Payback: The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religions

PAYBACK

PAYBACK The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religions G. W. TROMPF School of Studies in Religion University of Sydney

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521416917 © Cambridge University Press 1994 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1994 A catalogue recordfor this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Trompf, G. W. Payback: the logic of retribution in Melanesian religions/ G. W. Trompf. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Retribution—Religious aspects. 2. Melanesia—Religion. I. Title. BL2620. M4T765 1994 299'.92—dc20 93-31388 CIP ISBN-13 978-0-521-41691-7 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-41691-4 hardback Transferred to digital printing 2005

In Reciprocity and in Hope dedicated to The Peoples of Papua New Guinea

Contents

Illustrations and tables Preface A b breviations

x xiii xviii

Preliminaries: T h e T h e o r y of Retributive Logic Revenge 2 Reciprocity 5 Explanations of significant events 7 The epistemology of rationality 10 Religion and retributive logic 14 The origins of retributive logic 16

1

I TRADITION' 1

Revenge Payback killing: general observations 25 Warfare as retaliation 32 War's pretexts and preludes: a case study—the Bena(bena) The causes of war Important variables in the logic of Melanesian warfare Spiritual revenge 56 Deities and spirits as sponsors of revenge Outer-directed sorcery Intra-village sorcery Sorcery and social control, with a case study (Mekeo) Discriminate homicide and general patterns of violence 78 Punishments 82 Legal Custodial Personally redressive and other Paying back animals and things 93

23

2

Reciprocity

97

Concessions for peace: gifts for alliance 97 'Compensation' 107 Demands for sacrifice 112 Obligation Oblation

3

Integrating and Explaining Significant Events Positive and negative reciprocity interrelated: a case study— Orokaiva 128 Explanations of weal and woe 131 Trouble and sickness Death Salvation from adversity

vn

128

viii

CONTENTS

II

CARGO CULTISM'

4

Reprisal

159

Payback against colonialism 162 The retaliatory element in cargo cultism 169 Myths of reversal Case studies: counterstrokes of a more traditional kind 'Classic' cargo cultism Alternative religions as opposition 207 From the classic cases to the modem faces of 'cargo cultism' The economics, politics and religion of biting back On resenting colonialism: Paliau and Yali Others and their bones of contention Alternative religions as respectable competitors 220 From cargo cults to independent churches From cargo cults to modem political fronts Cargo cult lo as punishment; and as totalistic reordering of society 232

5

Redemption

238

Acquiring and relinquishing—in grand style 239 Cooperation 248 Participation 251

6

Wishing a n d Explaining the Extraordinary

259

Reprisal and the search for redemption and partnership interrelated—the Pomio Kivung 259 Eschatology as explanation 266 Explaining dilemmas and puzzles 276 III

7

MODERNIZATION'

Recrimination—in 'Modern' Guises

288

The 'sinews of sectarian warfare' and related matters 291 Enforced change and legalized retribution 304 The regulative power of missions: its scope and effects Maintaining a new order: the phases of acculturation Traditional physical avengement revamped 322 Tribal warfare resumed Homicide: from yonder hamlet to urban hotbed—and back again Violence and crime, gangs and rebels: secularizing payback? 339 Violence and crime Gangs and rebels Vindictiveness without violence? Some illusions of modernization 354 Sorcery: new masks The arts of civilization

8

Making Money a n d Modernizing Reciprocities Peace-making and compensation 376 'Monetarizing' and 'modernizing' primal exchange patterns 383 New sacrifice, new communio 393 Bisnis na Wok ('Business and Work') 402

375

CONTENTS 9

Money, Morals, Meaning: Old Logics, New Retributions?

ix 410

Money as a payback medium: with special reference to Papua New Guinea 410 Modifying meanings of life and death 417 Trouble Sickness Death Well-being

Conclusions a n d Recommendations

457

Bibliography Index of Melanesian Cultures General Index

461 528 532

Illustrations and tables

PLATES 1 Warriors standing over a victim, Neu Mecklenburg, ca. 1889 (Meyer and Parkinson) 2 Roviana war canoes, New Georgia, 1930s (UCA Munda) 3 Wahgi warrior begins a mock attack at a Kongar, 1973 (Trompf) 4 Fuyughe 'pig-kill', ca. 1920 (Dubuy) 5 Fr Bohn encountering Fuyughe, late 1930s (Dubuy) 6 Wahgi shepherds and sheep, Wahgi Valley, 1948 (NGAR) 7 Silas Eto, the 'Holy Mama' of the Christian Fellowship Church, 1964 (Trompf) 8 Yaliwan reads the Bible at his hideout, Abukanja, 1981 (Trompf) 9 Mekeo sorcerers at a local celebration, Yule Island, 1985 (Trompf) 10 Morata settlers organizing compensation and tok sort to the University of Papua New Guinea, 1985 (Niugini Nins) 11 A cartoonist on police attempts to contain urban violence in Port Moresby, 1978 (PNG Post-Courier)

48 49 100 102 180 187 222 228 359 381 382

FIGURES AND MAPS Location of traditional religions: on the main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands on the Solomons on Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu

x

20 22 22

ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES Model of migratory tendencies, rebound pressure, and tribal warfare

xi 51

Location of new religious movements: on the main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands on the Solomons on Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu

156 158 158

Modern provincial arrangements: the main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands

284

Location of cultures referred to in Part III: the main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands

286

Modern provincial arrangements and location of cultures referred to in Part III: the Solomons

287

Modern territorial arrangements and location of cultures referred to in Part III: Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu

287

'Japs Gang' rising sun tattoo

348

TABLES 1 2 3 4 5 6

Aetiologies of typical trouble in select Melanesian traditions Wahgi kangekes ('wild spirits') Aetiologies of sickness in select Melanesian traditions Aetiologies of death in select Melanesian traditions Schematized spectrum of cargo cult reactions The aetiology of death, with post-contact adjustments

136 139 143 148 200 4;40

Preface

This book is focused on one significant set of themes in Melanesian religious life, but it also goes some way towards providing an introductory guide to the phenomenology and history of religions in the most ethnographically complex part of the globe. Melanesia still harbours over one quarter of humanity's known and discrete religions, and this work supplements my Melanesian Religion (1991) as another kind of overview. Retributive logic is so crucial an aspect of Melanesian culture, and of such universal significance, that a general study of it is long overdue. While the varied indigenous 'pre-contact' expressions of retributive actions and principles require careful analysis and comparatively more space, there is now a pressing need to assess how the emergence of new religious movements (especially the so-called 'cargo cults') and the impact of the 'great traditions' (particularly Christianity) have affected this side to Melanesian life. The research involved quarrying at an enormous granite cliff of wondrous yet multiveined materials. I can only hope that the splinters I have chipped off during fifteen years of labour will illustrate and make sense of the massive imbroglio. When James Frazer eked out his thirteen-volume Golden Bough (1890-1936) and Eduard Westermarck his two-volume tome on the Origin and Development of Moral Ideas (1906), neither of them had any idea that the southwest Pacific contained the most complicated anthropological jigsaw puzzle on the earth's face. They would have been astounded to find that in this one volume alone just as many if not more distinct belief-systems have been referred to than either one of them discussed in their great monuments of erudition. Perhaps, though, I have been too sparing in my pages and too cryptic in my allusions towards the constituents of many and differing cultures. I occasionally look in despair xiii

xiv

PREFACE

at the vast archive of notes and observations in my filing cabinets, knowing that only tiny portions of what could be put in print are condensed into the following pages. Still, I note with a mixture of gloom and impatience that few general textbooks on comparative religion give more than a page to Melanesia, and what the region has to offer is typically buried under sweeping comments about 'primitive' traditions. Our chosen theme, that of payback or the logic of retribution, covers Melanesian ideas and practices concerning revenge, reciprocity, and the means of explaining events in terms of praise and blame, rewards and punishments. At first sight, readers might not perceive what this whole matrix has to do with the subject of religion, but one central purpose of this study is to demonstrate the connections. If one imagines that the study of revenge, for instance, has only to do with conflict theory, or research into the causes and nature of war, or the psychology of aggression, then the analysis of warriorhood religions, sorcery, punishments fortofew-breakage,'and other expressions of retaliation reflecting religious beliefs will help correct false impressions. And if one supposes that the consideration of positive reciprocities (such as gift-giving, exchange, compensations) is really only properly a concern for economic anthropologists, then here will be challenged some unwarrantable compartmentalizations of research, because the set of social realities being addressed demands a multidisciplinary approach. The book steadily moves away from traditional anthropological concerns, in any case, to those that are more sociological and historical, at the very least. What discipline does this study reflect most of all? I will have to explore on another occasion its implications for history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, politics, legal studies, philosophy, theology, let alone the comparative study of religions, and for such subdisciplines as oral history or ethno-history, the history of ideas, economic and legal anthropology, the sociology of new religious movements, social work, psychoanalysis, development studies, criminology, ethics, peace studies, pastoral theology, and missiology. Feeling pressed to name the discipline nearest to both my heart and intent, however, I understand myself above all to be an historian of ideas, beliefs, and consciousness, although this book reads more like historical or philosophic anthropology (which can be readily subsumed within the newer academic circuit of Religious Studies). The subtitle of this work refers both to logic and religion, in the hope that most readers will have got beyond denigrating religion as illogical, let alone passing off 'primitive' notions and rites as mere 'superstitions'. Drawing out linkages between logic, retribution, and religion from such a vast array of traditions, and allowing myself un grand tour d3horizon, is not necessarily preferable to the in-depth exploration of the same connections in one given culture. I have given more space to cultures in which I have personally spent a longer time researching, such as the

PREFACE

xv

Bena(bena), the Fuyughe, the Wahgi, and select coastal Papuan peoples; but the broad survey is necessary because researchers have bequeathed us too many detached analyses of isolated societies or social problems while shying clear of the 'general visions' now badly needed in developing nations—indeed, needed in the very countries that hosted many aspiring Western academics. One particularly acute problem, once a synoptic approach is adopted, is that of reconstructing worldviews. Investigators of 'other cultures' have the habit of writing as if they are able to render an objective account of a whole people's 'position' and very often do so as if the thoughts of the best informants of a given (perhaps 'already contaminated') area somehow encapsulate and speak for the society as a whole. Are these investigators presumptuous? Philosophers who have broached Jiirgen Habermas's Knowledge and Human Interests (1972), or Donald Davidson's notable though less accessible essay 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme' (1973-74), or Talal Asad on the problems of representing collective beliefs (1979; 1983), will know these thorny issues only too well. Some have already doubted that other minds, others' mental worlds, let alone subjective feelings, can ever be 'truly' reconstrued, and transferred to the printed page. I am under no illusions about my own efforts at reconstruction (Trompf 1984a: 509-11), and about the possibility of outsiders 'inventing' others' cultures (Clifford 1986). Everything presented here cannot escape provisionality. Along with other social researchers, the historian of ideas has the primary task of a glorified translator, of communicating one world or audience to another. Once these basic efforts at intelligibility look promising, then the opportunity for deeper reflection about the nature of human thought, action, and their interrelation is likely to be seized; and any historian worthy of the craft wants to find out how beliefs and ideas are modified through time, and about the consequences of such changes. In a general Uberschau, one can only hope that the examples selected are placed in the right contexts, given justifiable emphases, and made to provide a balanced perspective. And, in this study, group views have been represented via the most esteemed local custodians of knowledge. What about religion? The following chapters contain some surprises, because I do not always follow standard tacks. I disdain reducing religion to a narrow preserve—just to do with beliefs in spiritual beings, for example, or with palpable sacred times and places—and attempt to show how religion has been (and still can be) integrally related to war and acts of violence in Melanesia, to the economics of reciprocity, and to other features of life one might ordinarily expect to be 'secular', 'mundane' or 'profane'. Religion has thus been conceived much more as a people's 'way of life' than merely worship or approaches to the 'non-empirical realm' in particular. At times, admittedly, certain beliefs, rites, and customs will

xvi

PREFACE

be acknowledged as more distinctly religious—so anticipating prevailing preconceptions—but at other times I have striven to educate readers out of circumscription. If a definition is needed for clarificatory purposes, religion in this book encompasses 'those concerns that most dominate people's acts, reasonings, and feelings, because they understand their cosmos to be affected by living agencies, spirit-beings, or other non-human forces, and because people regard these agents or powers as subject to human influence'. This definition shows me to be in sympathy with those scholars (such as W. A. Christian, T. P. van Baaren and very recently J. G. Platvoet), who stress the dynamic interactions between thought and action, between humans and 'the Other', and between the more recognizably distinct sphere of religion (or 'the sacred') and other dimensions of life. This book originated from a paper I wrote for a Melanesian Institute Conference at Goroka (New Guinea) in 1978 (cf. Trompf 1991: 51-77), and at Norman Habel's valuable suggestion I plodded on towards a full-scale study of Melanesian retributive logic. In the process the late Jan van Baal's comments on my first draft were extremely helpful; and for so generously sharing their wisdom I offer special thanks here to Ennio Mantovani, Wendy Flannery, and Darrell Whiteman (Melanesian Institute, Papua New Guinea); Esau Tuza, Willington Jojoga Opeba, Caleb Kolowan, Sione and Ruth Latukefu, Carl Loeliger (University of Papua New Guinea), the late Peter Lawrence, Eric Sharpe, Tony Swain, and Sibona Kopi (University of Sydney), Stuart Schlegel and Noel King (University of California, Santa Cruz), Jacques Waardenburg (Universite de Lausanne), Jan Platvoet and Anton Ploeg (Rijksuniversiteit, Utrecht), Patrick Gesch (then at the Anthropos Institute), and the intrepid Andrew Strathern (University of Pittsburgh), whose study comparing patterns of violence in the New Guinea highlands was being awaited as I finished this work. To acknowledge the riches of oral sources, I have employed a pattern of recognition I prefer to prevailing standards of social research by both naming my chief informants consistently and listing them in the bibliography. Investigations by my many students, especially at the University of Papua New Guinea, Goroka Teachers' College, and the Holy Spirit (Catholic) Seminary at Bomana, have been invaluable. Many ethno-historical insights from a field of study increasingly becoming familiar to researchers in Melanesia (through Tippett 1973; Denoon and Lacey 1981; Gewertz and Schieffelin 1985, White 1991 and Carrier 1992), are manifest in the following pages. For helping to refine my field methods I could not have done without: Camillo Esef, Umakive Futrepa, James Kai, Michael Wandel, Godfrey Yeruai, Louise Aitsi, Vincent Koroti and Tapei Martin. For their working companionship, their protection in moments of great danger, and for the hospitality offered by their families, I am deeply indebted. I gratefully acknowledge that most of the field research was funded by the Universities

PREFACE

xvii

of Papua New Guinea and Sydney; that the Macartney Hill Bequest (University of Sydney) was invaluable in helping to defray the costs of copyediting this large volume; that Elizabeth Wood Ellem and especially Roderic Campbell and Jean Cooney were meticulous in the copy-editing and proofing; that Connie Fulcher, Tapei Martin, Cletus Topa, Anne Crossley, Wendy Cummings, Louise Aitsi, and my two daughters Sharon and Carolyn, were all very worthy research assistants in Melanesia itself; that research assistants Raymond Maxent, Ruth Lewin-Broit and Raul Fernandez-Calienes were indispensable in completing revisions and documentations at Sydney; that Gabi Boutau, Vagoli Bouauka and John Roberts devoted so much care to the cartography; and that Irene Rolles, Margaret Gilet, Nancy Hickson, Judith Lauder, Jackie Gwynne, Michelle Holmes, Lyn Leslie, Nancy Koriam, Ranu Oala and Kila Pala (the most improved typist I know!) have spent hours agonizing over my drafts. Lastly, for bearing with me in all I do, and for keeping me well in the doing of it, I thank my wife, Bobbie. Garry Winston Trompf University of Sydney School of Studies in Religion; Research Institute for Asia and the Pacific; Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies

Abbreviations

A AA AAB AB ABC(TV) Ag AM An ANA ANGAU ANU APCM ASA ASAO B BCM BM BNG BNGAR BRA BRW Bu CFCR CL CMA CRNH

The Australian Anglican Archives of Papua New Guinea Austral-Asiatic Bulletin Arawa Bulletin Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Television Network) The Age Australian Museum (Sydney) The Anglican Australian National Archives Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit Australian National University Australian Pacific Christian Mission Association of Social Anthropologists Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania Bella Brisbane Courier-Mail Die Biene auf den Missionfelde British New Guinea (official statements) British New Guinea Annual Report Bougainville Revolutionary Army Business Review Weekly Bulletin Colony of Fiji, Commission Reports Catholic Liturgical Documents Commonwealth Magistrates Association Constitution of the Republic of the New Hebrides xvin

ABBREVIATIONS DKZ DZ EA ERU ESCAP Fam FEER FLNKS FS FT GG GL GV GW I IASER IG JO K KM KPJ LA LF LMS LRC LTM MA MCC MSC NBC NGAR NGM NN NSO NT NY OC OPM OT P Pac PAR PC

xix

Deutsche Koloniale Zeitung Deutsches Zentralarkiv Evangelical Alliance of the South Pacific Islands Educational Research Unit, UPNG Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific Family Far Eastern Economic Review Front de liberation nationale kanake et socialiste Fiji Sun Fiji Times German Government Green Left Government of Vanuatu Guardian Weekly The Independent Institute of Applied Social and Economic Research (PNG) Indonesian Government Le Journal officiel de Nouvelle Caledonie (Noumea) Kanak Die katholischen Mission Komisi Pembinaan Jemaat Lutheran Archives of New Guinea Laws of Fiji London Missionary Society Archives Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea Les temps modernes Melanesian Alliance Melanesian Council of Churches Mission(naires) du Sacre Coeur National Broadcasting Commission of PNG New Guinea Annual Report New Guinea Mission Niugini Nius National Statistical Office of PNG National Times Nius bilong Yumi Ombudsman Commission of PNG Organisasi Papua Merdeka Oral testimony Paradise Papuan Courier Papua Annual Report Papua New Guinea Post-Courier

XX

PG PIM PNA PNG RPC RT SDA SDF SIL SH SIIO SMH SPC TAPOL TL TM T-M TP UCN UPNG UT UTW W WMM WN

ABBREVIATIONS Provincial Government Papers (PNG) Pacific Islands Monthly Papua New Guinea National Archives Papua New Guinea (including Acts and official documents) Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary Rabaul Times Seventh Day Adventist Church Sub-District Files, Papua New Guinea Summer Institute of Linguistics Seli Hoo Solomon Islands Independence Order The Sydney Morning Herald South Pacific Commission British Campaign for the Defence of Political Prisoners of Human Rights in Indonesia The Times (of London) Time Magazine Telegraph Mirror The Times of Papua New Guinea United Church News University of Papua New Guinea (including documents) Uni Tavur The University This Week Wantok Wesleyan Methodist Mission Society Archives Workers News

PLEASE NOTE

Some citations of authors in the text are not in chronological order. In such cases, the ordering relates to the sequence of topics or cultural references discussed in the preceding sentence(s).

Preliminaries: The Theory of Retributive Logic

This book concerns itself with some of the more remarkable features of Melanesian life: payback killing or the taking of indiscriminate revenge on enemies; prodigious acts of generosity without guarantee of comparable returns; and intricate modes of explaining important social events, especially disaster, sickness, and death. It will be argued that vengeance, reciprocity and the means of interpreting social affairs are integrally related in most Melanesian worldviews, and that these traditional interrelationships help explain why Melanesia's adjustment to rapid technological and social change has its own special flavour. Behind the Melanesian pidgin term bekim (payback)1 lies the presumption that life, punctuated by dangerous feuding and competitions, coloured by the excitement of reciprocities and trade, is to be apprehended as a continuous interweaving of gains and losses, giving and taking, wealth and destitution, joy and sorrow, vitality and death. How Melanesians think about the significant events and situations affecting them, and how their thinking is translated into action, are points of inquiry covered by my phrase 'the logic of retribution'. Elsewhere I have used the idiom retributive logic of both biblical and Graeco-Roman beliefs about the divine distribution of rewards and punishments in history (Trompf 1979a: 93-106,155-74,231-41,285-95; 1979b: 21929; 1983a; 1990a; 1994). Here I define it as any logical framework of ideas 1

As a verb = to give back, to reimburse, to answer, or to average: as a noun = exchange, repayment, payment, payback, or revenge, in Papua New Guinea pidgin (Mihalic 1971: 66). For equivalents elsewhere, cf., e.g., Camden 1977, s.v. 'Pei', 'Bak', etc., and note the Solomonese peimbak. Pebek (im) is not commonly used in Melanesian pidgin(s), but gaining wider currency. Pay(-)back as a substantive is itself barely beyond English slang, receiving its heaviest usage among anglophones of the southwest Pacific.

1

2

PAYBACK: PRELIMINARIES

enabling people to give reasons for their retaliations and concessions, and to interpret the dramatic changes of human existence in terms of rewards and punishments, praise and blame. Human thinking, admittedly, is bound up with action and, for that matter, emotions; yet, in the following pages I will concentrate on styles of reasoning, setting the priority of this study on the way people explicate actions and attitudes, and only secondarily on external behaviour and emotional states. That Melanesians interpret vicissitudes of life in terms of requital or retributive principles is clear from published research, but the notions involved have not been thoroughly examined in their interrelationship as expressions of religion, and retributive logic has not yet gained recognition as an important crosscultural phenomenon. Retributive logic is endemic to humanity. Childhood experiences in every culture are quickly filled with rewards and punishments for doing 'right' and 'wrong' with the gifts and withdrawals of parental affection, with instructions about right behaviour and attitude (whom not to enrage, for instance, or how to recognize and account for the significant happenings in everyday life). Coping in any society requires the ability to estimate. Children come to 'test' the degrees of permissiveness in the human and natural worlds. When wanting their own way, they intuit when they are over-exasperating another, either giving in or holding on to their 'victory' in accordance with their current temperament or relative sense of security. In their play and widening experiences they come to appreciate an inchoate spectrum ranging from homely safety to real danger, and from pleasure to pain. All the basic principles of education and socialization to be found the world over presuppose and reinforce this incipient, infantine power of assessment or calculation. One misdemeanour incurs more parental wrath than another, and to acquire the simplest skills, such as walking and talking, is to learn to surmount levels of inadequacy by doing better. Simple notions of causal relation develop from the parents' or child's own threats: 'if you do that, I will do this!' It is in this 'ready reckoning' a primal casuistry usually learnt within the complex environment of a family and other humans, within a veritable forest of words, symbolic actions and fluctuating emotions, that one detects the child's furtive rehearsals of retributive logic (Piaget 1924; Ginsburg and Opper 1969: 72-116; Chomsky 1972: 13-33, cf. von Bertalanffy 1971: 208-09; Berger and Luckmann 1967: 58-71, 168-73). Revenge To feel inclined to pay back those who are ill-disposed towards us is to be human. Few there be who are 'enthusiasts for punishment' who become 'excited when publicly covered with opprobrium and infamy' (de Sade [1787] 1931: 326-7). Aggressive urges usually well up in us when faced with

THE THEORY OF RETRIBUTION

3

condemning, unpleasant, threatening, or overbearing attitudes, when realizing we are being deceived, and especially when convinced that we have done nothing to merit some act of malevolence. Our reactions hail from those childhood experiences of frustration and fear, when we felt the drive, in our tantrums and stubbornness, to overcome the powerlessness of being young (Dollard et al. 1939; Megargee and Hokanson 1970, cf. Arendt 1970; May 1972). The will to revenge, however, is not a 'pure emotion' even if entailing such passions as aggression, anger, cruelty or lust. We can almost invariably give strong reasons why we want to pay back, and there is so often present that element of calculation, that intuited estimation of the 'price' that we think ought to be exacted. But of course any sense of proportion will vary with personality and culture, and the rationale for vengeance in one social setting may be entirely unacceptable in another. Where smallish tribes have been traditionally in armed-conflict, as in Melanesia, apparently vicious acts of reprisal—the killing of an unsuspecting child from among the enemy, for instance—will be socially accepted. Citizens of the large-scale pluralist societies of the West, by contrast, while still sending their soldiers to war, tend to pass off the 'precivilized' Melanesia as a scene of relentless 'feuds'; these moderns are more likely to locate the legitimate norm of payback with the elimination, certainly the weakening, of one's business competitors, or with the relatively peaceful struggle of classes and pressure groups to obtain power. That there is a universality of rationally justified recrimination, however, is beyond doubt (Fromm 1973: 272, cf. Simmel 1955).2 Retribution is not only something we contemplate, but also enact. How it is translated into action—how quickly, and in what measures—is an issue that can hardly be avoided here. With the loss of one's spouse through murder, for example, one would naturally feel impelled to kill the culprit in return, and to seek immediate requital. Various resentments may be harboured in the breast for many years, and groups, such as Melanesian villagers who see the foolishness of openly attacking an unwanted, betterarmed colonial administration, may bide their time until an opportune moment. When such a chance arrives, retaliation might not take a violent form, since payback has a thousand less-severe faces and can be as covert as robbery and scandalmongery, or as open as a public expose, a challenge of words, a refusal to cooperate, cursing, snubbing, sarcasm, or just plain unfriendliness. The relative severity of reprisals obviously hinges on the contexts. A range of payback 'mechanisms' can be detected in all spheres of human intercourse, being in play between individuals (competing 2

Please note that, in this book, payback is not automatically identified or syonymous with violence, or even aggression (both of which have their own special typologies). Thus, although I may appear to side with those denying human aggression is instinctual (e.g. Heller 1977: 32, 83), in fact I am not dealing here with aggression in general.

4

PAYBACK: PRELIMINARIES

brothers and sisters, rival peers, between husband and wife, young and old) and between groups (such as households, clans, factions, political parties, denominations, classes, nations, power blocs). Thus, the amount of satisfaction demanded is likely to depend on the number of people involved, as well as the issues at stake. The adult, moreover, will have learnt to be more calculating than the child. The infant's active payback can include physical violence—with stones and sticks—as well as a mere utterance or a releasing verbal revenge; yet adults have a wider choice of policies to follow, or 'more games to play' (Berne 1961: 98-115; 1964: 83-138), and they can give many more persuasive reasons to explain their rancour. Payback, at any rate, becomes increasingly attended by logic, as the life-cycle proceeds—or, better still, reinforced by more sophisticated forms of logic (A. Freud 1937; Homans 1951: 287; Sartre 1956: 221-23; Mead 1934: 30002; Scheler 1972: 43-78, cf. Schoeck 1966; Heidegger 1967: 326-29). Revenge and rationality are at no point more openly enmeshed than when the former is legitimized by broadly accepted values, when it acquires such a high-sounding name as 'redress', for instance, or is carried out by a 'justly indignant' punitive expedition. Alexandre Dumas could count on the sympathy of his European readers for his hero Edmond Dantes, Count of Monte Cristo, who with such native cunning brought ruin on those who wrongfully consigned him to the dungeons. Japanese warriors acclaimed those who had the equanimity to carry out public tortures on the enemy during wartime, and felt justified in scorning those who could not die like a samurai (Bergamini 1971: 959-60). Moral outrage or indignation, then, can lead to vengeance as an abounden duty, and can have effects as direful as the Nazi holocaust or as comparatively innocuous as a pressure to resign (cf. van der Post 1963). Tormented by the paradoxical nature of it all, the famous German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche fell into despair: humanity everywhere 'has sanctified revenge (Rache) under the name of justice (Gerichtigkeity ([1887] 1969: 73-74); now, it is a matter of subjective (even if sometimes legal) opinion as to which is which. Punishments based on socially accepted rules or laws, of course, which are apparently the inheritance of all documented societies, constitute a species of payback in the negative sense. The culprit to be requited, particularly if the crime is deemed heinous, takes on something of the status of an enemy ('an enemy of the people') who must be brought to heel. The types and degrees of punishment vary considerably across cultures and history, for 'sanctions' can either be negatively 'subtractive' or positively 'inflictive'. It is noticeably common that a (sizeable enough) group is prepared to put one of its own number to death for wrongs done, an extreme it traditionally applies to its military foes, or those threatening the very existence of the group or society from without. In human cultures, though, degrees of penalizing are developed (perhaps by trial and error, perhaps

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by pondering legislators) and the punitions always reflect some relation to the known possibilities of human revenge (such as torture, deprivation of rights, exile, shame, snubbing, subordination, labelling) and this is a relationship quickly enough understood, since punishments have been typically 'natural inventions' inevitably framed in terms of those negative manoeuvres people rarely like to see falling upon themselves. Legal principles and theories of punition, moreover, even in the most 'modernized' nations, are still expressed in terms of (negative) retribution, Vergeltung, and so on, as if a society has to 'get its own back' on those who have betrayed its dearest values. Law, we note, can hardly be confined to the judicial or arbitration system controlled by those of high social authority, or maintained by officialdoms; there is a multiplicity of law-making and rule-making levels in all cultures. Institutions, companies, 'grades', peer clusters and varieties of subgroups or subcultures are all capable of making their own regulations, as are households, or even individuals. Punishments can be meted out by all these sectors, within bounds that are calculated according to tradition. Significantly, again, almost none of the sanctions they employ—'sacking', the disallowance to pass from one degree of attainment to the next, consignment to bed for the night without a meal, and so forth—ever escape associations of vengeance or recrimination. The line between penalty and vindictiveness is often so blurred, indeed, that it appears failed students can be 'paid back' for their laziness, let us say, or workers fired for their unproductiveness, or unsuccessful seekers of promotion can be paid back for creating jealousy, and so forth (Pospisil 1956: 751; 1967a: 2-26; Peristiany 1967; Moore 1973, cf. Weber 1925: 124-76; Mayntz 1963: 103-20; Acton 1969). Reciprocity What of payback as (re)payment rather than revenge? What of rewards rather than punishments? Cynics like to affirm that humans generally find it harder to make sacrifices than to exact a price. This view compels, although misleading comparisons can produce false impressions, especially when one sets our reluctance to concede freely against our eagerness to say or do something spiteful. The fact is that constraints are usually placed on one's own wild, overreactive will to revenge, just as self-interest teaches against our being over-generous. Certainly, one cannot adjudge our basic tendencies in the abstract. Altered circumstances and varying experiences, to offer as flexible a generalization as possible, eventually leave us all with a scale of rewards to bestow and penalties to impose, and how we balance matters is again subject to temperament and culture, let alone intelligence and intuition. Such complexities! Yet, it remains true that to sacrifice something of one's own or one's self for the sake of others usually requires

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more conscious effort than to satisfy the impulse, when felt justified, to dispossess or subvert. Such self-sacrifice falls within the cooler ambit of reciprocities—of friendlier give-and-take, trade, domestic sharing, or the fulfilment of social and ritual obligations. This is a broad sphere of activity that calls for hard work and constant repair, vulnerable as it is to neglect or mismanagement and, thus, to the lurking, divisive forces of blame and vindictiveness (Mauss [1925] 1967; Lowie 1937: 233, cf. Levi-Strauss 1949; Becker 1956; van Baal 1975a). Positive and negative payback, however, can easily be taken as two sides to the same coin. Giving can not only occasion a sense of debt or obligation in others, or even embarrassment, shame or guilt; it is almost always attended by a measure of self-interest. The extent of one's generosity, in fact, is so often affected by the security of special friendships, or perhaps by the desire to buy favour, dominate sexually, taunt someone who deserves a pointed lesson, or just to keep up appearances before a person we secretly despise. It will often pay to be generous or full of good works, further, not only because virtue brings others' support (as well as its own rewards!), but also because it means one's competitors or enemies are disarmed. From a position of strength one's magnanimity can prey on the weak, and in moralistic cultures righteousness can be one way of maintaining personal superiority, even of putting down those we love most dearly. There is also the phenomenon of aggressive self-sacrifice that demands love by heaping it without moderation on select friends (Storr 1970: 110). Thus we can reward ourselves by rewarding others and yet injure those we surreptitiously choose to be untouched by our initiatives—a fact of life that makes the injunction to love one's enemies seem psychologically unbearable or politically impractical to the realist. Here, admittedly, we are edging towards erldless arguments over altruism and egoism (cf. Sorokin 1950; Rand 1961:81-83,117-23), or covert as against overt motivation; but, whatever the outcome of such altercations, the presence of retributive logic is not in doubt. It still persists when we simply feel and act upon the weight of our responsibilities; there is always the threat that we will be 'punished' by non-acceptance or by loss of sustenance or reputation if obligations are left unfulfilled. Few there are who do not feel bound to live up to expectations—as required by parents, for instance, or by some group, society conceived as a whole, or by the spirits or God— and we are for ever learning afresh how much they demand of us. Retributive logic, then, is a logic of human motivation. We may be going to do something in the future: our assessment of consequences in terms of retaliation or concession brings this logic into play. We may have exacted a recompense in the past: whether we recognize our real motives or repress them for a later rationalization, at some point we are pressed by the need to justify our action to ourselves. If it lacks a satisfying rationale, or if its

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basis has been called into doubt by some unquestioned moral axiom, our own logic or the judgments of others may find us ashamed or guilty. The logic does not have to be perfect or valid or sound, it simply has to appear that way or to be meaningful (and it is culturally relative, in any case). We certainly have to make sense to ourselves. Then again, our motivations are generally conditioned by an ethos which surrounds us and which we can even cultivate. Life usually blossoms when we are praised, given to, or readily accepted, so that we can afford to be mellow and self-giving. We are susceptible to resentment and depression if conditions are otherwise, and more than likely to worsen our position or self-estimation by overreacting. Life has its vicious circles; even in riding on the crest of a wave, there lies the possibility of falling either through another's jealousy or one's very own pride (Rosenzweig 1938; Flugel 1945: 114, cf. Rank 1932: 80-85; 1945: 245; Allport 1958: 3-46; Goffman 1959; Rokeach 1976; Laing 1970: 18-37; 1971: 83-86; van Sommers 1988). It has been helpful to isolate the dimensions of 'positive requiting' by concentrating on individual motivation; yet, who can deny that all these attitudes and thoughts lying behind actions are substantially conditioned by human groups and societies? Thus, it should not surprise if in the following pages we explore the fulfilment of obligation or other related expressions of morality as aspects of social reciprocity. Among the socioeconomic transactions and rituals that are characteristic of primal cultures, there are concessions, gifts and exchanges between mortals, and fascinatingly analogous interchanges between humans and the gods. Occasions of extraordinary hospitality and sacrificial rites are perhaps the most intriguing of all such would-be reciprocations, because of the apparently one-sided cost to the sacrificers and rewards heaped upon other agents. The group rationale for such phenomena are of immense interest as manifestations of shared retributive logic and as complex blends of altruistic and self-interested activity. Explanations of significant events The logic of retribution, to be sure, does not only cover one's own predispositions to reward or punish, but those of other people and of other forces as well. It is often these others who bring about and involve us in occurrences quite independently of our wills. Humans endow events with meaning; they recognize a change, especially when it affects them personally, and so distinguish changes for better and for worse; they also give reasons why changes, or any events accounted significant, have happened. That people put shapes or spatial images on events (referring to them, for example, as behind or in front, moving up or down, or curved, or in blocks) is an important subject for anthropological

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and psychological study (e.g. Jung [1912] 1956). More to the point, however, is that there is no known culture whose members do not explain the most important happenings in their lives in terms of rewards and punishments. The event of a death calls forth this explanatory mode in its sharpest form. Something or someone is blamed. Even if in Western culture the wrathful God and the spiteful Devil are less fashionable causal agencies, conceived over and against diagnosed natural processes, blame is assigned still—to an almost personified cancer, for instance, to an untrustworthy doctor, an ill-disposed member of the family, or even to the self-neglectful dead person. In the 'first world' West, of course, or even in the cancer wards of 'second world' provincial Russia, so brilliantly described by Solzhenitsyn, consensus explanations for death do not come easily, but in most societies it is of concern to the extended family or community that a single cause can be agreed upon. In virtually all small-scale societies, further, the crucial question will be whether the death was 'good' or 'bad', whether, for example, it appropriately completed a person's visible life or was the result of some outside evil. And the event of death hardly stands alone in requiring interpretation; serious trouble, sickness, various types of tragedies, as well as the blessings and good fortune that make up their opposites, are commonly explained in terms of a retributive logic. In the West it has been less and less characteristic to instance the divine distribution of justice in events, a tendency out of step with cultures still open to the inroads of spiritual powers. Certainly, a host of 'third world' peoples believe in the efficacy of sorcery and magic, the vengeance or blessings of ancestors or deities, and the existence of supernatural power behind either disaster or fecundity in 'nature'. Nevertheless, retributive logic can persist in a secularized garb (even in Marxist or atheistical consciousness), for weal may be ascribed to praiseworthy skill, cunning or plain commonsense, and woe to human folly. In any case, 'modern' as against 'archaic' people still retain their scapegoats, and have their 'folk devils' to blame (Cohen 1973, cf. Burke 1968: 445-52; Ryan 1971; Szasz 1973). In explaining the vicissitudes of life each culture has its storehouse of knowledge. Its custodians usually like to say 'I told you so', referring to precedent and precept. Hence, medical diagnoses, local lore, proverbs, poems to cover human situations, rites, customs, treaties, let alone tabus and laws, provide people with the scientia by which to explain events in terms of recompense. In some cases it will be concluded that a person has been requited by an intervention of the gods or the dead; in others it will be found necessary for the living members of the community to punish an offender; and so forth. The reasons given for such conclusions, and the assessments as to prices paid, form the most highly reflective and most communal side to retributive logic. Even in countries with secularized legal systems millions still take the commands of God or Jesus to have a higher

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legal validity of their own, and to have uncanny value in explaining eventualities too personal or profound to be covered by the law, whereas in thousands of traditional cultures, it may be the actual breaking of an important rule (taken as sacred) that brings on sickness even unto death. The modes of explanation we have been discussing, then, provide the cognitive basis or rationale for payback and reciprocity. Many of us may need these modes for psychological support, to justify ourselves, since we humans tend to 'project the sins that reside in our hearts, locating them far off, in others, in adversaries whom we then assail and persecute for our own guilt' (Roszak 1973: 131). On growing older, too, we draw increasingly on experience, particularly those 'sorry experiences' that quench the 'glad heart of youth' and hence our social poses come to take on their individual stamps (Kierkegaard [1851] 1941: 103). Most important of all, however, humans usually work with the interpretative frames they have inherited culturally, acting in terms of society's expectations and permissions; it is therefore tradition or socially accepted norms that most commonly serve to bind together the actions and explanations that interest us here. Thus, a warrior who believes his dead relative has been the victim of sorcery will have reasons for taking revenge, even though these may be barely comprehensible to a secularized Western mind. Some other person, assured that his own neglect has incurred the wrath of ancestors, and so brought trouble, will have good grounds for placating them with rituals and food offerings. One of the chief aims of this book, moreover, is to show that peoples of Melanesia invariably give reasons for certain traditional behaviour patterns, such as killing and eating their enemies, which many would deem irrational. The rational bases of revenge and reciprocity in their case are almost always consistent with socially sanctioned ways of accounting for significant events. This means, intriguingly, that their traditional acts, not only of giving and taking, but of homicide against enemies as well, were in some sense religious, or else bound up with worldviews and belief systems normally graced by that awkward, all-too confusing term 'religion'. Admittedly, this rather special religious integration of thought and action has been breaking up in a changing Melanesia. Besides, there are other cultures in which religious doctrines stand against violence and vindictiveness, thus making it plain that retribution and religion are not necessarily identifiable, and that the logic of retribution is not always religious. There are, in fact, several theoretical problems issuing from my use of the phrase 'retributive logic' (concerning rational thought and action, for one, and religion for another) that crave further (if somewhat more philosophical) analysis.

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The epistemology of rationality The logic of retribution is normally 'consistency logic'; truth is a datum rather than a problem, and the problem becomes how to interpret and act in the world with the accepted truths (Gibson 1921: 1). Some might wish to refer to this logic as a form of 'bounded rationality' (Brookfield 1972: 159-60) or even 'pre-logical mentality' (Levy-Bruhl 1922: 47-60), but such expressions are objectionable because every logic is culture-bound, and it is a pitfall of ethnocentricity to conclude that some peoples are generally less rational (or more rational) than others (Trompf 1980a: 340, cf. Lukes 1970: 194-213; Ling 1973: 144-45; Kleinig 1980: 91; Hollis and Lukes 1982). It is not necessary for us to adjudge retributive principles by canons of would-be absolutist logic at Oxford University, let us say. Nor is it initially helpful to subject any system of retributive logic to technical criticisms, let alone value judgements, until one discerns the part it plays in a society, whether it is psychologically or ethically supportive, whether it sustains an ecology, and such like. European logic has been extraordinarily useful for developments in nuclear physics and biochemistry, yet this does not mean that it is the only or governing form of logic in Western consciousness, nor more useful than apparently curious retributive logics of primal societies, for nurturing a balanced psyche. The most important first step is to recognize logics of retribution as styles of reasoning, to establish that they have a phenomenology as logical frameworks of ideas. We can tell this kind of reasoning is in play when someone gives reasons for fighting back or doing a favour, for blaming or praising, for inferring that a happy outcome was merited or that evil must be paid for 'with a price'. The task of the observer is to find out how all these lineaments fit together as a general pattern of thought, held together collectively or in the minds of individuals. It is hardly an easy task. Difficulties are compounded by the entrenched dichotomy between rationality and irrationality. There is a satisfying paradigm that sanity never produces rashness, and that people knock each other over the heads only when they are unable to control irrational impulses. Not only does it presuppose certain Western (Enlightenment) value-judgements, but it also tends to obscure a blatant existential fact: that non-rational factors are for ever at work while we are doing our thinking and reasoning (and vice versa). Now, one could hardly deny the unimportance of mental activity at times of extreme physical duress (in the midst of a fight, for instance); yet, what remains of real interest to the student of retributive logic is that people can almost always tell you why they were so vehement, why they did something that seemed so charged with emotion! They have reasons for their apparent irrationality, a simple truth which ought to make one wary of judging human behaviour, let alone

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thought patterns, by preconceived standards of normalcy (cf. Laing and Cooper 1971). This book unfolds on the assumption that people are reasonable in their own (or own culture's) terms, that every communicated thought is in this sense logikos (rational, logical), although some are impossibly difficult for outsiders to understand, and that even the verbalized dementia of the so-called insane can be unravelled into a coherence (Spiro 1964: 1-15; Whorf 1951; Bateson 1973: 167-308; Geertz 1975: 88-125; Kuper 1979: 646-50, cf. Maier 1908; MacMurray 1935; Parsons 1963: xlvii). To attempt to understand many thought-worlds without pre-emptive evaluation of their worthiness is to adopt what some would deem an 'intellectualist' stance (although it is just as readily described as a side to the phenomenological method, which requires a patient listening to people with other viewpoints and a 'bracketing' of our own personal presuppositions and prejudices). Some might protest, however, that we are being overly concerned with thinking rather than with the complex totality of the human, that 'rationality is really our rationalization' and that it is patently 'Eurocentric' to be oriented this way (Sahlins 1976: 72, cf. Rupp 1974: 174). Yet, to 'thank heaven' that 'there is a man left who has not learned to think' to use Jung's phrases ([1939] 1964: 529), is one of the few absurdities which cannot be tolerated in the cross-cultural study of the human being—if the remark means either that thinking makes minimal appearance in many (particularly primal) societies, or that the processes of thought found in them are essentially different from those in 'civilized' Western quarters. For, thinking is synonymous with being human, and forms of reflective thought are found in all cultures (despite relative degrees of objectification) (cf., for example, Payne 1899: 56-57). Admittedly, one might be tempted to demarcate a person's working reflective rationality from the fluctuating sea of 'stray thoughts'; even then, however, the intuition will remain that there is nevertheless a coherence (and a mirror of our personalities) in the thoughts and consequent actions we have never questioned (cf. Schutz 1962: 207-21). Is the logic of retribution, in any case, as a dimension of thought, consciously perceived and reflected upon by its users? As an abstraction, or as a separable heuristic category, almost never; for, it is the special task of the researcher to so isolate it. Insofar as persons are made aware of their own and others' motivations (from time to time), on the other hand, and realize their need to appeal to a shared framework of beliefs and values in their society, this logic has an existential reality. It is the common property of human consciousness, although its details vary throughout the globe. It only becomes a recognizable domain for both research and selfknowledge, though, when it is explored and rendered intelligible by the investigator's mind. The charge of 'essentialism' is inappropriate as a criticism of this interpretative process, just as it would be to any attempt at the hermeneutics of comparative rationality, unless prior postulations

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about the nature of retributive ideas and actions are patently forced on a mass of data rather than being induced from it. Referring more appropriately to its methodological role, the logic of retribution presents itself as a rubric to help explain human behaviour and draw cross-cultural relationships, and could be taken variously as a 'structure' (following LeviStrauss 1977), as an object of thematics (Freire 1972: 73-81), as an appropriate 'polythetic' representation (Needham 1974: 16; 1983: 62), as an 'assumptive world' or a component in each identifiable Lebenswelt (lifeworld) of individuals and groups (Husserl 1962:99,148-54,179; Frank 1963: 27, 29), or simply as a hermeneutical tool (Eliade 1969: 2-11). Certain scholars, admittedly, may not be ready to concede rationality (and definitely not tough argumentation!) to the apparently ignorant, superstitious, primitive, let alone to the obsessed, neurotic and schizophrenic, and will beckon us to the attractions of higher reasoning. When the Enlightenment philosophes glorified Reason as the force to quell darkness, however, they failed to appreciate that most rationality is 'grassroots'—banal, selfinterested, defensive, and cunning. But it is in investigating the rich diversity of what is rather than what ought to be, and thus of contextual rather than theoretical rationality, that we can now best appraise human nature while honestly testing the validity of our own logical assumptions. All this notwithstanding, let it be plain that, although I am discussing a very important slice of human experience, it is not what I take to be the whole scope of psychic life. To uncover reasons where one would not expect to find them is not to sanction the reduction of consciousness to rationality. By taking jealousy seriously as an avowed reason for an act of violence, for example, or self-hate as justification for the attempted selfpunishment of suicide, it does not follow that one must exclude all consideration of the emotions, or deny a role to the unconscious. Emotions not only constitute a huge and special field of study, but they are bound up with all significant themes in human thought and not just one. They also impinge on phenomena lying beyond the sphere of rationality, including ecstasy, trance, awe, grief, and exhilaration, on the one hand, and compulsive behaviour, mental blanks, trauma, senile dementia, and products of congenital brain damage, on the other. As for the unconscious, it could well be the deep, veiled causal principle behind the diverse styles of retributive logic, yet it remains a giant, unfathomable iceberg, which still leaves us with the daily laborious task of decoding 'other minds' (cf. Ryle 1949: 51-61). Myths and dreams, I concede, are ostensibly languages of the unconscious; in this present work, however, our concern is limited to both how they can provide the grounding for action, and what logical or explanatory force they possess once they have been cast out upon the sea of consciousness (Jung et al. 1964: 20-103, cf. Faguet 1911: 352-74; Jahoda 1970: 146-47; Frankl 1975: 33; Schneidermann 1981: 196-97).

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I hold, further, that the serious comparative study of retributive logic will provide a sound basis for a cross-cultural psychology that centres itself around the conscious rather than the elusive unconscious mind. I hasten to add how baffled African and Pacific students are by the Eurocentricism of Freud and the conceptual leaps of Jung, as well as by the deficient anthropological insights of both. Black and white thinkers need to communicate more fruitfully with each other about psychological questions (as south Asian Indians and white North Americans are now able to do in the new humanistic school of psychology) (Sutich and Vich 1969). This is possible only when a psychic denominator is isolated that is meaningful to the various parties involved and, thus, when the psychology of the conscious mind is rehabilitated (James 1904:477-91; Vinacke 1952; Johnson 1955; Thomson 1959; Bartlett 1964; Ornstein 1968,1972). This is one crucial means of recognizing and disclosing our common humanity, for in this rehabilitation we shall confirm that blacks and whites or citizens of technopolis and primal village are no less or more human than each other, neither one reflecting a psychic propensity markedly different from the other. Truly, the well-worn view that so-called 'primitive peoples' live in a state of half-awakened consciousness is a ghost of scholarship to be laid for ever (Trompf 1990c: 71, 84-89). The disputing of evolutionism here is not intended to be deconstructive but reconstructive. In defending a common human rationality a good deal in the pages that follow will involve the problematique of language and use of one tongue cross-culturally—in this case the English language of Europe. I remind readers, first, that all attempts at communicating other cultures involve such a difficulty, and that a certain violence is done by selecting one medium of communication. On second thoughts, however, any act of communicating like this can be born of years of experience at listening, and knowing what others want to have said about their beliefs and doings. A confidence arises, then, in the judicious use of many English terms—conceptual, economic, legal—that credit different peoples with a 'realm of equivalents' valuable for dialogue, rather than forever consigning others' Weltanschauungen to an 'alien beyond', to obscure frameworks only decipherable by anthropologists, or to a world that supposedly can never be contaminated, all rubrics concocted by Western generalists. In any case 'particularism studies are usually found based on some undisclosed generalist 'sub-text' about 'truth', and it remains a more honest and transparent course to meet the pressing need for reconstruction and intercommunication, albeit necessarily constrained by phenomenology, a sense of historicity and ethnographic accuracy. Constantly accentuating the fascinations of difference becomes a luxury when the world is bleeding to death through misunderstanding over such cultural basics as revenge and concession.

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Religion and retributive logic The logic of retribution is not intrinsically religious. We have already observed that it may be secularized: on considering exemptions and penalties meted out by atheistically oriented communist parties, one soon perceives how it has been a powerful tool of secularist politics. Retributive logic takes on its most obviously religious face when it appears as a modus explicandi; for, eventualities are so often related to the acts, decrees, or wishes of some supernatural agency, and human deeds evaluated by god-given standards. 'There has to be a reason' is even a very common Western reaction to a disaster, such as the crash of a passenger jet, and there is a persisting tendency to refer the inexplicable to the 'God-of-the-gaps'. Some dimensions of retributive logic, however, can be anathematized by the religious mind. When such logic is applied as plans and justifications for revenge, for instance, rather than as the means of interpretation, it has been deemed abhorrent in Christian theology. The Israelites, so long as vengeance was not directed against their own people (Lev. 19:18), viewed the defeat of wicked enemies, whether by themselves or others, as the justifiable recompenses of Yahweh (Deut. 32:35-43, Ps. 94, Jer. 51, etc.). Once the Jewish national identity lost relevance, however, as it did in earliest Christianity, revenge was left to God alone and found unacceptable in human hands (Rom. 12:19, Matt. 5:38-48). For different, though not entirely unrelated reasons, all forms of violence—acts of retaliation not least among them— have been (theoretically) disdained by Jains and Buddhists (Acharanga Sutta 1.4.2; Samyutta 5.9). Again, the spiritual mind is quite capable of treating the calculations and reciprocities of the marketplace with a curious indifference, or of condemning currently accepted economic systems as irremediably corrupt. Thus, one should be wary, not only of identifying religion with retributive logic, but also of neglecting the intriguing transmutations to which the logic of retribution can be subjected by the individual religious mind, and the degrees to which certain of its aspects can overshadow or modify others in given traditions. Some persons and some ideologies, to illustrate simply, are far more legalistically and punitively oriented than others (cf. Laye 1959; Furer-Haimendorf 1967; Montagu 1978; Harris 1978, cf. Fraiberg 1968: 242-64; Foucault 1977). When religious teaching places fetters on human revenge, however, it does not follow that the logical framework we have been describing has been impaired or its existence thrown into doubt. Assertions that Vengeance is the Lord's' or claims about the adverse karmic consequences of violence are still articulations of religious retributive logic. They differ in manifestation, but not in essence, from systems that demand homicidal payback against enemy tribes (Melanesia) or exact Allah's holy penalties with the severing of hands (Islam). It is simply that revenge, for one, is approached

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differently in different religions. Comparable variations emerge with patterns of reciprocity, too: even though some religions have never been integrated into one particular kind of socioeconomic order, none of them has kept silence on gift-giving, or relationships within the community, the fulfilment of obligations, or on the consequences of socially accepted and rejected behaviour. It is in this very last unit of concern, of course, that we can easily perceive how close retributive logic comes to the heart-beat of religion, at the same time apprehending how such logic hangs together. The view that it is worth doing the right thing and that one will suffer adverse consequences from doing wrong impinges both on the rationale of retributive action (revenge, reciprocity) and on the arts of explaining what has happened as a result of one's own or another's deeds. In analysing different aspects of the relationship between religion and retributive logic it is most helpful, in summary, to look for'points of integration and tension between the two. In another context I have written of the Khodja Isma'ilis, a Shi'ite Muslim sect of southwest India and east Africa, in which retributive logic and religion are almost indistinguishable. For the Khodja cultural system is 'a religion in which everything in the three worlds of earth, heaven and the underworld has a "price" ' (Trompf 1980b: 9). Actually, money has become among this people the visible indicator of religious evaluation. Money is not only crucial in defining where Power resides in the community on earth (which centres on the Aga Khan as the holy Hazar Imam, even incarnation of God), but the extent to which money is given or withheld decisively affects one's spiritual standing and even one's place in the after-life. In other cases, however, the claims of religion and of retributive logic sit very uneasily together. The particular doctrinal positions of any given religion can be compromised away when special situations, or nationalist considerations, put the belief-system under great strain, so that those who once felt the call to love suddenly feel duty bound to fight a war for the homeland, or to create a scapegoat out of people who threaten their projected image of society (cf., for example, van der Post 1956: 94-95; Bettelheim 1970:196-209). Quite often, of course, ideals are neither attained to nor practised by the majority of those in a religious tradition: it is intriguing how in societies used to hearing high-principled condemnation of revenge, there remain many and varied instances of vicarious payback (identification with contesters on a sporting field, for example, or with the fighting hero of a television play), which one might be tempted to characterize both as sublimated tribal warfare and peculiar outcrops of religion (Scott-Forbes 1974: 51-56; Atyeo 1979, cf. Glasner 1977: 21-22). Hence the analysis of retributive logic can disclose the relative effectiveness of a religion, perhaps even whether it has been able to preserve its integrity. Overall, such analysis concerns a subject central to phenomenology, and one that writers on religion neglect at their peril.

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The origins of retributive logic I have slain a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech is seventy-sevenfold. (Gen. 4:23-24) An ancient biblical poem, this triumphant boast testifies that retributive logic, and vengeance in particular, has a very long history. Already in the story of Cain and Abel, themes of revenge, offering, and the consequences of action are intertwined, revealing that the association of these elements with the origins of conscience and religion is far from new (Gen. 4:1-8, 9-16, cf. 9:5-6; Enuma Elish 2:1-3,3:9,4:12-17). Surprisingly, however, those would-be social scientists who have theorized about the origins of religion during the last two centuries, from Charles de Brosses to Weston la Barre, have hardly broached the matter at hand. Friedrich Nietzsche stands almost alone in making a brilliant if poetic and highly speculative attempt to link revenge, the language of barter, and the dawn of religious notions. 'Setting prices' wrote Nietzsche, 'determining values, contriving equivalences, exchanging—these preoccupied the earliest thinking of man to so great an extent that in a certain sense they constitute thinking itself ([1887] 1969: 70). The principle that 'everything has its price' is primordial, and lays the basis for 'the oldest and nai'vest moral canon of justice' in prehistoric society: that 'every injury has its equivalent and can be paid back'. For Nietzsche punishments were at first mere mimics of the punitive acts of war, yet at length 'revenge was sanctified under the name of justice—as if justice were at bottom a further development of the feeling of being aggrieved' (73-74, cf. 71-74; Hobbes [1651] 1954: I, xviii; Maine 1861: 67100). Nietzsche's picture of 'Western Man' as an animal soul gradually turning against itself, leaving behind a world of brutal clarity for one of soul-searching and guilt-feeling, when warlike 'instincts were devalued and suspended' by the peace of more developed social organization (84, cf. Steinmetz 18923), opens up the fascinating question as to whether religion was born in the womb of violence rather than in the hushed, eerie encounter with the numinous. Despite the attractive view of certain prehistorians that Homo sapiens sapiens was nothing 'but a peaceable hunter-gatherer before the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago' (the Leakeys interviewed in TM 1977: 74; cf. Perry 1925: 64), a school of 'ethologists' or biologists of behaviour, led primarily by Komad Lorenz (1966) and Robeit Aidrey (1966), are now 3

S. R. Steinmetz's Ethnologische Studien zur erster Entwicklung der Strafe, a published doctoral dissertation from Leiden University (1892), is the earliest serious ethnographic study I know of blood-feuding in the so-called primitive history of human institutions. In the Dutch tradition, yet more missiological, note also Nordholdt (1960).

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contending that aggression is 'one of the most powerful of phyletic memories' from our animal past (Ardrey 1969: 43), and that biological evolution has extensively determined the nature of our 'souls' not just our bodies (for related discussion, see Carthy and Ebling 1964; Moore 1970; Hacker 1971; Montagu 1973; J. M. Smith 1974: 209-21 and 1978: 136-45; Heller 1977: 30-85; Alexander 1987; Groebel 1989). However, there are some questions, that can never be answered, and without a time-machine no one can penetrate back to real beginnings. The more speculative archaeologists have argued that even the 'proto-hominid' group known as the Neanderthals killed (and ate) one another and also anticipated an after-life (Constable et al. 1973: 104). About the primordial motivations of revenge and the supposed fate of the dead, however, the stones and bones remain silent. A variety of 'non-religious' causes for human conflict may be posited, such as the 'selfish gene' (Wilson 1975; Dawkins 1976, cf. Shaw and Wong 1989: 91-114), for instance, or the territorial imperative (Ardrey 1961), or pressure on food resources resulting from the last Ice Age (Birdsell 1957); but there is insufficient data to support generalizations, and we would naturally like to know the thoughts of our distant ancestors who had recourse to violence. The clues about human consciousness we gain from prehistory are too scarce and tantalizing, and have to be supplemented with references to social universals. With an air of resignation we soon find ourselves conceding that aggression and religion help us to define who and what a human being is and both, thus, are likely to be as old as humanity itself. To develop a personal logic of retribution, then, even one expressed more non-verbally than through words, is part of the condition of being a person and of surviving with a human group (Trompf 1990c: 129-33). A good many societies may seem to lack government or laws, yet no known society is without 'rules of some kind which everyone thinks it is right to obey' (Mair 1965:35, cf. Clastres 1976; Fortes 1983). If the rules are broken, the one who suffers will normally seek redress, so that notions of punishment, retaliation, equivalence, blameworthiness, compensation, and cause will quickly come to the fore, even in those societies that are decidedly more 'peace-loving' than others (cf. Lisitzky 1956: 211-98; Denton 1968). There are endless debates to be had about the most ancient correlations between social structures, rules, and ideas, as well as about their bearing on what we here term the logic of retribution. To learn whether the first incest prohibitions marked the earliest attempts at social organization, for example, as a 'remodelling of the biological conditions of mating and procreation' (Levi-Strauss 1971: 350, cf. Fox 1967:54-76; Fortes 1983) would throw light on the origins of tabus and ethics. To discover when the first 'grunt of disapproval' and 'non-symbolic act of bodily-punishment' was made (Malinowski 1947: 205), and whether antagonisms towards other humans sprang from attitudes to hunting (Goldman 1975: 44-76; Cartmill

18

PAYBACK: PRELIMINARIES

1983: 68-69) or out of grief over death (Spiegel 1978), or out of a gender 'division of labour' (de Beauvoir 1961: 85-120), perhaps even gender selective chemical substances (Barash 1977), would be to help explain the origins and persistence of war. To know if gift-giving was first connected with guilt, self-punishment, and the need to placate the spirits could lay bare the beginnings of sacrifice, even of 'work' and to confirm that hate was indeed the precursor of love I n the (phylogenetic) order of development' as Freud suggests (1979: 143), would indeed throw light on the origins of morality and social punishment (Brown 1959: 262-68, yet cf. Suttie 1960: 90-101). To establish also that, even before the neolithic stage illustrated by Catal Huyuk (Anatolia), people envisaged the conditions of postmortem existence and perhaps anticipated a judgment (Brandon 1967: 4-5), to confirm that for all primeval societies deaths were always thought to be killings of one sort or another (Hick 1976: 57), and to document how non-literate peoples have sought to classify events and items from time immemorial (Durkheim and Mauss 1969: 6-9)—all this would certainly take us to the roots of science and of human explanatory devices. To uncover the rationale of sacrifice, as Rene Girard has recently pretended to do (1977: 25, 89-118), moreover, might well allow us a glimpse as to how the various dimensions of retributive logic bear relationship historically (although whether Girard succeeds in establishing 'the fundamental identity' of Vengeance, sacrifice and legal punishment' and lays bare the true origins of myth and ritual, would make for a prolonged critique) (cf. Valeri 1985: 67-70). To find out, too, how prehistoric patterns of retributive logic related to humanity's first insights about God, an issue harking back to the earlier concerns of the Anthropos Institute, would be one way of fulfilling the great Father Wilhelm Schmidt's dream to understand religion (Schmidt 1931, 1934). But the mists of time are impenetrable and it has become increasingly unsafe to go on inferring the secrets of remote antiquity for elitist investigators of the present. Suffice it to say that logics of retribution abound everywhere in our own time. Like most conceptual tools of trade they are subject to modifications brought by encounters between cultures and by modernizing influences. It is to what one may examine today and can learn from the not-so-distant past (from the extraordinary Melanesian cultural tapestry) that we now wish to turn. Melanesia by itself, with its manifold primal traditions and its fascinating responses to Christianity and modernity, can both illustrate these preliminary generalizations in vivid detail and evoke from us a deepening analysis.

PART ONE

'Tradition'

Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild—and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the the sound of bells in a Christian country. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness

Half the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important. Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly in T. S. Eliot The Cocktail Party

P A C I F I C

O C E A N

PAPUA GUINEA

Location of traditional religions on the main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands (key opposite)

21

PAYBACK: 'TRADITION'

LOCATION OF TRADITIONAL RELIGIONS: KEY TO MAPS PART I Main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands (opposite); the Solomons (overleaf); Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu (overleaf). The religions are those cited in Part I: shown by number on the maps, they can be identified from the accompanying key (below). Note: The Index of Melanesian Cultures provides an alphabetical listing of tribal cultures. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Biak-Numfor Waropen (-Yapen) Bukaua Bokondini (Dani) Dugum Dani Jale Tor Ye'in Ngalum Kapauka Mimika Asmat Kolepom/Kimaan Mappi Sawi Marind-Anim Muyu Wape Lujere Gnau Umeda Avatip Chambri/Tchambuli Bimim-Kuskusmin Warn (Dreikikir) Kwoma Arapesh Iatmul Biwat Sawos Mundugumor Abelam Ilahita Arapesh Wogeo Yangoru Negrie Kumasa Murik Lakes Buna Middle Sepik/ Angoram Banaro Manam Gainj Haruai Tangu Malala (Ramu) Bongu (Ramu) Tung (Ramu) Bosmun (Ramu) Begesin Garia Karkar Yam, Sengam Bilbil Ngaing Siassi

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

Timbe Hube Kaileute Wain Wantoat Wompa (Laewomba) Atzera Mumeng Busamo Binandere (Orokaiva) Jaua (Orokaiva) Ioma (Orokaiva) Sangara (Orokaiva) Managalas Okena Maisin Nibita Wedau Dobu Bunama (Normanby) Trobriands Muju/Woodlarkls. Massim Wagawaga Panniet Bonarua Suau Mailu Si'ini Dovaraidi Keveri Hula, AromaVelerupu Motu Koitabu Rigo Roro Mekeo/Kuni Toaripi-Moripi Elema Purari (west Elema) Kerewe Kikori (Poroma) Kiwai Torres Strait Keraki Arube Suki Kubo Bibo Samo Gebusi Bedamini Biami

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124

Etoro Kumula Bosavi (Kaluli) Onabasulu Yombi (Kutubu) Erave/Kewa Kukukuku Wiru Mendi Nipa Wola Huli Duna (Kopiago) Hewa Takin-Telefomin/ Telefgol-Urapmin 125 Baktaman 126 Enga (Ipili - west; Mae - central; Kyaka - east) 127 Melpa 128 Ni'i 129 Kaupena 130 Kalam 131 Maring 132 Narak 133 Wahgi 134 Tambul 135 Chimbu 136 Gimi 137 Daribi 138 Siane 139 Asaro/GahukuGama 140 Bena(bena) 141 Bundi 142 Hua 143 Kamano 144 Tauna Awa 145 Taiora 146 Kogu 147 Fore 148 Gadsup 149 Kunimaipa 150 Tauade (Goilala) 151 Seragi 152 Fuyughe 153 Wuvulu 154 Tulu 155 Ponam 156 Usiai 157 Manus 158 Tula 159 Baluan(Matangkor) 160 Loniu (Matangkor) 161 Mussau 162 Lemakot

163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191

Djaul Nalik Tanga Tabar Tiang Madak/Mandak Sursunga Lamassa Tolai Baining Mengen Kaliai Lakalai Bakowih Lolo Kove Arawe-Kandrian Sengseng Haku Solos Halia Kiriaka Evo Torau Nasioi Telei Buin Siwai Monu-Alu (Shortlands) 192 Choiseul 193 Sambo (Simbo) 194 Roviana 195 Toa[m]baita 196 Lau 197 Kwaio 198 Iova (small Malaita) 199 Florida, Sau 200 Koaka 201 Gari 202 Moli 203 San Cristobal 204 Santa Ana 205 Baled 206 Houailou 207 La Foa 208 Lifu (Loyalties) 209 Banks Is. 210 Aurora (Aore) 211 Atchin 212 Malekula 213 Ambrym 214 Efate 215 Tanna 216 Anutyum 217 Fiji groups

22

PAYBACK: TRADITION'

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Location of traditional religions on the Solomon Islands, Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu (key p.21)

CHAPTER 1

Revenge

The islands of the southwest Pacific have been peopled for millennia. The New Guinea mainland was occupied some 40 000 years ago (Groube et al. 1986), tuber and tree crops being curated in the central highlands as early as 30 000 BP (Gosden 1992), and systematic agriculture developing during the seventh millennium BC (White, Crook et al. 1970; White and O'Connell 1982: 171-212; Shutler 1970: 39-46; Golson 1981: 55-64, cf. Bellwood 1978; Swadling and Kaidoga 1981). Today Melanesia comprises hundreds of linguistic and cultural groups scattered from western Irian Jaya to Fiji.1 It is an incredibly complex tapestry of small-scale, 'stateless' societies, which has resulted from the peculiarities of geography, many adventures in migration and, more to the point of this present study, from countless undocumented tribal conflicts and alliances. Although Melanesian technologies were comparatively elementary, people were skilled in the use of stone, wood, bark, bone, shell and sometimes potting clay; and their tools enabled them, not only to garden effectively, but to hunt and domesticate animals.2 In various quarters they engineered impressive house structures and bridges (Kembol et al. [1974]), erected megaliths and small artificial islands (Reisenfeld 1950; Ivens 1930); they also developed lines and systems of exchange, sometimes with special trade languages and maritime expeditions involved (Malinowski [1922] 1961; Brookfield and Dart 1971; Hughes 1977; Specht 1978; Dutton 1982). 1

2

The following pages avoid discussion of so-called 'Polynesian enclaves' within Melanesia (e.g. Anuta, Bellona, Futuna, Kapingamarangi, Ontong Java, Rennell, Sikaiona, Taku, Tikopia, and even the Lau Group), but takes Awa and Wuvulu to be included as 'fringe Melanesia', the latter receiving some discussion later. Mastery of iron-working in parts of West New Guinea (Irian Jaya) derived from the Sultanate of Tidor; cf. Kamma and Kooyman (1973).

23

24

PAYBACK: 'TRADITION'

As for religion, each society has emerged out of the misty past with its own mythology, ceremonies, music, iconography, customs, values and its own special understanding of the cosmos. Religion was crucial for group survival, for it was not an extraneous compartment of culture but the very stuff of life, all human thought and action issuing in the presence of numinous or preter-sensual forces, and in a community of the dead as well as the living. It is hard to generalize about Melanesia's religions. There are certainly common patterns and themes, but it is impossible to embroider hundreds of strands into a unified picture that does justice to the depth and colour of complex reality. This is why even writing an introductory work on just one aspect of so-called 'Melanesian religion' is fraught with problems; for one cannot say anything that is true of every society, and it is easy to distort the character of particular cultures cited, each one of which could absorb a lifetime's study. To complicate matters, Melanesian belief-systems have often been misunderstood by outsiders and treated superficially in descriptive ethnographies. Sacred knowledge has been the special preserve of its custodians, and there are very few good reasons why it should have been imparted in its 'purest forms' to the uninitiated, let alone to foreigners (Lawrence 1971; Chowning 1977: 1-3). Despite such great odds, however, we can now at least begin to make sense of the more distinctive features of Melanesian religion, with the time being ripe to unravel the vast entanglement of ethnographic reportage into a working synthesis. The notional frameworks categorized in the introduction by the phrase 'retributive logic' have manifested themselves in all the indigenous Melanesian religions I know. In each culture area one finds sanctions for revenge, systems of reciprocal trading and gift-giving between parties, and complex sets of reasons given to show why people experience trouble or blessing. In each the avowed motives behind payback and reciprocity are inextricably related to normative explanations of significant events. To a pronounced degree the members of each society share common assumptions and 'self-evident truths', even though leadership and specialization are necessary to make specific decisions and clarify particular situations. How each collectively held logical framework came to be as it is, of course, is virtually impossible to answer, although at least archaeologists, linguists and oral historians provide enough clues to show that so-called 'primitive' societies were ever-changing, not static (cf. Denoon and Lacey 1981). How Melanesian children come to absorb the values and insights of their societies is also a tantalizing subject for inquiry, and since Margaret Mead's Growing up in New Guinea ([1930] 1942) very little has been added to our knowledge of it (cf. Mead 1932; 1935: 66-92; Whiting 1941; Schieffelin 1990; cf. earlier, Riley 1925:28-93). But the patterns of thinking about retribution are certainly there in all their diversity; and it is the thesis of this book

REVENGE

25

that we can better understand the modern history of Melanesia, with its reactions to colonialism and its emergence in the arena of world politics, by analysing those forms of rationality that have been bequeathed by archaic, primal traditions, and which have made Melanesia the aged mother of a thousand fascinating religions. Melanesia has long been publicized for its tribal fighting, and many of its earlier expatriate visitors, especially missionaries, have long since returned to their homelands with tales of headhunting and sorcery. For many Christians these destructive features mark sinful heathendom at its worst; for European colonials they are proof of civilization's absence; for an older school of social scientists they confirmed the theory 'that peaceful relations were impossible among primitive man' (Ratzenhofer 1898: 13334); and for certain psychoanalysts the 'archaic "blood thirst" ' smacks of necrophilia and the return of the human to an animal-like existence (Fromm 1980: 33, cf. 27, 30-34). This lack of sympathy towards such tribal warfare and hostilities,3 moreover, persists in the current policies of domestic peace upheld by independent and neo-imperial governments. The reader is being asked, however, not to prejudge Melanesian traditions before seeking to understand them, or before learning methods and insights that facilitate understanding. Retaliation in Melanesia takes on many forms; although acts of homicide and sorcery stand out among them, and beckon immediate attention, revenge should be appraised within the broader context of Melanesian religion and consciousness, as we shall now demonstrate. Payback killing: general observations Melanesia spawned a profusion of warriors. It was expected of a man that he should defend his people and know how to use weapons. The killing of one's enemies, in fact, whether by stealth or in battle, was an honoured if not favoured pastime of able-bodied men, who proved by their prowess that they were fearless, strong, and not women.4 It is admittedly not wise 3

4

In the following pages, I tend to use the terms 'war', 'warfare', and 'feuding' interchangeably as all applicable to small-scale group fighting within and between 'culturo-religious complexes' or 'societies'. In cases of chains of single vendetta killings, however, the term 'feuding' alone (of the above three) is appropriate. Only in rare cases did women bear arms (e.g. among the Rigo and certain Orokaiva groups, Papua), although their verbal encouragement and moral support at battle times were important in many societies. In the follow-up of a rout (as among the Chimbu and Wahgi New Guinea highlands) women would raid enemy gardens. On the Orokaiva case (especially BNGAR 1899-1900: 91; Waiko 1985), women took enemy spears out of shields and held up fighting sticks to prevent enemy warriors from bringing down clubs on their men. Among the Umeda (Upper Sepik), women arrow-retrievers and spectator children were 'fair game' in field wars (Gell 1975: 21). For a West New Guinea (or Irian Jaya) case, see Boelaars 1981: 150 (Mappi).

26

PAYBACK: TRADITION'

to make exaggerated claims. The love of killing for its own sake is not characteristically Melanesian, and certain groups felt less pressure to raid, take lives or bring home heads than others. Certainly, one needs to recognize geographical and demographic variations. Most groups' warfare was almost exclusively concentrated on neighbouring tribes or units speaking the same language (Berndt 1964: 183-203), while other peoples—whether because they favoured raiding distant places (the coastal Marind Anim of Irian Jaya, for example, or the Kukukuku of the Papuan Gulf hinterland), or whether they made up tiny linguistic pockets (as around Madang, coastal New Guinea)—fought much less among their own 'kind' than with men of quite different tongues (van Baal 1966: 692-93; West 1968: 153-54, cf. Wurm and Hattori 1982: 7). Even if it is true that social units living on the smaller islands were commonly at war with one another at the time of European contact, moreover—as on the Saint Matthias, Tabar, and Tanga groups off New Ireland, for instance, or on the now famous Dobu Island in the d'Entrecasteaux archipelago (Dixon 1981: 6-8; Lamers 1935: 172; Bell 1934: 301-05; Fortune 1932: 36)—this obviously did not apply on the tiniest outliers holding single or solid associations of people (e.g. off Manus, New Britain, Malekula, Vitu Levu, etc.). There are also historical factors to account for: it may be that the intertribal conflicts documented for immediate post-contact times were as widespread as they were because they erupted in the wake of pre-contact epidemics. Diseases spread through the southwest Pacific from the earliest, coastal interaction between indigenous populations and the newcomers, and their fatal inflictions, frequently ascribed to enemy sorcery, would have demanded vengeance and thus war parties (e.g. Haddon 1932:105; Burridge 1960: 122-23, cf. Nelson 1971; Lacey 1981). Be all this as it may, killing was part of the game of Melanesian life, and to do it well enhanced a man's esteem. I vividly remember sleeping a night under the same roof as a Wahgi warrior (central highlands, New Guinea) who whiled away the hours by telling me how he had killed at least twenty of the enemy, and where his favourite places of ambush and confrontation had been. But if, for many, payback killing seemed 'a very good kind of sport' (Matane 1974: 5, cf. Vicedom and Tischner 1962: 145-55; Berndt 1962: 444; Matthiessen 1962; Peabody Museum 1963; Pouwer 1964; Gardner and Heider 1969; Heider 1970:99-133 and 1979:87-112; Orken 1973), it required to be played seriously because it could cost you your life. No matter how amusing the gloating or the recounting of episodes around the clubhouse fires, or how reckless a warrior might dare to be in challenging the enemy, killing was an act to win both personal and collective survival. Willing destruction of one's enemies was a kind of virtue, not just an obligation. Among the Iatmul (Sepik River), for example, homicide was highest on the list of male achievements, the first kill by a young man being

REVENGE

27

the occasion for the most complete celebration of the ritual called naven (Bateson 1958: 6-7). Male initiation normally instilled the necessity of killing enemies as an expression of both group loyalty and the perpetuation of ancestral ways. Among the Negrie (Sepik), initiates were conducted into an enclosure dominated by high poles with the skulls of victims placed Macbeth-like at the top (Gesch 1985: 232-40). One could claim to be a man among such societies as the Wompa ([Laewomba] Morobe) or Waropen (Yapen-Waropen area of Irian Jaya) only by acquiring a head, which was duly presented to clan ancestors, or, as among the Keveri (Milne Bay), by bringing back a finger as proof of your raiding party's success (Reitz 1975: 163-64; Sack 1976: 50-76; Held 1957: 225-26; Wetherell 1973: 39). Not only was abstention from homicide a strong reason for social rejection (captives sometimes being brought to the weak-stomached initiate for him to land his first blow), but one had to face the possibility of being overcome by enemies in return with the staunchest equanimity (e.g. Seligmann 1910: 552-53). As Jojoga Opeba puts it of his fellows, the renowned Orokaiva, 'to die for one's society and the well-being of the community is an individual sacrifice'. It was better to merit post-mortem prestige by dying bravely than to endure shame (meh) among the living as a coward (Oral Testimony [hereafter OT] 1978, cf. Jojoga 1983:8-45). Overall, the concern to eliminate foes was indistinguishable from paying back people who had been killing one's 'fathers' and 'brothers' over the years, although at no time was there a stronger urge to take life than when the enemy seemed to have committed a 'fresh' act of aggression. When a kinsman was suddenly 'a missing part removed from the whole' (among the Siassi Islanders), it was 'as if a hand had been wrenched from the body' and male members of his family often had but two alternatives: to meet their 'moral obligation by an atoning payback or to face ostracism' (OT: Kigasung 1978, cf. Schmitz 1958). For the Chimbu, it has been argued, one even falls 'guilty' (or at least under 'heavy liability', pring pangwo) until one repays the obligation to a clansman who has not had his slaying avenged (Irwin 197?: 280-81). Thus, no Melanesian society could afford to shun violence. There are no parallels with the alleged pacificism of Malayan Semai or Indian Chenchu, 5 nor with the one known exception of the Sawi of coastal Irian Margaret Mead evidently laboured under the illusion that the traditional Mountain Arapesh lived virtually without war ([1938-40] 1970:15), yet cf. Fortune 1939. The confusion probably arose because certain Arapesh clans did not engage in war, but in other specializations (OT: Narokobi 1985). One possible exception to the general rule I have stated are the Efate (Vanuatu) (cf. Thompson 1981: 3). Others include the Chambri of the Sepik River region, who put up little effective resistance to their Iatmiil foes, and whose headhunting was reduced to the ritual killing of bought captives (Mead 1950:101), and the Gebusi (Strickland River region, Papua), a people subject to Bedamini raiding and infiltration over at least a century before contact (Knauft 1985: 8-9, 12, 237-42, 321-22). These appear to be cases, however, of special imbalances that removed the possibilities of older inter-tribal and

28

PAYBACK: TRADITION'

Jaya (Richardson 1977: 53), were there sacrosanct places of refuge from pursuing assailants (cf. Latukefu on Polynesia 1974: 8). Admittedly, certain preconceived rules were often applied. We discover that the Iatmul, for instance, debarred the use of spears with a pronged fork in fighting upon the Sepik River from canoes, and it was tabu for an ambush to be carried out on any village in which drums were being beaten (OT: Dambui 1985). But anything approaching a formalized military code of ethics (as in the Indian Arthashastra, let us say) is rare. M. J. Meggitt, moreover, in his highly detailed analysis of Mae Enga warfare (1977: 16-21), writes that the 'great fights between whole phratries' which have been 'deliberately planned affairs' involving 'stylized displays of aggression' and duels between chosen individuals, were and remain infrequent. Armed conflict between clans, however, especially those living in close proximity, was both common and blatantly violent, with Meggitt's description of it fitting the general picture most readers will have of 'tribal war'. Most Melanesian societies, in fact, consisted of tribal groups or associations smaller than the Mae Enga phratry, and these were the ones that fought so intensely. Serious conflict was not uncommonly generated between such groups that had marriage relations, and it was almost always between sets of warriors who spoke mutually intelligible languages (cf. esp. Berndt 1964: 188-93).6 To generalize briefly, fighting broke out for certain reasons; it had its causes and its pretexts. It manifested itself in a surprise attack or more or less arranged confrontation, and when spears and arrows were not clouding the air in quantity, it could be kept going by threats, rumours and the felling of isolated individuals caught unawares. But this is to simplify; for, no worthwhile comment can be made on the cause of a particular clash

6

inter-group conflicts of a more typical kind. In Gregory Bateson's technical terms, cultural relations in these last two cases would be those of 'complementary' (as compared with symmetrical) 'schismogenesis', i.e. producing further and further submission (Bateson 1958: 176-77; Harrison 1973: 14). To ease the frustration of students, it should be pointed out that the choice of English (or European) terms to describe primary social groups varies among researchers, and can be affected by arbitrariness, personal choice, and ethnocentricity. For provocative surveys of the relevant literature, see especially Pouwer 1967; Godelier 1977: 70-81. Crucial for our analysis is the datum that segments of most primary groups (or tribes) lived in close proximity for security purposes, and pre-contact travelling was thus severely limited, despite a few possible exceptions to this rule (e.g. the Takin-Telefomin; cf. PNA—Taylor 193839: 249), and despite great differences in population density and environment (vast swamps to very high mountain valleys). That members of primary groups have other corporate allegiances, incidentally, to moieties, in-law connections (affines), allies, secret societies, and so on, is hardly being denied here. On the importance of certain Melanesian cultures for the developing study of complex kinship structures, especially Ambrym in Rivers's researches, see Langham 1981:189-90; and on the history of ideas about 'the tribe' especially Fried 1975. Various terms used for the primary group include tribe, clan, solidary group, security circle, sympathy group, community, war unit, jural group, kin group, parish, stamme, carpel, lineage, connubium, hamlet, susu, segment, cognatic group, even deme.

REVENGE

29

without inside knowledge about the long-term relationship between the contesting parties, or about the bearing group memories have on the conflict. Empirical accounts of the formal procedures, frequency, weaponry, and strategy of war, what is more, have only partial value in explaining conflict if little can be said about consciousness and underlying beliefs. The first rule of interpretation is to learn what a group may say about the maintenance of its own identity in a hostile environment over time, and to appreciate the beliefs and ideas that its members hold as they prove their right to survive. There is no better introduction to this cognitive side to the matter than through analysing notions of revenge. Killing was not carried out for the sheer love of it; it was virtually always an act to repay or satisfy some material grievance. But vengeance against enemies, in particular, was almost invariably backed up by appeals to legitimacy. Whether taken at the socially acceptable moment or not, it was normally sanctioned by those helping, perhaps paying the killers, or by those sharing the drive to assuage the sense of loss in ongoing 'revenge warfare' (Numelin 1950, cf. Wright 1965: 58-60). More personal vendettas were also backed up by reasons, although only those against an 'out-group' were typically countenanced and left without censure by the retaliatory own fellows (see below). A central claim can be made, indeed, that retributive actions (to pay back the enemy or punish some offender) constitute powerful expressions and integral parts of tribal religious life. It is simply not feasible to dissociate Melanesian war from Melanesian traditional religion: the two were interlocked, just as so-called 'economic' and 'political' forms have been 'religious'—Melanesians never conceiving them apart from the 'supernaturally given' order in which they were located. Violent punishment, too, arose from outrage against the violation of sacrally enshrined norms and rights. Even if warfare often attracted a number of 'hotheads', and even if warriors sometimes took revenge 'illegally' and without the sanction of their clan, or 'security circle' as Peter Lawrence (1984: 121-24) prefers it, the general connection between bloodshed and traditional religion requires honest recognition (Brown 1910: 141-51; Turney-High 1949: 1 50-51, 16667, yet cf. van Baal 1966: 756-57; Fromm 1973: 211, 269). Not that Melanesian traditional religions have been unable to survive without war and physical retaliation; this book is designed to show how these religions have been able to adapt and persist in spite of pacification. But they have nonetheless been seriously hobbled by colonial pacification in losing the sense of corporate unity experienced in a more threatened, war-racked world, and for not having the autonomy to execute severe retributive acts of their past. Not only can they be easily made to appear ridiculous to willing critics, but scholars can find it difficult to reconstruct their original integrity. In Nevermann's well-informed survey of traditional

30

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beliefs and practices in the Pacific, to illustrate, we learn that headhunting and cannibalism are 'obligatory', 'moral' and (at least) 'sometimes part of religious life' in Melanesia (1972: 112, 119), but he seems at a loss to know how to fill out these connections; while in many ethnographies of specific cultures, different chapters on 'war', 'law' and 'magic and religion' have sadly substituted misleading compartmentalization for a sounder, more organic approach. A reappraisal is required. Perceived to be so important by Melanesians, payback as revenge was bound to be played upon in the rituals and mythologies of their communities. In some cases a group collectively cursed their enemies in their absence. During the ceremony of Na Sai Na Vitu ('The Assembly of the Seventh Month') among the Gari of Guadalcanal Island (Solomon Islands), to take a fascinating case, warriors sat on the beach in an imitation canoe, tying knots in rope as they envisaged the strangling of foes, and later cut up long softwood sticks as they faced enemy country from a hill, naming the combatants they hoped would be beheaded in battle (Prendeville 1979: 28, 31). Significantly, to spice this complex integration of verbal payback and 'sympathetic magic', other components of this ceremony allowed for the momentary lifting of tabus, so that close kin and spouses could hurl insults at each other, a moment of ritualized vindictiveness known elsewhere (cf. Oakley 1972: 148; Kirk 1973: 368-69; Camp 1979: 79). As already stressed, initiation ceremonies were one-way thresholds into the adult world of strife, and even when some allied group co-sponsored initiations, the demands of blood revenge were rarely forgotten in ceremonial interaction. At the very arrival of such visiting co-participants in Santa Ana (Eastern Solomons), for an apt example, an armed and decorated 'challenge team' would rush down to the beach in 'mock' assault, before conducting the canoe-loads of guests to the great grandstand-like initiation platform. Doing this was not merely a matter of 'playing safe', but a vivid reminder that relations with the visitors had not always been so good in the past and might not be so in the future (Mead 1973: 76-78). As we shall see, exchange ceremonies between separate 'security circles' almost inevitably let loose the innuendo of inter-group antagonisms somewhere in the proceedings (chapter 2). Reflecting briefly on Melanesian mythology and saga materials, individual acts of requital and also traditional punitive expeditions are subjects commonly treated. Occasionally, the impulse to retaliate is symbolically identified as part of the cosmic order, serving to explain why things are as they are. Witness a better-known story told by the Roviana about their enemies the Simbo (on New Georgia in the Solomons). The Simbo suffered continual defeat at their hands and sought to capture the moon for an aid, but no matter how hard they tried to succeed, even with a bamboo tower built on the highest mountain, they failed to bring it down.

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They finished by throwing mud and stakes at its face, so marring its previously unblemished complexion out of bitter frustration (OT: Tuza 1978, cf. Beier and Chakravarti 1974: 59-60). As one finds in other parts of the world (Levi-Strauss 1976: 203; Lawson 1978: 518; etc.), numerous origin myths also reflect the revenge motif. The story of a cataclysmic flood as told in the Biak Island region (of Irian Jaya) is characteristic. The hero Kungu is nearly poisoned by his wife; having refused to take action against her, he makes the flood drown 'everybody' after his two nephews succeed in avenging her treachery. Only Kungu and his sons survived the (apparently local) deluge (Kamma 1978: 16-18).7 That revenge arises from anger and anger from offence is the subject of a thousand stories and songs (cf., e.g., Ker 1910: 84; Hannemann [1920s]: 20-21; Laade 1971: 53; McElhanon 1974: 40-41, 158-59; Blackwood 1978: 117-22; Spiro 1982:99; Young 1983a: 14,62-65; LeRoy 1985:210-12; Pulsford 1989: 58; MacDonald 1991: 320-21, 435-37). 'Keiwatika has killed the pigs!' runs a Lamech-like gloating at the end of a Melpa legend (New Guinea highlands)—by a widow who managed to despatch her husband's killer: He walked about as a murderer! But now I have killed him in his turn. You people, come and gaze on him! As he killed my man, so I have done to him! (Vicedom 1977:55) Not that most mythic or legendary material from Melanesia was about ordinary humans. So much of it concerns more-than-human beings, or specially empowered ancestors, such as the spirit-man of the Tiang people (Djaul Island, West New Ireland), who is punished and killed on a number of occasions—for passing a cane through a woman for stealing a pig and doing other things that humans ought not do (Taufi 1973: 5, 6-9, cf. Schwimmer 1973: 5 for parallel). As the spirits of the dead are understood to remain involved in the life of the community, one can also expect many stories of their displeasure (even thirst for blood), either warning against the neglect of one's own departed kin or reminding that ghosts of fallen enemies are highly dangerous (e.g., Wheeler 1926: 172-73 [Monu-Alu, or Shortland Iss]; Poignant 1967: 87-109; 1970: 22-30 [various], cf. van Baal 1947). One intriguing legend from Aurora Island (Vanuatu) actually incorporates these motifs into a narrative of the origins of warfare. After two young fellows had stolen food from the blind old Muesarava, singing a taunt against him, so the story goes, he became 'exceedingly angry, and 7

For other myths of a great flood as payback, e.g., A. Manke 1909: 97, 104-06 (Bongu, Madang); and many others collated by P. Chakravarti, UPNG. cf. also below, chapter 4 (on the Fuyughe, Papuan Highlands). For still more complex mythology, connecting the sun and moon with headhunting, for example, and concerning the origin of man, see van Baal 1966: 288-92, 249, 401-06, and for a selection of other pertinent materials, Landtman 1917; Burridge 1969a: e.g. 135, 149, 288-89, 294; Holtker 1974; Janssen et al. 1973: 81-88.

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plotted against the people of the place whence the two youths had come'. Blind as he was, Muesarava 'made fighting arrows of [dead] men's bones', and whereas 'his enemies' always failed to hit him, his own weapons struck down many 'and they all died' (Codrington 1891: 368-69). It is only when the ancestors are 'on' the weapons that revenge is secure, and here both the theft and an old man's helplessness serve to justify it. Thus, we should come to recognize how Melanesian religions embrace the furore and intensity of violent conflict. The carving of shields and arrows (each item or style of which could receive a special, powerful name!) (e.g. Mitton 1950; Rockefeller 1967: 24-25, 54-56; Sillitoe 1980: 495-96), the cries of victory, the magicians of war and the plumage of armed warriors in fearsome array—all have been as much a part of any Melanesian religion as spirit masks, funeral wailings, healers or diviners, painted dancers at a feast, let alone rites de passage, sacred truths or unquestioned values. War was not 'secular', and the actualizations of revenge, and not just the myths and rituals that reflect them, form part of the phenomenology of Melanesian religion. Warfare as retaliation When hostilities break out between two sides, the outsider is apt to regard the situation as arising de novo. And when Melanesians are asked today why given fights have occurred, they themselves are prone to give deceptively simple answers, to do with land-grabbing, for example, theft of pigs, rape, or perhaps sorcery. Rarer reasons are known to have been voiced: such as woman stealing (Fortune 1949:24), elopement (Layard 1942: 590), jilting a marriage suitor (Vicedom and Tischner 1962: 155), threats to a trade speciality (Mennis 1982a: 217), or even insults directed at gardens by a visiting tribal leader (Serpenti 1977:217-64). Perhaps the most common type of response, though still simplistic as it remains, is to give a narrative account, an informant telling how A was angered by the actions of B and led a raiding party to kill B or one of his associates (and did so in a way worth telling), the deeper or long-term reasons behind the act of revenge being barely touched. After years of interaction between 'subject' and 'ruling' peoples, these replies to outside researchers have taken on a stereotypical quality. As the handy means of evading contentious issues before the government authorities, such replies have been absorbed into preexisting explanatory frameworks to vulgarize the already dissolving subtleties and complexities of traditional perspectives. When it is blithely accepted, however, that Melanesians view human conflict in terms of disconnected, separate episodes, with acts that require revenge, followed by acts of vengeance (or satisfaction), supposedly forming a self-contained unit of affairs, only a half-truth has been swallowed.

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Certainly, empirical observation will bear out that specific acts taken to be aggressive will provoke reaction, and it is probably most helpful in analysing the logic of revenge killing to begin by isolating the characteristic pretexts and preludes of armed retaliation. A careful examination of the manner in which a group prepares for revenge, or becomes aware that confrontation to redress losses is inevitable, will hopefully lead one beyond inadequate aetiologies (beyond pat, journalese statements that 'this particular event' led to 'that particular response') to deeper questions concerning Melanesian consciousness and religion. This is hardly to deny that theft of land or pigs, and the rape and pirating of women, do not provide reasons appealed to very readily, reasons for paying back the enemy. Clearly, an individual act of manslaying, in this sense, is a pretext par excellence. Closer, more painstaking research, however, would also disclose that although Melanesians obviously distinguish particular ruptures—remembering them by those vitally involved (those who 'own the quarrel' as the Mae Enga put it [Meggitt 1977: 30]) or by the magnitude and immediate consequences of the clash—they also show awareness of chains or networks of events, and thus of longer-term group relationships important for a sounder causal analysis of war. Pretexts and preludes, then, ought not to be mistaken for causes, though in each culture all are integrally related as parts of a 'tradition' as familiarized sequences of events in the socio-religious life of a particular people. War's pretexts and preludes: a case study—the Bena(bena) To discuss pretext and prelude in depth, I have chosen an example from my own research among the Bena(bena) (eastern highlands, New Guinea) into the phenomenon of 'payback running' (or genefafaili) in the high grass country east and north of present-day Goroka. The whole region of Bena speakers is made up of separate 'autonomous tribal groups' with hamlets (mainly made up of patrilineages) being scattered throughout each tribe's territory (Langness 1966). The hamlets certainly have access to a wider support group, through which wars are waged and alliances forged, but the occupants of each are fully aware of their relative geographical proximity to the settlements of other (often enemy) tribes. Payback running is a symptom of inter-tribal hostilities while being focused on particular centres of residence. I was fortunate enough to interview a payback runner, an elderly woman named Aubo, in 1973. Aubo had married her stepson Piaruka, following the death of her first husband. When Piaruka fell ill, she was debarred from seeing him; then, as she returned from the gardens one afternoon in July, she was informed he had died. Her husband's other relatives began gathering at the hamlet Kalagefagheai (on the southern side of the Bena Bena

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River) for the lamentations. Aubo slept with them, but early the next day, as she described it, a special wind (bunemeha'a) entered her body and she began to shiver. Her dead husband had taken control of her. It was not the first time she had been seized this way, for when her biological sevenyear old son, Ethaphuthapa, had died of suspected poisoning, the wind had come in full force. So, she was not frightened, but she was not herself. Friends of her own age group secured a special bark called yahuba, yet it was a younger man who, biting it, spat its juices on her back as her trembling intensified (cf. Langness 1965: 262; 1972a: 955-56). In an instant she began running and everybody was after her. It was the implicit belief that, as the man's death had been caused by an enemy sorcerer, his spirit would eventually find its way to the culprit's hamlet. On many occasions a runner, after much meandering, would 'arrive' somewhere, a place facing the enemies from whom an indiscriminate payback killing would be exacted (although only when the time was opportune). To bring the exercise to a close, the followers would perform the curious act of passing across the runner's shadow, all frantic activity then ceasing and the possessing spirit given leave. Aubo told me that in her own case Piaruka's presence gave her great strength, yet drove her through the bush in a most haphazard fashion. At one point she sank down in a place where she believed sorcerers hid and smoked, all her impulses to move being momentarily lost. But she knew her husband's power was still in her, and with juice bespattered on her back, she was away again. In this particular case, however, tradition was thwarted. Found some six miles (almost 10 km) from her home sprinting along the Highlands Highway, forty-year-old Aubo and her followers were arrested by the police for inciting tribal war, with her shadow being 'crossed' in the ensuing melee (cf. Trompf 1979c: 131-32). Traditionally, a dead person's spirit could seize any member of the clan known well in life, but nowadays only close kin are possessed. 'My kinsfolk knew and believed that the spirit would enter me!' Aubo cried, for Piaruka had once said he would enter a friendly relative. Now she felt his spirit had been unhappily released without his killers being identified, and he was not expected to return in this role. If the Bena often appear uncertain or strangely uninterested about the final condition and influence of the dead, such running amounts to one kind of rite of passage into the spirit order. With this last act of distinct involvement among the living, the newly departed reveals the crucial knowledge on which revenge for his or her death will be based. Even if some Bena groups distinguish between soul (frenonua) and spirit-ghost (fre), and think of the former proceeding to an order, with villages and pigs, like the present one, and of the latter being free to come and go where it wishes, the seizing of a runner by a fre is always seen to be an individual carrying out one last act of aggression on behalf of the group (OT: Rasinakafa 1980, cf. Langness 1965: 263).

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This example beckons some reflection. It is an extraordinary sequence, which, for those participating, serves to explain a depressing fact of life, while at the same time indicating what should be done about it. A fatal sickness was not 'natural'; that is a typical Melanesian understanding. Someone rather than something has been responsible. A spirit then irrupts within the community to make plain the legitimacy and necessity of revenge, and becomes director because it smells the odour of its killer. The group is ready for that convulsion; one is tempted to view the Bena payback run as a paradigmatic if controlled rage against the 'human situation' when humanity's awful mortality has been unmasked. Death elicits from them a primal outburst that satisfies the pressure to rebel against death itself, just as with the Baktaman (further west in the central highlands), who ravage a newly dead warrior's gardens and kill his pigs and dogs for food, out of a compelling, collective anger over his death (Barth 1975: 149; cf. pp. 95, 368). Still more than this, the whole set of actions by the Bena meets the desperate need to blame and punish. Thus, the event and consequences of fatal sickness are integrally tied in with reactions to enemies, to the threatening, outside forces that have made up the well-known traditional instability of the eastern highlands (Langness 1972b: 171-85, cf. Berndt 1964: 188, 193-94; Watson 1967: 53-104). An outsider, quite perplexed, might ask why that connection is made at all; but for those within the culture the same malevolent powers that can be appropriated by the enemy to bring defeat or death by the spear can also cause disease. To set the record straight, however, payback running does not automatically produce war among the Bena. Not only may the spirit lose the culprit's scent, but even with a clear identification of the hamlet involved, retribution may be put off for a long time. Accounting will have been made, nevertheless, and the characteristic chase, so boisterous and noisy, stands as a ubiquitous threat towards the offenders, promising future requital for their outrages. Who had died, and which people had been found culpable, though, can affect what follows. The fatal sickness of a 'bigman' or manager (for the Bena have no hereditary chiefs) would stir clans to war or raiding more promptly than other tragedies, yet a runner's divination to a traditionally friendly tribe, or one rather too formidable at the time, would dictate patience. And it was not a matter of applying a less subtle principle, simbaten, known on Vanuatu's Malekula Island, where the first fatal reprisal following a death was considered an immediate 'equalizer' between warring 'clans' (Layard 1942: 599), nor is revenge based strictly on notions of 'the same kind of person'—a woman for a woman, a bigman for a bigman, as among the Haruai in the New Guinea Schraeder Range (Lindergard [forthcoming]). Equivalences for the Bena are forever a matter of debate, and can be adjusted to suit the kin connections and interests of each hamlet (the male members of which are in recurrent pursuit of a

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consensus interpretation of events). The identity of a killer may actually be learnt, to go further; yet, even if one of his associates or kinsfolk is ambushed, it does not follow that he himself has then ceased to be a key target in later clashes. In any case, someone expected to form part of an avenging party or 'revenge group' might prefer the death of a person other than the recognized killer, being related to him by marriage bonds from some previous alliance (and thus being cast like a troubled Hector against an Ajax) (cf. Fortune 1947a: 108; Berndt 1964: 196-97; Glasse and Lindenbaum 1969). If identities are not known, of course, as is usually the case with sorcerers, payback running only isolates the hamlet involved, not individuals. At odd times, admittedly, death by sickness did not generate Bena payback running at all. The wasting away of an irresponsible person, or even his being felled by enemies, could be considered the result of his own susceptibility; while the demise of an elderly man, despite signs of sickness, simply evokes acknowledgement of a life lived 'completely'. Such cases apart, however, the Bena are highly prone to interpret any sickness that brings death as the end-product of sorcery or a nalissalobo (sorcerer). War does not stop short when warriors leave skirmishing, but it continues under cover by sorcerers who smoke, whisper spells, and manipulate coastal shells to kill their victims. Thus, even a wounded warrior who eventually dies is a victim of sorcery; enemies are quite capable of sneaking in close to his hamlet after dark, and his groaning enables a sorcerer to 'catch' his voice, and to use it to worsen the damaged part (OT: Rasinakafa 1980). Set in context, then, payback running is a first step in showing how impossible it is to understand Bena warfare without comprehending Bena religion. Fusing the two, there is a logic of retribution that encapsulates and legitimizes deep feelings of fear and hatred toward the obstacles of life, that satisfies the passion to find and blame causal agencies of death or sickness, and that channels these feelings and issuing attempts at explanation into corporate action. This logic does not consist in abstract reflection but in the range of notions that is traditionally, yet dynamically integrated into the acting-out of an event—the pursuit of a possessing spirit. This frenzied rush, we must admit, is only one of an (albeit small) number of possible preludes to fighting, and we must concede that it resulted from but one of the pretexts of war: sorcery. It is also only one facet of Bena religion. But this special scenario points beyond itself to a whole outlook on life, a total perspective in which violence and the consciousness of the spirit world are inseparable, physical acts never being reducible to a pragmatic secularity nor religion to a special compartment concerning ritual and belief in so-called supernaturals. At this point we are under pressure to reconsider the causes, let alone outward manifestations, of war in terms of traditional Weltanschauungen, and then go on to such related matters as magic, sorcery, and other forms of retaliation.

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The causes of war The study of payback syndromes, though not to be confused with the study of warfare or human strife in general, must concern itself with the generation of conflict. As we have already cautioned, however, the generation and cause of conflict may not be the same. The ancient Greek historian Polybius, for example, has bequeathed us a time-honoured distinction between the cause, pretext and beginning of wars (Historiae 3.6.1-7.3; 22.18.6; cf. Trompf 1979a :83-84), instructing us that the first steps to open up hostilities, or the immediate pretexts and excuses for taking up weapons, can only be deemed the causes (aitiai) of particular conflicts in the most superficial sense. Thus, the fashion of listing land-grabbing, theft, rape, and so on, as causes of fighting provides only the shadow of a genuine aetiology which lies rather in the past histories of relationships between the groups involved in any strife. These relationships, if they had been immemorially unsavoury, were dominated by the issue of assuaging the loss of life itself, and thus by the most basic question of all: the survival of a human group among hostile neighbours. The longer-term nature of these relations can be reconstructed by the most arduous oral historical investigations. There are, of course, group traditions about the origins of particular clans, and even about their wanderings in the more distant past. What concerns us here, however, is the continual process of 'score-keeping' that has been kept in vibrancy during the history of each group's interactions, such shared memories not being easy to come by. The tallying has been the special preserve of those who are in the business of survival itself, and who have constantly adjusted their estimates as they confer over new developments. One thing remains clear: traditional group (especially tribal)-relations were in a constant state of flux, and one simply has to be an entrenched inhabitant of a 'male clubhouse' to pick up all the nuances and shifts of opinion from day to day. Who, however, can now provide such intimate experiences? Social change has had the better of empirical scholarship, it seems; for, even where the anthropology of actual war has been undertaken it has been under conditions already affected by European intrusion. In pre-contact times matters were complicated by a much greater movement of warring communities than has applied since the (stabilizing) colonial period (Denoon and Lacey 1981), and the more the movement, it seems, the more drawn out the contests were likely to be. A tribe losing men and resources in one confrontation might in fact take years of careful preparation for a revenge comeback that would satisfy them (e.g. Waiko 1972 and 1983). Among attempts to record traditional histories, with a welcome emphasis on the ongoing process of 'military costing' and reasoning in the light of new events, Inge Riebe's study of the Kalam (central highlands, New

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Guinea) is probably the most detailed (yet cf. Healey 1985a). The Kalam present us with the kind of segmented society helpful in introducing traditional Melanesia in broad terms. They make up a culturo-linguistic block of 10 000-15 000 persons, occupying four major valleys and gardening in a relative abundance of land 5000-6000 feet (1520-1820 m) above sealevel. Local groups identify themselves by place names (twenty-five in all), and it is each 'aggregate' (bSogpek) that is the 'support group' crucial for revenge killing (and for the forging of alliances along cross-cousin ties of kinship) (Riebe 1968: iv, 13, 16, 22, 24-27). Riebe attempts to document 'case histories' of 'fighting sequences' involving some of these aggregates between the early date of 1914 (more than twenty years before contact with the outside world) and 1962. Her stresses, though less with an eye to religion than suits this present study, properly centre on the warriors' lively memory of key incidents, gains and losses in the past, on their calculations and recalculations of the 'score' through time, and on their payments for services rendered (since owners of Kalam quarrels can hire killers, who are compensated either for success or tragic failure). Above all, she conveys the existentially exciting and absorbing character of war from the protagonists' viewpoints, thereby hinting at a religious dimension that observers who have never been involved in small-scale war find hard to apprehend. Riebe readily confesses to the (virtually unavoidable) defect of writing about the motives of people on one side of an ongoing conflict, while treating the enemy involved like a 'blurred mass' (1968: 88). Yet she has rightly chosen to understand complexes of human violence first of all from an historical perspective, rather than to impose abstracted principles of interpretation on complex interactions that finally elude them (cf. 1968: xi-xx; 82). One recalls R. G. Collingwood's dictum that history is mostly about purposive causation, and that wars are as much the outcome of human intentions, thought, and planning as anything (1939: 285-88; 1946: 309-15, cf. Dray 1959-60). Riebe's approach pushes the analyst beyond the mere stratagems, the brutal facts of violent retribution, the stereotypical listing of pretexts, towards a deeper comprehension of worldviews. Such a methodological stance, nevertheless, is out of tune with many recent anthropologies in which we find a refusal to base any general theory of causation on local or traditional rationality. Social scientists want to rest their cases on objective principles or models that do justice, not just to the particular cultures they choose to research, but comparative ethnography as well (cf. Barnes 1962: 5-9; Langness 1964: 142-50). Sharing this basic assumption that true explanations emanate from a high plane of sociological abstraction, in fact, some Western scholars hold that it is only a 'cultural-ecological' paradigm that is adequate for interpreting warfare in atomized or small-scale societies. Upon analysing inter-tribal conflict

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in Maring society (central highlands, New Guinea), for example, A. Rappaport has argued that warfare and religion are both ecological mechanisms that regulate crises of over-population and protein levels, or which produce a constraining cycle between the potential excesses of hostility on the one hand and the advantages accruing from both pigkilling rituals (which generate peaceful relations) and the non-violent redistribution of land on the other (1967:224-42; 1979, yet cf. Salisbury 1975: 128-31; Knauft 1990: 270-71). Having researched in the same area, but focusing more with war than religion, A. P. Vayda puts process before motives even more unabashedly, to maintain that, if revenge helps to account for the early phases of fighting (= our 'pretexts'), it is economic or wider ecological factors (population pressure, food shortages) that best explain the whole 'system' and reveal war as 'an adaptive response' (1976: 33-41, cf. 1961:346-56; 1968:86-87; 1971:1-24; Harrison 1973:26-27; Sexton 1973). In one form or another these interpretations are (structuralist-) functionalist. They are worked out on the prior understanding that there must be a purpose for war, let alone religion, but that this rationale, far from being identified with the motivations of the people themselves (whether expressed individually or collectively), can only be grasped by practitioners of modern science, who can locate all phenomena in the social pattern of things and see social benefit in what is apparently dysfunctional or maladaptive. Marxist analyses of 'primitive' war, too, reflect a fairly comparable method, placing emphasis as they do on the struggle for resources rather than on a phenomenology of grievance (e.g. Modjeska 1982: 50-108);8 while there are certain aggression theorists who have abstracted war into a 'safety valve mechanism' once again to circumvent the awkward complexity of concrete reasonings (e.g. Coser 1956:48; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1984: 113-217). More moderate and sensible general analyses adopt the factorial approach (adding to revenge as the cause of war such factors as status enhancement, politics, economics, specifically religious requirements, and pleasure [Oliver 1989: 424-36]), although it proves more useful, we maintain, to interpret the role of all these within 'the revenge complex'. It is not our business here to present some general theory of warfare, let alone conceive the whole raison d'etre of any or various Melanesian religions. Suffice it to say that such functionalist, ecological and reductionistlooking approaches fail to pinpoint the specific relationship between motivations and actions, treating 'real causes' as one step removed from the purposes or consciousness of people—the agents of history themselves. In reaction, C. R. Hallpike has recently tried to redress this lopsidedness 8

Modjeska's, however, is a more sophisticated, latter-day Marxist analysis; yet cf. Malinowski 1920: 10-12, for an earlier assault on Marxist interpretations of war. Note also non-Marxist stresses on the survivalist and economic aspects of war, see Fortune 1949: 24; Elkin 1953: 170; Glasse 1959: 274, and so on—approaches recently under attack by Hallpike.

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by a detailed account of what he describes as treachery and butchery among the Tauade, especially the Goilala tribe in the Papuan highlands. Yet, he himself has pressed far too far in the opposite direction, especially by overplaying the (so-called 'Heraclitean') passion of these Papuan highlanders, who are supposed to 'kill for the pleasure of killing' (1977: 7)— and, thus, by underestimating the role of rationality or legitimation. Although he recounts narrative episode after episode of homicidal brutality (from Administration and oral sources) (1977: 93, 196-231), the possibility that meaningful reasons explain why persons become so enraged that they take life, or that religious preconceptions might govern their deeds, never seems to be countenanced. As I have contended elsewhere, however, simply because the Tauade 'describe their own volitional acts in terms of urging from their insides, it does not follow that they are less rational, only that their rationality is different from others' (Trompf 1979d: 155, cf.. 1980a: 340-41; Gutul 1977: 13-14). We find a more balanced approach, and one avoiding the worst dangers of the ecological, psychologistic, or highly theoretical orientations (just discussed) in the writings of L. L. Langness, who has worked among the very people considered in our case study, the Bena(bena). Admittedly, Langness succumbs to the typical pitfall of confusing causes with pretexts, and also fails to challenge the brash claim (made well before Hallpike by the Africanist J. Barnes), that research in New Guinea suggested 'a great[er] emphasis... upon killing for its own sake' (1972b: 176-77). One of his main purposes, however, has been to characterize a healthy interest in child psychology, male-female tensions, consensus preconceptions and the way war is 'one of the most critical variables in any understanding of New Guinea social structure'. His reconstruction of the general ethos, then, is all to the good; except that warfare and conflict are still described as if religion is only tangential to them, or as if beliefs, rules, or rituals we conveniently deem religious belong to a compartment more or less distinct from 'secular' military or blatantly physical activity. War, for Langness, is basically a matter of force, not of thought, and along with most universitybased ethnographers operating in the central highlands since the 1950s, he is much more interested to see how conflict reflects social organization and structure rather than general attitudes towards life (1972b: 180-82; 1964: 128; Steadman 1971: Hayano 1972, yet cf. Koch 1974: 67-90, 136-178). Some anthropologists, then, do not make it easy for us to connect violence with rationality and ideas. An old (and apparently unsolved) question, what is more, still keeps rearing its ugly head: do people usually act first and think to justify themselves later? Yet, I will simply stand by my opening methodological analysis of these problems, while adding that in traditional Melanesia revenge as 'notion', 'rationale', or even 'norm' was already integral to culture, and already inscribed into the prevenient

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(or emergent) 'history of relationships' between two or more groups to condition individual urges or brutal deeds. It has been expressed in Papua New Guinea pidgin thus: what is 'essential for salvation' or survival is 'the strength to succeed in the fight against enemies' (strong bilong winim arapela long pait) (Fugmann 1977: 125); and it is no more nor less my purpose here than to establish that revenge was continually being taken for reasons that had already been discussed by a particular batch of people, since ongoing military exchanges demanded, not merely ongoing strategy, but reflection on significances and imperatives deriving from transpired events. One learnt not only how to act (within certain limits/after a certain fashion), but also consensus reasons why one acted or reacted, and was required to do so, so that an amount of premeditation concerning violence was a cultural 'given', a parcel of tradition I am daring to call (part of) a logic or set of logical principles, which was waiting to be backed by emotion, anger, and bodily response once a typical pretext arose. The general justifications for revenge had already been articulated prior to any actualization of it, dire actions without such legitimacy being deemed 'criminal' (or possibly 'accidental') (Malinowski 1926: 125). Thus, even though some peoples may be more 'affective', 'excitable' or more easily 'pent-up' than others (cf. Mead 1972: 226-27; Murphy 1957: 1032; Steward 1958:206-10), the case for the uncontrolled passions and irrational outrages of one Melanesian society or another is unfounded. The next step in our argument will have begun to look obvious. It is necessary to begin filling out the dimensions of these logics of retribution. More requires to be said about the inextricability between negative retribution, religion, and inter-group warfare; and then to go on to flesh out all the possible ramifications of the retributive frame of reference, by examining forms of non-physical violence (such as sorcery), legal sanctions, the recourse to personal retaliation, and then those reciprocal and explanatory sides to the whole matter we have earlier introduced (cf. Preliminaries). Some important variables in the logic of Melanesian warfare To return to the Bena(bena) as such an indicator, it is useful to examine the payback complex we have already begun documenting among this people alongside comparable textures from other cultural tapestries. Here I shall focus on points of comparison directly to do with war and armed conflict, singling out those issues that have obvious bearing on motivations and the connections between religion and the most visible expressions of warriorhood. First, and most generally, we will fail to find among each Bena group any notion of initiating armed hostility for its own sake. What Brian du Toit has written of the Gadsup (farther east) (1975: 77, 86-87) applies nicely to

42

PAYBACK: TRADITION'

the Bena and also to most other Melanesian corners: 'hostile actions, an attack or an ambush, are always an act of retaliation [that is, against those outside one's own primary community]'. These hostilities, moreover, as long observed by analysts of so-called 'primitive warfare' (such as Seligmann 1910: 542; Vertenten 1923; Wedgwood 1930:5; Marett 1933:47-48), generally manifest in the middle stratum of three socio-geographical spheres of conduct. In the sphere closest to oneself, the Veritable home-circle' made up of kin by blood, the tabu 'Thou shalt commit no murder' is fundamental. On utter strangers, by contrast, in the sphere most removed, there is barely reason to endow any humanness at all and thus no qualms about killing (highly untrustworthy) trespassers. Between the neighbouring groups in the middle range there remains the ongoing pattern of 'tit-fortat' and shifting alliances, which settles down to be part of the combatants' traditions. Only rarely do we come across segments of a culturo-linguistic complex owing allegiance to a central authority (the paramount chieftaincies of Fiji and the Trobriands, of course, being the notable exceptions); thus, warfare as an act of rebellion was far from characteristic of traditional Melanesia (yet cf. Gluckman 1963; 1970 on Africa). Secondly, usually because there is a blurred line between the living and the dead, the one who has just died is drawn into the vortex of the retaliatory measures. Bena payback running, for instance, can be seen as a divinatory exercise as well as a means of making sure the spirit is not lost or distracted before it gives crucial support. Divining techniques are one method for explaining death as a significant event (cf. chapters 3,9), and the procedural variations are enormous. Among the eastern Toaripi (Papuan Gulf), for example, close male relatives waiting by the corpse traditionally took turns to sit in the jungle at night, watching for some sign (a flying fox's movement, a firefly) to indicate the direction of the enemy sorcerer's origins (Koroti 1974: 2-3). The Mendi (southern highlands) ask questions to help pin down the identity of killer-sorcerers by whispering questions down a bamboo tube connected to the skull of the buried cadaver; and in collective dream sessions on the mountaintops, where slumberers lie tied together by cordyline in longhouses (and under the supervision of a 'dream-master'), someone is expected to see enemy culprits in his or her sleep (Lornley and Eastburn 1976). In several New Guinea Island societies a divining pole is held lightly by the bereaved, and the dead is understood to jostle the holders until it points towards the guilty parties, in the past towards enemy centres (Trompf 1991: 94). Other cultures looked to specific birds, which were supposed to call the names of culprit sorcerers (Williams 1928: 127, 268), and still others for the tracks of ghosts after powder had been left on new graves (Keysser 1911: 143). Thirdly, the Bena example presents us with the phenomenon of alleged spirit possession in the service of armed retaliation. This feature is unusual

REVENGE

43

for Melanesia; one may discover analogues around the region nonetheless. A tawakanim among the Wantoat, to cite a case, is a specialist in holding a divining bamboo or tawak (Morobe). When a man succumbs to a fatal sickness, the tawakanim blows pieces of the dead man's hair into this short and special bamboo length until he is shaken by the deceased's spirit. His momentum built up, he too, like the Bena pa/back runner, will start off at extraordinary speed towards the culprit's settlement (Kaima 1983: 9). Among the Malalas farther west (hinterland Madang), a comparable procedure is slowed down by the fact that the specialist must let the spirit guide him from the bamboo, while he somewhat awkwardly runs with it sideways. Although this is less obviously a case of possession, the group going with him to reach the suspected hamlet will then return home singing a nauwa, an eerie song that is alleged to take over and weaken the enemy warriors, so that they will too often leave their residences and be less heedful in looking after their women and children (OT: Kokon 1983; cf, Gesch 1985: 191). If in these societies possession was accepted as happening beyond ordinary control, in others there may have been an element of pretence. Ongka, a reminiscing Melpa bigman, talks of this kind of possession phenomenon more cynically: 'When someone died, it was often in fighting or by an enemy's sorcery, and we would think of revenge. At the funeral one of the men would pretend that a dead man's spirit had entered him; he shook and said "He! He! He! He!" in the hope the spirit would turn vengeful', before sacrifices were made to secure the help of all the remembered male ghosts in reprisals (Strathern 1979: 52). Genuine possession or not, this was still ritualistic activity to work up the will to avenge among those devastated by a death, just as with the Hube 'death magician' (hafec bapa) (Morobe), who flayed the corpses of the slain down to their skeletons during funerary rites in order to be worked up or 'daemonized' by their heightened animosities, allegedly giving immense strength to the group in its pursuit of blood revenge (Gerber 1978: 61-62, 64). Occasionally such spirit possession was more than just a prelude to war, so that, until someone was 'seized' (as on San Cristobal, Solomons; Fox and Drew 1915: 169), warriors would not set off for battle (see below on Etoro). Fourthly, the armed coterie in the wake of a Bena payback runner reminds us that we need to consider the solidity of the revenge group. Traditional revenge was seldom a matter of 'self-help' (cf. Sack 1974a: 78, 86). Only a few people, admittedly, were almost automatically drawn into working collusion after a given death (usually close agnates of a patrilineage) and these operated as an 'executive' to secure wider clan or tribal support, or to hire and pay off ambush killers, let us say—as is well documented for highland groups (Vicedom and Tischner 1962:156; Berndt 1964: 191), and for the Toa[m]baita and Koaka in the Solomons (Hogbin

44

PAYBACK: 'TRADITION'

1964: 59-61; Idulusia 1979: 23). For, it was natural that subdivisions of a whole political unit or tribe were bound to feel the particular death of one from among their own numbers more keenly; thus, an onus often first fell on an initiating party, which might even have been ready to act on its own.9 Forces were usually widened, however, although how two or different sides came to have the shape and backing they had depended on important variables. The most fundamental of these were social structure, residential patterns, and the historical conditioning of alliances and power balances. Each Bena tribe, to take our test case, was managed and kept in viable unity by competing bigmen from various hamlets, one of whom in one of these residential clusters was deferred to more than the others in such matters as fights and feasts. Under such egalitarian circumstances, separate subgroup initiatives were more likely. But many Melanesian societies, particularly those on the coasts and in the islands, possessed hereditary chiefs (occasionally 'noble families' as on Manam Island), and thus inter-group operations required the sanction of special figures who, for all the rules of etiquette and sacral mystique surrounding them, had not necessarily earned prowess by dint of hard work and battle scars as typical highlander 'influentials' had (cf., e.g., Seligmann 1910: 692-700; Wedgwood 1934: 373-79; Murray in PAR 1937-38: 33-34; Rimou 1983: 2). As for residential status, the apparent Bena norm was the patrilineage in a separated hamlet, marriage being exogamous (outside the whole tribe) and thus with women who, hailing from tribes who might not always remain friendly, were forced to dwell virilocally (where the male lived) and to be recurrently suspected of disloyalty (Meggitt 1964: 218-25). This, admittedly, is the most common pattern in Melanesia; yet, some endogamy was known, or mixed exogamy-endogamy (e.g. Brown 1960a: 33; Berndt 1964: 188), and there were also societies in which men were expected to spend at least some years living and working among their brides' people (e.g. Malinowski 1927: 8-24; Tuzin 1976: 93-995, cf. Murphy 1957: 103334). On Dobu, in fact, although it was not true that a couple was bound to 'live in alternate years in the village of the husband and the village of the wife' (Benedict 1935: 98; yet cf. OTs: Edoni 1983; Brunton 1983), there were pressures for an irregular oscillation between the two places until one of the partners died (Fortune 1932: 21-93; Uberoi 1962: 59). The Dobu situation, however, introduces another variable, since these marriages take place within the 'war unit' or district, which is rather larger than is characteristically Melanesian and consists of up to twenty villages cooperating against enemies (Fortune 1932:35-36; Benedict 1935:95). That only reminds 9

Some cases of individual action are exceptional. For example, on /a/ritual homicide among the Ilahita Arapesh, see below, and on the hiring of a ramos warrior to carry out individual killings among the Iova on small Mala(ita) for a 'blood bounty' of valuables and a pig, see Rimou 1983: 5; cf. Keesing 1978a: 50-70; Keesing and Corris 1980: 17-25.

REVENGE

45

one that social structure and residency custom can combine into the one complicating factor. Even in a central highland society such as that of the Huli, where warfare and shifting alliances do not look so dissimilar to Bena and other highland standards, one discovers a surprisingly greater degree of choice as to where males should settle down, and with whom they should fight, producing more 'cognatic' bonds (as R. M. Glasse refers to them, 1968), than in other patrilineal cultures.10 Significantly—one might say commensurately—Huli society was also unusual for possessing cultic centres (cave shrines for sacrifice) resorted to by whole clusters of tribes, and manned by a priesthood that could have become powerful enough to produce a tribal confederacy (Gayalu 1979: 19-25, cf. Jojoga 1983: 3041 on Orokaiva; Thomson 1894: 342 on Fiji, for comparative materials). As for the 'historical' conditioning of alliances and power-balances, which has brought with it much more fragmented than broader unities in Melanesia, this variable can hardly be held in isolation from the others nor from a general analysis of war. Certain group activities, such as headhunting raids (which were usually propelled for distinctly religious reasons), brought previously antipathetic tribes into temporary military cooperation to cross long distances by low-lying land or sea (e.g. Held 1957: 198-201; van Baal 1966:693-95; Tippett 1967:147-60). From various corners one gains the impression of 'united fronts' between one culturo-linguistic block and another—the Tolai against the Baining (Rascher 1899: 295-303, 346-50), the mountain Orokaiva against the Managalas (Schwimmer 1973: 123-24), the Halia versus the Solos on Buka Island (Parkinson and Meyer 1894: 28, 30, cf. plate 28), the Abelam slowly encroaching on the Arapesh from the southeast (Forge 1965-66:24; Tuzin 1976:73)—even though within each block feuding went on repetitively. In the highlands, too, tribes (as among the Wahgi) who shared 'common ancestors traced through legends or . . . past historical alliances' were much less likely to join issue or let quarrels drag on indefinitely (Kerpi 1975: 15, cf. Reay 1974: 205; Kai 1979; Kondwal and Trompf 1982: 88-95). In most eastern highland areas, however, alliances were much more frequently made and remade and thus brittle, with the Bena being most notorious for their unnerving willingness to massacre as many of the enemy as were vulnerable. Since remnants took refuge with more secure tribes after such devastations, Bena social structure has been rendered all the more difficult to analyse (Langness 1966: 14547). Behind fighting in many other areas, to complete this bird's-eye view, 10

Although, as Arum Matiabe has argued of the Huli (OT: 1983), knowledge of one's relations twelve generations deep enables the warrior to know when and with whom to fight, despite rather flexible residency patterns. Other examples of cognatically (or 'ambilineally') bonded societies include the Choiseulese (see Scheffler 1965:139-78), the Garia and Begesin (Madang hinterland), the Bosmun (lower Ramu) and the Haruai (Schraeder Range), cf. also Nevermann 1972: 105.

46

PAYBACK: TRADITION'

one must be aware of various kinds of shifts affecting the pattern of conflict: this includes migrations (Jojoga 1981), quests for asylum (Strathern 1972a: 90; Kondwal and Trompf 1982: 102-04), the formation of moieties (Layard 1942: 589-98), or of factions in groups which have become too cumbersome (Reay 1959a: 32; P. Brown 1960b: 4; Hau'ofa and Trompf 1974:235). Highly significant for interpreting the relationship between war and religion in all this is a simple datum: that of keeping alive territorial claims and maintaining a sense of identity and prowess, which were invariably recorded with great (why not say sacral) seriousness in narrative and song (Kolia 1974-93). We are in a better position to turn to the immediate preparations for war as our fifth variable, and thence to the actual exercise of violence itself. Among the Bena, assaults were typically unpredictable. 'Survive or be struck down' was a commonly cited proverb, and warfare was usually a matter of early morning hit-and-run raids (Langness 1972b: 142-52). Plans there were in the men's house, and certainly priority set by an undeviating, daring pursuit of the ends, as if a warrior should be ready to involve himself in an attack 'with all his soul' (OT: Rasinakafa 1980; cf. van Baal 1966: 720). But there were no war-drums nor slit-gongs, as beaten by the Tolai and Ilahita Arapesh, for instance (Sack 1974a: 90; Tuzin 1976: 47-48); no intimations of war by calling messages down the valley, nor casting of spells on battle weapons, as with the Wahgi (Eilers 1967; Kerpi 1975: 17); and neither, for that matter, were preparatory omens taken, such as through cracking fingers for auspices, as with the eastern Motu (OTs: Meba, Kopi 1977), or testing for possible traitorous intentions by any warrior collaborator, as among the Mae Enga (Brennan 1977:48-49). In several other respects Bena preparations were comparatively simple. Their abstention from sexual intercourse before battle was characteristically Melanesian; there was no confidential soul-searching with close relatives (no expression of the warrior's 'wishes and desires and hopes; of his unrepaid debts and unfulfilled obligations' before war) about which we hear from far away Malekula, for instance (Deacon 1934:220-21), because all signs of unsureness were to be quelled. Artwork devoted to weapons was basic and not 'magical' in its own right, while it was not presupposed that particularly powerful warriors were privileged with the protection of special ancestors, as believed, for example, by the Toa[m]baita (Idulusia 1979: 30). Fundamental to the Bena, however, as to all Melanesian societies, were traditional repertoires for (religio-)'psychological preparation' of actual entry into the field of combat or into exposure, the preparation to get back at the foe (cf. Wallace 1968: 172-78). We come, sixthly, to the outward forms of inter-group fighting. Here one will be asking questions about the kind of particular scenario that is more common in a given culture. Bena warfare, for a start, was comparatively

REVENGE

47

brutal and unceremonious, since unpredictable ambushes were 'favoured' over field fighting; in any case, the object in either raiding or battle was a decisive routing, by which hostilities would hopefully subside for a comfortable period (Langness 1972b: 142-54, cf. Fortune 1947a: 109). Farther west through the highlands, by contrast, one hears more of 'ceremonial warfare on cleared battle-grounds' with leaders haranguing from both sides, and sometimes with 'renowned fighters' jousting in plumed groups (in clement weather!) until one was 'caught off balance' to fall victim, after which the rest of his clan would seek safe ground until the next round on the morrow or a few days later (e.g., Salisbury 1962: 25; Gardner and Heider 1968; Ploeg 1969: 161-65; Meggitt 1977: 16-21). On the other hand, there is the overall momentum of conflict to contend with. Certain Bena tribes dominating lower-lying sweeping grasslands, interestingly, who were not cramped into the upper Bena River valley, found themselves able to acquire large tracts of territory (over 20 km2 each). The relative absence of restraint in war clearly contributed to this; victors had no compunction about driving losers into refuge elsewhere, burning their hamlets, killing those too slow to escape, and taking over gardens (Langness 1966: 146). In all probability the most successful of these 'miniimperialists' managed to push back the Asaro groups into the landlocked valley they presently occupy west of Goroka. If other Melanesian groups achieved less territorially, much the same ferocious intent prevailed among them, as the more recently contacted highlands amply indicate (Nilles 1950: 40; Read 1955:253; Ryan 1959:268; yet cf. Berndt 1962:233). A characteristic across the board, in any case, was the 'chain-effect' of payback killings, which, while either peace negotiations or a severe loss might temporarily interrupt the procession of avengements, viciously cycled on without foreseeable end. An early German commentator on the Tolai was even of the impression that new spurts of vendetta activity could be so easily set in motion, because one (apparently unemotional, calculated) way of stating a complaint (if a man's wife had been stolen, for example) was to go out into the jungle and spear the first outsider encountered: 'The victim's relative pass on the [new] misdeed and general murder and terror spreads until revenge for the first misdoing [the theft] has reached the person responsible' (Hahl 1897:75). Even accounting for exaggeration, this suggestion of criss-crossing lines of ill-blood helps us to confirm the general picture in traditional Melanesia of a conditioned, readily triggered antagonism towards 'the other', of the easy dispensability of the enemy, and a conditioned indifference by warriors towards the act of killing as such (which Heider found so remarkable among the Dani ([1979: 107-08, cf. 81-82]). The recurrence of war, therefore, naturally solicited a strong sense of 'duty' in the male. It was something one had to engage in because it had

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Tigak warriors on a payback raid, photographed standing over their victim, Neu Mecklenburg (New Ireland), in about 1889. (photo: from Meyer and Parkinson, plate 24)

REVENGE

49

Roviana war canoes, photographed at New Georgia in the 1930s. Canoes such as these took part in the famed headhunting expeditions to the west, as far as Bougainville, (photo: UCA Munda) long been 'the fashion of the fathers' who were in any case thought to maintain their presence among the living, thus 'colonizing' the sense of obligation. And women were drawn into this turmoil as much out of the likelihood of falling victim themselves to outside spears as to strong male psychological pressure to prove their loyalty (cf. Lea and Lewis 1976: 73). Revenge was not personal, and, being corporate, was morally binding. For, being both these, vengeance is a crucial ingredient in 'tradition'. Nothing is more obvious about Melanesian statelessness than that small bundles of humanity keep bumping into each other, seal their conflict of interests by the shedding of blood, and sink into 'customary' patterns of

50

PAYBACK: TRADITION'

enmity and alliance as expressions of their 'total concerns' or identity (cf. also plates 1-2). James Kai is probably the first Melanesian to have constructed a theoretical model of mini-war syndromes, with his study of the turbulent zone around Kup, at the meeting of the Chimbu and Wahgi highland culture areas. Presented in a simple diagram, and assuming a slow westward-moving tendency for most groups over the last 150 years, his conclusions are shown in the diagram opposite. This paradigm may not fit situations in other areas, particularly if the terrain is more rugged or settlements more dispersed, but it is a useful tool for testing them; and Kai's explanations are uncluttered, since he takes the rate of homicidal payback over any other factor to be the chief determinant in group relations. Most telling is his assessment (made while in the unusual position of district historian to the Chimbu Provincial Government) that these movements are recognized in oral traditions as an 'order of life' or an aspect of 'cosmos' in which men must play their stalwart part over the generations (1979; OT: 1980; and cf. Silata 1985, 1986). To conclude these comments about the external forms of inter-group clashes, we would do well to note how conceptions of space in each circumscribed 'world' can contribute to the settling-down of patterns of warfare. War between those speaking the same language, to exemplify, may be relatively lessened if a (nonetheless divided) society is small, or can sometimes think of itself as 'one' against outsiders—as with the Chambri vis-a-vis the Iatmul, Sawos, for example, since a Chambri warrior's success in headhunting against any of these 'strangers' from surrounding territories can bring him renown throughout all Chambri communities, even from those currently hostile to his own village (Gewertz 1977: 172-73, 178-81). Remember, also, that people could not pass through every part of their own traditional 'territory' without circumspection, because of dangerous spiritual forces in eerie swampland, dense undergrowth, or even sorcerers' traps at tribal boundaries. If one wonders why war parties rarely took certain circuitous routes, which would have made their raids all the more surprising, the reason often lay with fear of unknown forces in the 'chaos' of the bush. Each Fuyughe tribe (in the Papuan highlands), for instance, believed its domain was supervised by a protector-spirit (sila), with its lairs near the mountain-tops. Consensus in all the groups had it that to travel into another tribal area via the wild, scraggy mountain-heights constituted an act of trespass, and was likely to result in a sila's fatal attack (Trompf 1981b: 14). In this sense, cosmic conceptualization made its contribution to the typically balanced, see-saw quality of most Melanesian conflict. Seventh, there are variables concerning the immediate outcome of violent conflict. The prime object of each episode of Melanesian warfare was usually to take at least one life, but there are specific questions to be asked

51

REVENGE

A. SETTING

<

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Wahgi / Chimbu /

2 (KOMUNKA)

: 1 (KUMAI)

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'' 3 (GUALAKU) \

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/ 4 (ENDUGLA)

(7)

B. BASIC DYNAMICS consequence 1 1+2 as allies vs. 3

1 •—

consequence 4 1+5 as allies vs. 4

FIGHT (arbitrarily considered the opening fight)

(6)

3

consequence 2 3+4 as allies vs. 1

consequence 5 4+7 as allies vs. 5

(7)

Migratory tendencies, rebound pressure, and tribal warfare—the Chimbu-Wahgi case (model by James Kai) Note: comparable pressures apply among tribes to the east and west. Alliances can bring in clans and small warrior groups from tribes further afield, but take the above form in the main.

52

PAYBACK: TRADITION'

about the actions warriors take when they are in the position to kill, and also about what happens if one of their own number has been slain. If the object of Bena aggression is blatantly straightforward, for example, it is interesting that captives were rarely taken or tortured, and that women caught who were related to the attackers were just as likely to be sent packing after the fleers. The Bena sing and dance a taunting song immediately after a day of success (an act of gloating involving both men and women easily paralleled elsewhere—e.g. Heider 1979: 102-03). This gora hanama, as it was called ('singsing in celebration of the shedding of enemy blood'), was also the occasion when supporters and allies of the victors would arrive in battle dress to receive cooked pork for their aid in the previous episode of fighting, a ceremony guaranteed to perpetuate the future onset of war! (OTs: Rasinakafa and Futrepa 1980; cf. Fortune 1947a: 108-09 for fringe Kamano parallels). The Bena were also cannibals, but considered it repugnant to eat an enemy. They would eat, on the other hand, one of their own 'powerful warriors' (hetafobo) who had fallen, for the precise purpose of receiving extraordinary strength from the dead to effect payback. The bodies of weaker or aged men were unsuitable for this, thus making less agile types the favoured targets in field warfare. Once a hetafobo fell, then, kinsmen made every effort to retrieve the body, both out of fear towards the neglected dead and a concern to consolidate clan strength. There are differences here with other traditional Melanesian societies, in which captives were commonly taken (e.g. Mead 1937:223, 233-34; Held 1957:223-26; Schwimmer 1973:214): sometimes for slaves and slave trading, as in northwest Irian Jaya and on the western Solomons (Fischer 1940:15253; Held 1957: 198-201; Tippett 1967: 147-60); sometimes because women allowed themselves to be won this way (Wahgi) (Reay 1959a: 183); sometimes because hostages could facilitate temporary truces and female fertility (Ilahita Arapesh) (Tuzin 1976: 50), or because a captive's kin possession might provide access to the power of neighbouring spirit effigies (Murik Lakes) (Tamoane 1981: 121). For the Choiseulese (on the Solomons), mana for military skill could be acquired by eating cooked enemy flesh before battle (cf. de Tolna 1905:20-21), while in other situations again, vital power was derived from the name of the victim before a life was taken. The Marind-Anim did not name children in their clan without taking a sufficient number of heads, and they transferred victims' names, exacted before killing, to their offspring, yet with one name often serving different children (van Baal 1966: 717, 750). For the Orokaiva slayer, it was a prize to discover such names, each possessing a power (ivo) of its own, which could be 'adopted as a distinction' (Schwimmer 1973: 69, 78). Sharing in the devouring of the slain, too, transferred ivo to the victorious, although cannibalism was not practised within one's own 'grouping' of tribes

REVENGE

53

(e.g. Binandere, Jaua) but only on members of others (OT: Jojoga 1983; Mead 1950: 109 on Mundugumor and other Sepik contrasts). In other variations, captives were dragged home and tortured for the benefit of the recently bereaved (southern Massim, Papua) (Seligmann 1910: 555-56), or the testicles of slain enemies were ceremoniously crushed by slit-gong beaters before the men's cult house (Abelam, Middle Sepik) (Forge 1966: 27), or freshly killed corpses were offered to a war god or other spirits (Fiji) (Rice 1910: 78-79; Hogg 1966: 22-51). Degrees of homicidal revenge were sometimes drawn: the Baktaman, for instance, distinguished plain killing from the throwing of a body into a river to destroy its soul (Barth 1975: 149). Sometimes a division of labour applied between the catching, final despatching, even biting of the victim, as reported of the Purari Delta area (coastal Papua) by Lieutenant-Governor J. H. Murray (1912: 105-06). This was in the better-known headhunting country (running from the western Gulf to the south coast of Irian Jaya), and cultic significance was often placed on man-trapping instruments. The coastal Marind, to illustrate, did not kill until the special pahui war-club was shattered on the back of human prey (and then discarded). A ('symbolic') penis, its 'death-inflicting aspect' being recounted in myth, this club gave further sacral meaning, and thus rationale, to the securing of heads (van Baal 1966: 726, 734-43, 759, and nn. 183-84). By contrast, in cultures not practising either headhunting or anthropophagy, we find anything from leaving the bodies in an unrecognizable mess to the stuffing of Various magical things' into the wounds and orifices of enemy corpses (the latter a Dugum Dani ploy to thwart enemy funeral preparations—Heider 1979: 99). Cannibalism and headhunting present special problems of their own. Looking beyond the Bena habits of eating kinsfellows as just discussed, varying attitudes to cannibalism applied elsewhere: these ranged from flat disdain to a genuine relish of 'long pig' (Boelaars 1981 [Mappi]; Williams 1936: 284 [Keraki]; Martin 1982 [Suki raids on Arube]), or running from great respect towards the body of one's own father (parts of which were distributed and eaten) (Lindenbaum 1979: 20-25 on south Fore) to a fear that to eat enemies would only encourage them to 'retaliate in kind' (Tuzin 1976: 52 on Ilahita Arapesh, cf. also Helmuth 1973: 229-40; Brown and Tuzin 1983). There were certainly places, from as far apart as Malekula Island to highland Jale, where devouring the enemy was a blatant rather than indirect act of vengeance (Deacon 1934:228-29; Layard 1942:619; Koch 1970); yet, in other cultures (the Marind-Anim for a start), only specialists needed human flesh, and putrefying corpses at that ('as an ingredient for their magic') (van Baal 1966: 746). As for headhunting, some scholars argue that it should be distinguished from warfare (and thus, by implication, from blood revenge syndromes), because certain cultures mounted expeditions for heads against far-off groups from whom they did not expect comparable

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retaliation. The Asmat and Marind seem best to fit this exception, because warfare between villages within these societies was only sporadic and easily defused, while they usually cooperated in headhunting treks (Zegwaard 1959: 1020-42; van Baal 1966: 695-705). Inland Marind groups, however, clearly combined warfare with headhunting against much more proximate enemies, so bearing out the typical conditions we have characterized before; in any case, it is difficult to pretend that headhunting expeditions over long distances were in no sense quests for revenge, since some raiders usually lost their lives en route or at their (plainly imperilling) destination (cf. van Amerlsvoort 1964: 49; van Baal 1966: 702, 706-08). Taking heads, I will be quick to add, was almost always bound up with distinctively religious practice, though in no uniform way. For some cultures, the act of killing is intimately, if not causally, connected with procreation (certainly for the Iatmul and Marind) (Hauser-Schaublin 1977: 258; van Baal 1966: 87, 222, 238, 752-64); for others, as in the western Gulf, a prime achievement of the warrior was to insert an enemy skull in the racks above the gope boards representing their ancestors, these boards being flat, elliptical discs, carved and painted for the male cult houses (cf. Hurley 1924:225 on western Elema; Newton 1961: 14-17 on Kerewe and Kikori). It is time to draw threads together. Whatever the differences in externals and conceptual details, comparable patterns of attitude and thought throughout Melanesia make blood vengeance central in cultivating a logical basis for collective action. Even though actions such as theft and the defiling of women join homicide as common pretexts for violent reprisal, it is the history of bloodletting that best explains why the extremes of war so often prevail over pressures for compensation. Again, no one need deny that most cannibalistic societies relished human flesh, even placing it, as one Motuan myth indicates, before pig and cassowary as the meat 'worth dancing and singing about' (Chalmers 1895: 129). Yet to conclude glibly that human quarry was taken as pleasant hunting or for 'good food' (BNGAR 1899-1900: 34-35; Hogg 1966: 33, cf. Bulmer 1968; Shaw 1990: 133), is to miss primary for secondary causes, or fundamental reasons for additional incentives. Death (not just blood) was their argument; and, considering sorcery, we must remember death could occur off as well as on the battlefield. Any ecological notions, moreover, that population levels be controlled by feuding, are foreign to traditional consciousness, and it is only lately that certain peoples have been able to comprehend their own acts as part of an ecosystem. Among the Kamano (eastern highlands), for instance, clansmen have been used to burying their dead in shallow graves close to watercourses, so that sicknesses have arisen among other tribespeople drinking from streams lower down; sorcery was then alleged, with a physical payback killing (and a new burial!) the worst outcome of all. In the last few years the young and educated have been trying to depict

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all this as a vicious cycle and to convince the Kamano that they are victims of their own insanitary habits (OT: Wabadela 1977, cf. Keil and Johannes 1971). Before that, however, they were all interpreters of a different world; though it is now pragmatically useful to conceive the whole process, neither putrefying corpses nor bad water can be said to be the causes of war. Not that it is our intention to deny the realities of established systems (preferably called cultural rather than ecological) that reinforce consensus reasons for violence. It is quite possible, indeed, for any such identifiable system to take on an explanatory role in its own right, for the people concerned and the scientific observer. In a recent, brilliant effort to reconstruct traditional belief and practice on eastern Viti Levu (Fiji), for example, Marshall Sahlins (1983) spelt out the intricate connections between the acquisition of cannibal victims and an hierarchical complex, which kept the ruling chief in power. Put simply, the chief himself was like a cannibal victim, who had to die ritually at his installation and who was ultimately a stranger to the group for whom he was mediator. He took wives from the people of the land' but the resulting female offspring were sent as 'raw women' to the 'fishers' (of turtles), the tribe of 'assassins' who were responsible for procuring 'cooked men' for his feasts. All victims brought in, moreover, were first offered to him as one who, after his special 'death' had been reborn as a local god. According to Sahlins, it is this network, together with its mythological underpinnings, that accounts for so much bloodshed, and he considers the investigation of motivations comparatively unprofitable. Quite apart from whether Fiji constitutes a special case, however, and whether Sahlins has made the system he reconstructed too tidy to satisfy local variations (Kerans [forthcoming], cf. Webb 1890: 625), or has been somewhat disrespectful towards nineteenth-century views about Fijian cannibalism as 'the very climax of revenge' (e.g. Pritchard 1866: 371), the whole process provides the cosmos in which the Fijian participants could give meaning to their own actions—and polity (Thomas 1991: 69-75). It is not the complete filling out of an individual's motives that governs this study, in any case, but the fact that he or she can draw on a stock of consensus assumptions, beliefs, and values. The structures and the human thinking within them do not have to exclude one another; for, in fact, they are mutually supportive. To reparaphrase Hegel, 'the real' system or Weltanschauung 'is [for the Melanesians] the rational [motivation]' and vice versa; thus, the rationally based requirement of revenge can also appear as the centre or generator of a complete social order. Prestige is the middle term that explains it all more simply, because if a man cannot 'get a name' without taking life or if the most visible highpoint of group intensity, excitement, vitality, and corporate strength consists in going out to battle with paint, feathers, empowered weapons, and the sources of invincibility, the system itself provides enough reasons of its own (cf. Broekhuyse 1967).

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Even if its partisans may admit that they really hate war after all (which is, paradoxically, true of the Bena), the system is 'tradition', 'culture' and 'religion' in the widest sense. If we are going to comprehend such broad concepts, however, we have much left to discover about cultural component parts (cf. Knauf11990:292). In seeking to learn more about the links between avengement and religion, for a start, special stock will have to be taken of 'supernatural aggression' as Forge describes it (1970: 257). Even our opening case of the Bena runners, significantly, did not turn out to be an example of direct retaliation; it was as much a means of contacting the spirit world and of divining sorcery as an anticipation of violence. Thus, before even passing on to consider other violent retributive acts (such as independent homicides, capital punishments), our analysis now surely requires attention to the place of spirit agencies and sorcery in the exercises of inter-group conflict. Spiritual revenge As has already become patent, armed conflict in traditional Melanesia mentalites never lacked its psycho-spiritual dimensions. Revenge can hardly be reduced either to physical acts or to emotive, physiologically analysable states that precede them. For it is above all a culturally (and domestically) conditioned mental attitude, with its most serious exactions demanding great bursts of psychic energy, plotting will-power and the putative harnessing of spiritual assistance (in the form of gods, ancestors, magicians, and sorcerers). Since negative payback cannot be confined to the deeds of war, however, nor for that matter to inter-tribal conflict in general, a study of 'spirit sponsors' of revenge and sorcery will inevitably take us further on than tribal warfare, to questions of individual recourse to satisfaction, legal sanctions, and so forth. Deities and spirits as sponsors of revenge War and the organization of collective violent reaction were enacted in the presence of unseen spirit powers. In the quite exceptional Fijian case, the ruling chiefs were themselves gods and other chiefs at least the 'representatives' of such (Hocart 1927: 74-76; Swain and Trompf 1994); most typical of traditional Melanesia, however, is the preconceived distinction between the living and other supra-human agencies. Not that these other forces were usually thought to be transcendent, for they often shared characteristics with human beings (or else other creatures); but they were deemed decidedly more powerful, much freer in their movements and greater in capacity to bring welfare or disaster. How these agencies have been classified and conceptualized, of course, has differed from culture to culture, but typical

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was the belief that they affected the results of fighting or inter-group relations, and joint activities and ritual life were always organized with some view to keep the spirits 'on side' or from doing mischief. Which among a given cluster of spirit agencies were crucial in connection with feuding behaviour, though, varied greatly. Such an unusually transcendent sustainer of the cosmos as the Mae Enga Aitawe, for example, was expected to be 'omnisciently acquiescent' towards, but not actively involved in, the turmoil of inter-clan conflict (Brennan 1977: 161; cf. Freund et al. 1970: 141-66). About a comparable 'high God' however, Yabwahine (a deity with variant names throughout southern Massim cultures), we gain different impressions. On Panniet Island, among others, he is both the originator of the land and its many benefits and the very power appealed to for support in battle (Namunu 1987: 111, cf. Fortune 1932: 111 [Dobu]; Roheim 1945-46: 210-20, 319-25 [Bunama]; Lasaro 1975: 172 [Bonarua]). If such spirit-beings were relatively more spiritualized, however (though still capable of being drawn into the vortex of violence), others were decidedly more concrete. One role of a 'priest' (gapar) in the Murik Lakes, to illustrate, was the periodic 're-creation' of the war god (Kakar) by lining up the ceremonial war-clubs during battle preparations; the god would have no supportive effect without human attention to these physical details (Tamoane 1981: 105-07, cf. Somare 1975: 15-16). Some spirit-powers operated at human behest, while others, high or low, were strangely aloof or unpredictable vis-a-vis human strife (cf., for variations, Aerts 1981; 1983; Mantovani 1984; Trompf 1991: 12-16, cf. Janssen 1975; Prendeville 1979). The ancestors, of course, and not the gods, have been most commonly associated by scholars with inter-group conflict. Postwar anthropology in the highlands has rightly stressed the obligation felt to avenge the deaths of recently departed warriors, whose ghosts were believed highly dangerous if attempts at reprisal were not made (e.g. Meggitt 1965: 111-13); but the general importance of the ancestors as a sustaining power in unstable situations is just as common a feature. When patrol officers Jack Hides and Jim O'Malley entered the territory of the Etoro on the Great Papuan Plateau early in 1935, for example, the people's manner of forestalling the threat was through a nocturnal seance with the dead. As is characteristic of the Etoro, Onabasulu and Bosavi cultures, a medium 'makes contact' in a great longhouse, and in this case the 'glorious bursts of song' throughout the night marked a spiritual preparation for the dangerous encounter on the morrow. Early in the morning up to fifty warriors approached the patrol officers' camp, fortifying themselves again by 'a loud outburst of song' constantly 'singing and prancing' and responding to the swaying medium (or shaman?) with his drum, who sat perched on another man's shoulders (Hides 1936: 49-53). This scenario illustrates only too well the

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typical ancestral legitimation of revenge, because a loss to the living also vexed the dead, the latter's concern for the prestige of the tribe usually persisting unabated. Because of the rampant effects of pacification and missionization, however, one tends to forget that Melanesia once had a very extensive array of war-gods to whom men sacrificed and appealed before facing their foes. Because the emblems and idols of these deities have long since been smashed, burnt, given up to missionaries, or transported to museums overseas, only careful historical investigation enables reconstruction of their former prominence. Occasionally, especially in more recently contacted areas, we gain precious glimpses into the old ways. Among the Wahgi, to cite a fascinating case, some of the southeastern tribes preserve impressive traditions concerning kukoinamb, sacred stones used ritually before battle. These objects were mortars, pestles, and carved round stones, which were not manufactured by the known generations of tribes, and thus bore an uncertain past to 'the relative moderns' who found them. The 'amateur archaeologists' who found such objects, usually lodged in the root of great trees, had no reason to connect them with the great horticultural experiments in the area as far back as the seventh millennium BC (cf. Golson 1972,1981). The common belief, rather, was that unknown spiritbeings greater than both the stones themselves and their finders placed them there, and these unknown forces attracted a person towards them to make the discovery, subsequently gracing him with a significant dream and a clear increase in the size of his family and pigs. 'The power behind the stone', an informant assured me (OT: Kumai 1976), was the closest pre-contact equivalent to 'God', and such a stone was placed below the central pole of a separate, non-extant roundhouse (obodughgar, lit. 'the war eye [is] hot'), each sub-clan normally possessing these things. The special house was ringed by a palisade, a 'war magician' (obokunjeyi) being the only person permitted to enter the lay-out. Among the Kumai tribe, one kukoinamb was a sizeable, broad-lipped, high-based mortar on which strips of cooked pork were lined as an offering, especially at times when lives were lost in battle, the meat then being redistributed among the warriors to endow them with supernatural strength. Significantly, a war party felt the special need to have recourse to this god especially when the pressure to secure military redress was greatest (cf. Didi 1979: 23 for Tambul parallels). Donald Tuzin, in his brilliant account of Ilahita Arapesh religion, provides a vivid account of another people's reliance on a war-god for their pursuits of revenge, especially before pacification in 1945. Killings in raids and battles, including laf (a secretive ritual act of homicide against the enemy by a single intruder), 'were credited to the cult spirits' (pidgin: tambaran). Each patrician claimed connection with at least one of these spirits, yet all of them together (somewhat analogously to the Murik Lakes

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case of Kakar) made up the god Nggwal. The generic term Nggwal ('cult spirit') was thereby drawn up into a collective aspect, and in this way emphasis was laid on the achievements of the whole village, not the exploits of individuals (1976: 51-52; cf. 47; 1980: 50-53). Tuzin describes Nggwal arrestingly as 'a transcendent, theistic and remote ideal by which morality is reckoned and human conduct judged; a Cyclopean incarnation with a monstrous appetite, who acts as the tutelary spirit in all village endeavours' (1976: 216; cf. 51, 215). Although there are cults with tambaran spirits of different names, Nggwal encompasses them all, being particularly important in the supporting and securing of group retaliation. Unlike the neighbouring Abelam, perhaps, the Ilahita took no battle trophies, but tallies of the enemy dead (kept by knotted ropes) were 'part of the village cult paraphernalia' ostentatiously draped over 'the facade of the spirit house during ceremonies' (1976: 51). War was considered a terribly precarious business. There were fears about enemy traps in the dark before dawn. There was the worry about not returning from the raid. Yet in those moments of extreme tension, Nggwal and other gods did not lack the quality of succour. Omens were taken by a war leader-diviner before a course of joint action (they were auspicious when chewed pitpit, spat out in the direction of the enemy village, did not blow back in his face), and the onslaughts on human foe were treated as sacrificial appeasements and avengements that Nggwal required, for the ongoing military prowess of the village and the unity of its wards (1976: 48; cf. 56-61, 83, 88-89, 1974: 321-24). The visual impact of sculptured or painted gods is not to be neglected here. With so many traditional idols banished away to the world's Kunstmuseen, anthropologists who have not been in first-contact situations will find it hard to recapture the atmosphere in which iconic representation was part of the deities' awe-inspiring effects on their supplicants or enemies. The traditional spirit-world will appear to have been dominated by the ancestors (who survived missionization) when more truly formidable forces were often alleged to be present. Notorious among the Tauade, to cite one characteristic phenomenon, was a fearsome effigy locked away in an inaccessible gorge to the east of present-day Kosipe. Little is known of the cult surrounding this prodigy, except that the figure was usually decorated with long, straight hair, was accessible only via a narrow Petra-like ravine, and was fearful to visit because those bearing offerings would reap the wrath of the spirit if they slipped off the set path of stepping stones to its lair. Annari, as this statue was named, guarded an ancestral cave. Each year, at the time when yams were harvested, a chief led a ceremony in which Anuari was re-blackened with charcoal to avert group sickness and was offered food to encourage his support in war (OT: A'ide 1977). But he is no longer to be found.

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Although strictly speaking a protector or place-spirit (lume), Anuari was not unlike other war-gods we learn about elsewhere, such as among the Roviana (New Georgia), whose formidable idols of Musumusu were erected a safe distance from settlements and in the seclusion of the forest, and before whom priests cautiously placed food gifts in tiny shrines (Trompf 1991: plate 3). Unless one experiences the encounter with such a ferociouslooking image in its bush setting, one may forget the terror it would strike in intruders (cf. also Hocart 1931). Admittedly, when these fearsome gods (or vindictive aspects of traditional 'high' gods) faced extradition in the processes of religious change over the last century (cf., e.g., Brower 1980; Bagley 1984), the ghosts and ancestors continued to evoke something of the old intensities, for it is hard to find a culture in which they were not already co-sponsors of vendetta principles. Yet, only careful oral historical investigation will reveal the shifts undergone in each society. Reconstruction of pre-contact traditions, in any case, leaves us with a paramount theme: that spirit-powers were typically conceived to play their parts as participants in inter-group revenge, with retaliation against the enemy being more than an act of human strength alone. The human appropriation and 'localization' of spiritual forces, however, is a distinctive feature of Melanesian traditions, which conducts us immediately to the discussion of so-called 'magic' and sorcery, because those persons engaged in retaliatory activity were not likely to rest content with a 'general trust' in the succour of the gods and the dead, especially when they thought power could be concentrated on to their very arrow-tips, or bundles of potency borne close to potential victims under their armpits or in false tokens of food. Outer-directed sorcery Sorcery, it has become obvious, constitutes an important set of Melanesian payback techniques, and is fairly barking for attention. As the Bena case already suggests, sorcery can be inextricably bound up with the actions of war and can serve as an explanation of serious adversity. We find such linkages in a still more complex form when war-magic and sorcery proper are distinguished. The distinction cannot always be made very easily, but a preliminary dichotomy between two kinds of 'spiritual revenge' can be drawn, one directed against traditional enemy groups (at some distance) and the other against those in one's own community—this rough differentiation now having become part and parcel of the contemporary Melanesian outlook on life. There are traps for young players here, however, because the term sorcery can sometimes seem appropriate to the actions of war-magicians and ofttimes be suitable to describe powerful vindictive rites of specialists who act on behalf of their people in external

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conflicts, rather than harm-dealing or creating fear of some 'enemy within' their own community (cf. Winter 1963; Black 1976: 57). Consider the varieties: in most cases the balance of tribal recrimination was directed against 'out-groups', the powers of war-magicians and sorcerers (whether distinguished or as one) both availing in this cause, but with occasional instances of internal sorcery being known. In other cases it was not so. On Tanga Island by the 1930s, for example, 'sorcery' was still 'for the most part an importation from the mainland of New Ireland', but death-dealing 'magic' against enemies 'in war' was 'almost indispensable' (Bell 1934: 305, cf. 1935: 84-86), whereas for a small cluster of societies sorcery was mainly associated with those close at hand, even one's very own brothers, as among the Kwoma, Sepik (cf. Bowden 1987: 186-95). One needs to tread warily, then, and our discussion requires not only pertinent case studies but careful (and diachronic) plotting of the subject's dimensions. Wahgi traditions usefully illustrate the issues, since these people speak both of so-called 'sorcery' and what anthropologists loosely (and all too sedulously) dub 'war-magic'. The tasks of a 'war-magician' (obokunjeyi) are intriguing. If an open engagement is pending between two or more tribes, for instance, the obokunjeyi plants a special piece of wood (called ond kisan) to mark a line across the middle of the battlefield, and during the onslaught he surreptitiously whistles if a warrior from either side crosses this line (it sounds like the makings of a football game!). Unless this temporarily unobservant warrior knows procedures for 'counter-magic' he will surely die, for the other tribe's (war) sorcery will make him immediately vulnerable or eventually 'find' him. In the past every clan had an obokunjeyi accompanying its men to the field; he carried some magical red wood (ond kunambang), bought afar in the Jimi Valley or from the Chimbu, and by guarding the wood in a small bilum (or string-bag) under his armpit, as well as uttering spells, he allegedly gave his band the power to kill or be accurate. Such a man lived close to a house reserved for weapons and ond kunambang] it was tabu for him to eat with others and his meals were left by his wife some distance away (OTs: Mond 1973; Kuiwan, Tongil, 1975; etc.). Among his other prerogatives was the spiritual defence of tribal boundary posts (ontr embegem), and he was to man these posts protectively whenever he learnt visitors were entering his tribe's territory (Reay 1987; cf. 1959a: 135).11 For the Wahgi, however, this war-magic is distinct from sorcery (kum), and the latter is connected with open physical fighting only under special circumstances. If there have been a number of deaths by sickness, efforts 11

On old men unable to fight yet still performing war-magic in Wanggalum, see Ploeg 1969: 169 (Bokondini, fringe Dani), and for special studies of war-magic in other cultures, e.g. Landtman (1916: 322-33).

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are made to identify the sorcerer or kumyi (who may come close to the hamlet and 'dance around in the night'), and to locate the kum material he deposits. A kumyi's objects, if found, should be wrapped up by the leader of the men's house in tangent leaves or hair until a day of war. When an engagement is pending, the bundle is placed near a mumu cooking-pit with each spear temporarily left poked into it. Warriors then cry in unison that one of the sorcerer's relatives is to be killed in the clash before they devour the pig cooked for the occasion, withdraw their spears, utter the war cry, and bound off. In the field an enemy is marked as the associate of this sorcery, a most dangerous man because kum on the fight-ground is said to weaken even the strongest man without his realizing it, rendering him a slow, easy target (OT: B. Kai 1976). On the field of battle, it appears, this kum is an agency of revenge against the 'out-group' quite comparable to obokunje (war-magic), but already one should have noticed that kum is primarily identified as a surreptitious intrusion, secreted at times other than those of battle, and especially productive of sickness. And note again: it is conceived to be worked between enemy groups. With the Bena(bena) we have already found 'strong beliefs about sorcery' and they 'view it as emanating only from enemies' so that it is always operating between, not within, tribes (Langness 1972a: 376; cf. also Hayano 1972; du Toit 1975:13-15; on the eastern highlands Tauna Awa and Gadsup, respectively). Under these circumstances sorcery was neither a source of internal divisiveness nor a factor that would spur one to think about the state of one's relationship with close associates. The general orientation is the same among the Wahgi, yet with the added belief that one disturbing means by which kum can enter the tribe (to produce sicknesses unto death in times of rest from war) was along marriage lines. Males took their wives exogamously from other (at least, potentially) enemy tribes; it was thus the relatives of females closely associated with the dead person who were first suspected. In the nearest Wahgi equivalent to the Bena payback run, for instance, widows were sent back to their kinsfolk after their husband's death, and if they returned with a treated or 'poisoned' object (kimak), it was taken to signal the source of the sorcery: bearing a kimak was taken as a woman's declaration of solidarity with her husband's people. But, upon returning with one or not, it was then up to her to decide if she would return to her place of origin, and both discussion and circumstances would dictate how the dead man's kinsmen should respond. In single instances it could be left to the spirit of the dead to take vengeance; a death in the context of military instability, however, or a number of them traceable to the same occasioners, necessitated the reopening of hostilities. Among the Wahgi, moreover, kum could also be associated with what we may distinguish as witchcraft. Kum, it is generally claimed, entered their great valley a long time after the employment of war-magic, and this is

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particularly true of sorcery effected through kumkoimp (pidgin: tanguma; English: bewitching creatures), a type commonly thought by highlanders to derive from coastal peoples. Females allegedly house these tanguma (usually some kind of lizard) in their anus or vagina. It entices its bearer to disinter and then eat corpses of the departed, thus both infuriating the dead and unleashing evil power. If not actually caught doing harm, or with the malevolent passenger protruding, women with tanguma are usually identified at night, for their bottoms are said to glow. A husband noticing such a condition in his wife could send her packing, or even have her killed, while in more recent times families remaining faithful to accused women have been exiled unprotected to low-lying land (OTs: Kanangl 1972; Walep and Kaipel, 1976; cf. Reay 1976; and for comparisons elsewhere, see Kelly 1976; Strathern 1982a). The hum produced by tanguma, then, is like a special disease within the camp, and is not wielded against enemies except in the sense that women marrying in from other tribes may bring it with them. That hardly precludes the nagging suspicion or nightmare (cf. Reay 1962: 460-61) that hum derives from 'out-group' sources, that wives who seemed to retain too much loyalty to their home clans were more likely to be witches or used as the secret agents to plant sorcery bundles. (Within this context, incidentally, deaths of women that were not physically at the hands of an enemy, but through sickness or old age, did not always constitute an occasion for requital unless their loyalty and worthwhileness was absolutely assured.) One must always be ready to discriminate, then, not only between the exertion of spiritual power in the actual physical outbursts of war and the use of harmful power more generally (that is, between so-called war-magic and sorcery) but one also ought to weigh up whether the sorcery is conceived to operate more between or more within groups. The actuality or genuine efficacy of such expressions of 'spiritual revenge', moreover, is rather less important for such an assessment than the claimed or alleged wielding of it. This also applies to a diachronic appraisement, because an increase or decrease of the fear of sorcery over time is more important analytically than gauging the relative amount of recourse to certain techniques, especially since it is often hard to establish the physical causeand-effect of sorcery techniques (cf. Trompf 1991:92-95). What is significant in the case of most Wahgi groups, for instance, is that traditional emphasis concerning the source of sorcery was much more upon 'other tribes' whereas in modern times, with considerably lessened tensions and freer mixing between tribes under white rule, the new anxieties dictate that the source is just as likely to be located within one's very own hamlet, and especially with disliked women. This information from the Wahgi area is very useful for introductory purposes. It has largely resulted from my concern to reconstruct pre-contact

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patterns of survivalist mentalites, and the richest parts of it have been culled from warriors living in a zone where tribal fighting is still recurrent. In my field researches, however, I became increasingly aware that most tribal tracts of this whole culture area had been subjected to a radically new order of existence since the late 1940s. Now, once open conflict has been seriously inhibited by colonial officials or missionaries, any primal society will experience pressures and chains of events that can seriously modify their nature and propel them in different directions. These changes are of fascination for the ethno-historian, but they have often been underestimated by social scientists, who have almost always entered the field in a postpacification situation, and who could unwittingly convince themselves that they have been dealing with the 'genuinely traditional' as against specific post-contact phases in the continuing history of tradition (Tippett 1973; Lacey 1975; Trompf 1981a; Waiko 1983). As shall be shown in the following pages, the processes of pacification brought a shift in the focus of payback energies away from the much greater outer-directedness of the past to a mixture of outer and intra-community directedness, an altering of perspectives and ritual emphases no better illustrated than in the history of Melanesian sorcery. One litmus test for discriminating between perceptive and somewhat facile anthropology, in fact, is to discover whether any given ethnographer calculates this possible/palpable drift in cultures, and documents its accelerations from the time the colonial proscription against warfare has been accepted (Trompf 1991: 92-93). It is methodologically wise to presume that such 'post-pacification drift' will vary from group to group and that it may even pass through identifiable phases. As one might expect, simply because the new 'peace' facilitated human mobility between the territories of previously warring groups, one of its likely early effects (at least temporarily) was to make it easier for raids against identified sorcerers to take place, especially in less regularly policed areas. Among the Bosavi or Kaluli (southern highlands, Papua), for instance, tribal warfare (gis) was successfully suppressed by the Australian administration in the 1950s; control was ineffectual enough, nevertheless, to permit retaliation by noisy raids on suspected sorcerers, an albeit time-honoured procedure itself, yet one that now came to the fore as the only remaining 'public' recourse to open physical revenge between tribes. As newly accentuated, these raids between longhouse communities stemmed from the belief that 'every death is caused by a witch (sei)' or sorcerer (Schieffelin 1977: 78, cf. 58-59,101-02,108-09), yet the explanation of death in such a simple, sweeping form is actually a common post-contact development in many areas of Papua and one consequent upon the fact that indiscriminate payback killings or tribal wars have been debarred (cf. Trompf 1981b: 171 and [forthcoming] a).

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Before pacification a much higher proportion of Bosavi males died in open combat with enemies, more often than with groups (some nonBosavi) a good distance away (Schieffelin 1977: 12-13, 1978: 7; Gordon 1981a: 5). But with the new arrangements the typical form of the death seemed to be sickness, and much more enmity came to be focused on nearby hamlets, the image of sorcery as a 'long distance traveller' being radically altered. In immediate pre-contact times, further, it was far harder for the Bosavi to identify a sorcerer, or test any means of identification to the full; with relations farther afield very tense, neighbouring groups could not afford constant instability among themselves, and thus 'sorcery raids' (sei sandam) were much rarer. Once an easier relationship between communities was possible, however, information about likely sorcerers filtered through the area, and even those leaders whose hamlet was at the receiving end of a sei sandam were as concerned as the members of the 'raiding' party to see whether the suspect did indeed have a sei's heart when extracted. Both sides had to consent to his death, and to decide from the colour of the heart whether there was a good reason for further hostilities or for acts of compensation (cf. Knauft 1985: 104-08 for comparable Gebusi data, and see below). If the Bosavi situation is any indication, there have been phases, even certain common patterns, in the winding down of Melanesian tribal warfare, probably best plotted from those many places where warfare ceased yet where virtually all deaths came to be ascribed to sorcery. Without drawing hard and fast rules, a working paradigm of change includes: first, raids to kill sorcerers with a certain discrimination (as with the Bosavi above); second, subsequently individual acts of homicide against sorcerers; and, more latterly, group identifications of sorcerers followed by generally accepted demands of compensation or imprisonment (e.g., Tamoane 1981: 124; Trompf [forthcoming] a)—all these reflecting tightening colonial control (Kaspriis 1973: 120). This model is offered in the full knowledge that other shifts in belief and practice can result from the heightened importance of sorcery (cf. chapter 7). It is also tendered with the recognition that much more oral historical work is required on these matters, and a diachronic perspective needs teasing out from odd clues dropped into rather ahistorical ethnographic studies. Sometimes traditional sorcery is presented as if its practitioners were hated and distrusted equally wherever they were found, and as if it were traditionally the case that anyone had recourse to it as a vendetta technique against individuals they seriously begrudged (e.g. Nevermann 1972: 131; Burridge 1965: 235-36; Hesse and Aerts 1982: 18-19). At other times we can be lucky to find useful asides in anthropological work about significant changes or situations that no longer pertain. Scholars are beginning to be aware of the issues, a turning point coming

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with the symposium on 'Sorcery and Social Change in Melanesia' (Zelenietz and Lindenbaum 1981; cf. also Stephen 1987). Methodologically, it is sensible to test first the axiom, succinctly put by Mary Patterson (1974: 149), that the 'common (Melanesian) institution' called sorcery is 'frequently . . . an expression of pre-existing hostile relations' between groups, and thus to be seen as a concomitant to 'feud and warfare'. The 'group' should be first conceived as the 'revenge group' or 'security circle' within the context of recurrent armed combats, to reconstruct the pre-contact world. In this world it is still quite permissible to speak of feud along with warfare, since clusters of tribes within the one 'society' (or culturo-linguistic complex) usually fought one another. It was also possible for fission within tribes (that is, between clans or sub-clans, lineages) to generate fighting and thus the severing of previously consolidated unities—a problem for bigger groups, such as the Bokondini 'parishes' documented by Ploeg (1969: 116, 162) from highland Irian Jaya. And in various societies some sorcery was directed (or thought to be directed) between the units within a given larger 'group' (or tribe), such sorcery not being connected to ongoing armed hostilities, and not necessarily resulting in deaths either, unless reasons for a drastic separation into two revenge or jural groups had developed (cf., e.g., Fortune 1932: 35; Hogbin 1970a: 143; Strathern 1976:4).12 One can safely assert it to be typical of pre-contact situations across the board, however, that workers of sorcery within and against their own security circles, who had no sanctions either from their own people or its leaders, were decidedly punished or 'executed' as Barth puts it of the Baktaman (1975: 4); while sorcery against the circles' enemies was supported as justifiable revenge in the blood feud (cf., e.g., Hogbin 1964: 55-61; Strathern 1976: 4; Gewertz 1977:172; Brumbaugh 1979: 143; R. Keesing 1982a: 52; Durkia 1983: 4-6), although with rules usually applying to avoid sorcery attacks on affines and in-laws (e.g. Lawrence 1952: 343; Hayano 1973: 184). Some societies, it cannot be denied, differ markedly in structure to others; and thus, some stand as significant exceptions to our rule-of-thumb. Special cognizance, for example, should be taken of cultures in which broader or higher unities have developed, the primary group thus being unusually large. I think first of the renowned Dobu in this connection. With them what we would normally select to be the 'security circle' is the Susu ('mothers' milk'), or 'the firm undissolving group of the mother's line', or at least the various Susus in one's small village, expressed in clusters of family 12

Sorcery was not only directed against humans. It could be said to affect pigs (e.g. Williams 1940: 296 on the Elema, Papuan Gulf), although such sorcery, when attributed to outside enemies, was often considered preliminary to an attack on the pig-owner's family (e.g. for the Huli, OT: Iobi 1983). Sorcery could also be understood to bring bad weather, to spoil another group's festivities, for instance (OT: Durkia 1983 on the Tolai).

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houses that all surround the common graveyard in the village centre (Fortune 1932:1-2; Benedict 1935:95). On the other hand, there is a 'district', sometimes including up to twenty villages, which used to constitute the war-group, with no sanction for any warfare between the villages within district boundaries. Marriage was endogamous as far as the war-group is concerned, but arranged between villages rather than within any one of them. With the Dobu, then, large groupings had developed that somehow contained inter-village group violence, there being a very strong distinction between narrower and wider security circles. The result? An unnerving prevalence of sorcery fear and accusations of sorcery within the locality. Suspicions were generated in the midst of intense competition for wealth between members of different villages participating in the Kula trade ring (chapter 2); it was also true that husbands were often under pressure to live in their wives' villages for long periods of time, and if a man's spouse happened to die he was liable to be viewed as the 'outsider' within the Susu fold most likely to be responsible for the tragedy. All this confirms first impressions of a society inwardly racked by sorcery a la tradition, but one must keep open a cautious ethno-historical eye. Reo Fortune maintained that the sorcery of the war-group's enemies in another district caused no worry, since sorcery (here including witchcraft) was 'believed to be innocuous at a distance' (1932: 36, cf. 30-31). It prevailed within the locality and, even if making for dreadful insecurity, acted like a law in its apparent provision of checks and balances (157, cf. 197-200). Yet, however early Fortune came to the field, it was still thirty-seven years after the arrival of the first missionary, and it is significant that he made only a brief record of a pre-contact means of appeasing deaths through sickness, the surviving spouse's kin and supporters bringing back a human victim from another district or island, and thus projecting their guilt on to complete outsiders in the context of inter-district wars (36, cf. 306). Even with the Dobu evidence, then, telltale signs of a certain post-pacification shift remain. There are other comparable cases of larger groupings to consider. For being atypical, one should be warned, they tend to attract the detailed attention of anthropologists. I think especially of the two remarkable village communities of Kalauna (central Massim) and Ilahita (east Sepik). Both evidently emerged as unities in 'near contact' times, the Nibita people coming together 'for their own reasons and without government prompting' to produce Kalauna village, which was 300 strong in ca. 1912, and as many as 470 by 1967 (Young 1971: 33). What makes Kalauna interesting are the sorcery conflicts within it, yet here we really have a special case of indigenously generated overcrowding. That sorcery accusations and imputations probably arose from population pressure is confirmed by the fact that, on spending five months in the related, much smaller, village of Bwaidoga, Michael Young heard 'not a whisper of sorcery' (136, cf. 130-32; Patterson

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1975: 226); when he returned to Kalauna in 1977, he found it exploded into scattered hamlets (Young 1983a: 256). As for Ilahita, its exceptional size (1490 persons in 1969) has lent itself to the common belief that many deaths through sorcery are effected or sanctioned by Nggwal. Instead of a virtually uninhibited cycle of retaliatory blame within the community, village elders (or higher-grade initiates of Nggwal's cult) maintained 'social control' by deciding which sorcery deaths derive from Nggwal and which not. If in former days 'war supplied many of his victims', who were thought to be 'consumed' by him, in recent times emphasis is placed on his acts against all those offending him, whether inside or outside Ilahita. Thus, 'those who die through sorcery performed with Nggwal's approval are said to have been swallowed by the tambaran, and are duly entered in the record of kills' through knotting ropes (Tuzin 1974: 324, cf. 321, 335; 1976: 288-91; 1980: 142-46). This Ilahita situation is surely highly unusual, even within the general culture area, yet in any case the evidence for basic religious shifts on the heels of pacification still remains to support our broad line of diachronic interpretation (cf. Thurnwald 1916 on the Banaro for comparabilities). Mention of social control, of course, raises questions about social structure. In more hierarchical societies, such as those with chieftainships, for instance, was not sorcery an instrument of religio-political power in rulers' hands, and therefore as much an internally, as against outwardly, directed force? Along with our analysis of 'post-pacification drift', this kind of question impresses upon us the need to examine inner-directed (or better, intra-village) sorcery in particular. Intra-village sorcery Sorcery survived pacification. If at first it was quite obvious that the problem of enemy sorcery was not removed by the enforced or induced cessation of open hostilities, however, and if pacification failed to eliminate 'covert war' between traditional enemies—the fearful 'spear by night' rather than 'by day', as Abelam phraseology has it (Forge 1970: 259)—that was only the beginning of new problems. In the course of time, peace as the abolition of warfare brought a recognized (though not necessarily real) increase in inner- as against outer-directed sorcery, blame for sickness and death being increasingly put upon those near-at-hand and decreasingly on those farther away, to varying degrees across the whole range of Melanesian societies. In this connection, the extraordinary, sometimes traumatic, impact of the colonial order should never be forgotten. A great many coastal or hinterland villages throughout the region, for a start, underwent both relocation and enlargement following the stipulations of government officers or the advice of missionaries.

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Diverse hamlets, then, some of which belonged to separate (albeit usually allied) groups, were brought into single sets of houselines for easier inspection, schooling, and so on (Rowley 1972:32-89; Schwimmer 1973:191-206), with resultant tensions producing sorcery accusations that previous situations of dispersal had been less likely to foment. Within some cultures (as with many former Orokaiva warriors), indeed, for a man to get sick and appear a sorcery victim rather than fall on the battle-field was palpably dishonourable, giving all the more reason for festering bitterness over alleged surreptitious, occult vengeance both in and between villages, while the 'whitemen' tightened their reins of control (Jojoga 1983: 30-40). In all sorts of ways the new 'sorcery syndromes' of internal village dissension were set in train: assimilating hunter-and-gatherer people out of existence by requiring them to settle among sedentary neighbours (viz. the Papuan highland Seragi, Trompf 1981a: 23-27); granting upland people tracts of seaboard land (thus producing longstanding land disputes, as among the Si'ini and Mailu in the Abau area of Papua) (OTs: M. and T. Bonou 1983); encouraging all inland villagers to dwell on the coast for the sake of economic betterment, as the missionaries successfully argued on the Loyalty Islands (Howe 1977:103-04); reuniting in the name of the Christian peace hamlets that had not long since separated, as among the Loniu on Los Negros Island (OT: Kolowan 1983); relocating villages simply for the sake of greater proximity between all, yet at the same time undoing the 'quarantine' nature of old territorial patterns and increasing the susceptibility to disease, as on the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal (Bennett 1974: 120); and so forth. Even before these disruptive transactions, of course, there were problems in various sectors with limited, even indirect, contact with the outside world. Foreign diseases, it is well known, made for a depopulation in some parts of the southwest Pacific almost as staggering as that now established for sixteenth century Mexico (Wolf 1982; cf. CFCR 1896; Pitt-Rivers 1927; Buxton 1926; Scragg 1957), and these calamities eventually made expatriateinspired recongregation into new settlements look the more sensible. If these sicknesses, whether epidemic or not, were earlier blamed on enemy sorcery (when the role of the whites was not known and their presence in many cases not yet felt), in the course of time sorcery accusations were flung more desperately and haphazardly both within and beyond settlements. This process went pan passu with the reorganization of houselines under the colonial aegis and male frustration over the emasculation of the warrior ethos in augmenting intra-village tensions (Trompf [forthcoming] a). Perhaps the most important sticking-point to do with these tensions has been the heightened level of anxiety in Melanesian villages over sorcery operating close at hand, a factor every present-day ethnographer must needs contextualize. At least four simple points are worth noting here. First of

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all, sorcery 'at a guarded distance' gave way increasingly to 'more proximate', even 'direct' or physical applications of 'the black arts'. Typical of pre-contact procedures was stalking by stealth, operating nocturnally near an enemy settlement from some secret hiding-place. To this day among the highland Mendi, for instance, 'stone bird' sorcery (nemb nu) substitutes for warfare, sorcerers being 'hired in payback killings'. Yet, the sorcerer carrying a bird-shaped stone in his bilum is not expected to accost the potential victim, but rather to act out the spiritual revenge (to hang the stone from 'a double branched piece of wood', bite a worm, say a spell and thus 'direct the evil spirit') on to an unsuspecting person he can overlook in seclusion (Mawe 1980: 79-80). Where direct confrontation took place in (or between) certain cultures, the sorcerers were backed up by armed accomplices. I think here especially of the coastal type of sorcery often called vada (a Koitabu term used in Papua) or sanguma (in New Guinea pidgin), and which entails the hypnotism, poisoning, or clubbing and then reawakening of a victim in a death-bearing stupor (cf. LMS 1876; Parratt 1976: 35-37; Pulsford 1989: 103-04; OTs: Mali, Lamaro 1981; yet cf. Barker 1983). Sorcery as an open accosting or surreptitious touching of a victim by an individual sorcerer, however, was not a common pre-contact phenomenon at all; for most cultures one might even call it a new luxury for practitioners, one that peace and freer access have made more possible. Second, it goes almost without saying that the very same sorcery techniques that were once more outer-directed could be utilized for more domestic or intra-group purposes. Take the Mendi and Nipa practice of hultrem (or hultem), for example, which is distinct from 'stone bird' sorcery. If one is aggrieved by a trading partner, or some rival from another tribe in the suiting of a female, hultrem is a possible recourse. Disclosing to his close kinsmen how he has been wronged or deprecated, a man performing this sorcery builds a small house on stilts in the bush and takes up into it a specially selected red or brown pig. While the kinsmen wait below, the pig must be killed without emitting a squeal, and then thrown downwards, blood flying everywhere. When the beast is ready for cooking, its heart is extracted and placed in a small reinforced bag containing a rat or bird. The creature is to nibble at the heart and, to complete the rite, the offended man fires an arrow with great force in the direction of his adversary. Here 'imitative magic' as James George Frazer termed it (1922: vol.1, 55-57), is the vehicle of retribution, yet satisfaction is being obtained without jeopardizing one's position, without any open or effective assault on one's enemy, or without blatantly dislocating human life in any dramatic form. Traditionally, we stress, as in the case of a parallel technique among the Tor (of Irian Jaya), the practice was directed to an enemy in an 'out-group' (cf. Oosterwal 1961: 266). How easy it has been in postcontact times, however, for this very same technique, which has been

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customarily connected in these societies with individual rivalry more than ongoing tribal war, to be applied to anyone considered an offender both within and without the tribe (OT: Dus 1978). Examples such as this can be found throughout the whole region, perhaps the most fascinating case of all being that of the 'railed bed' among the Houailou (eastern New Caledonia), on which a man slept to receive (and thus project) a vision of one's enemy killed (Leenhardt 1930:143). Once the warrior esprit de corps was gone, there were fewer guarantees that the bed and the visioning were not going to be used in local quarrels. Third, increased fear of sorcery within a settlement was naturally consequent upon higher population mobility, if outsiders who were otherwise in no position to be accepted into a village now had opportunities to enter. Take Tolai society as an interesting, if extreme, case. Traditionally, property inheritance was matrilineal, but residency requirements for male heads of households were patrivirilocal (Epstein 1969: 97-104, 202-50). Under German rule, however, such males now had the choice to take up residence either among their wives' people or their fathers', so that as early as 1897 Governor Dr Albert Hahl observed how Tolai outsiders were leasing and buying surplus land 'in every district', even though 'the settlement of a district by one clan still prevails' (1897: 73; cf. Parkinson 1907: 56). It is no wonder that, with the ill-feeling these new developments engendered, anxiety over sorcery from internal as much as external quarters became the order of the day (Durkia 1983; cf. Sack 1974a). Fourth, the greater mobility of sorcery across tribal and cultural boundaries naturally exacerbated the heightened fear of it as more prevalent and intrusive. Vada sorcery became quite a notorious problem along the Papuan coast during the 1930s, for example, precisely because its techniques 'travelled' across cultures and because individual sorcerers played on the fear of it even within their own village (Fortune 1932: 284-87; cf. OT: Kopi 1979). It stands to reason, admittedly, that this very mobility gave the operation of sorcery between groups a firmer footing after pacification, and worsened the prospect of insidious techniques being transported from some far-off place, from centres (like Dobu, for one), which became notorious for harm-dealing skills. While many villages grew in size, however, and even incorporated immigrants from distant quarters, their inhabitants could easily imagine new sorcery being appropriated and increasingly used within the village. Those colonized or pacified societies that experienced a longer history of 'physically peaceable' relations came to possess a stronger-than-traditional sense of their culturo-linguistic identity, as Motu vis-a-vis the Mailu, for instance, or Manus over and against the Usiai, so that increase in sorcery could also be conceived as a threat to this newerfound (though still developing) unity. Psychologically speaking, feelings of identity with any one of these emerging unities only strengthened the

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impression of sorcery as an internal canker, or the need for greater concern to bolster oneself against its pervasive effects. These shifts are all too familiar to Africanists (cf., e.g., Beattie 1963: 32, 53; Wilson 1971), and in Melanesia as in southern Africa problems were compounded by new procedures to hire 'stronger' sorcerers. With greater access between regions, one's own neighbour could pay an outside sorcerer (a practitioner from inland, to use an example from the Hula and AromaVelerupu, coastal Papua), to perform some inimical act affecting 'domestic politics' (OT: Karo 1983, cf. Haddon 1932: 105). This suspected 'strangercum-sorcerer' might well be seen freely wandering around the village before a sickness occurred. Yet, no one could be sure who in particular might have bought his services and few would be so reckless as to bring out an accusation in public (for fear that charging the wrong person might bring sorcery as reprisal!); only an adept might dare to claim that it was the stranger and not one of the local village sorcerers (or some other party or agent) who was responsible. It is this kind of relative uncertainty, the divisiveness accompanying it, as well as the sense that sorcery networks have become so much larger, more intertwined and thus formidable, that are the marks of the more recent scene (Trompf [forthcoming] a). The accentuations of this shift, of course, were hardly uniform. In the northern district of Papua, for instance, the Orokaiva groupings experienced a widening of the hiring network (Waiko 1983; Biama 1985; OT: Jojoga 1983; cf. Schwimmer 1973:182), because these peoples were treated as related both culturally and linguistically by the colonial authorities (cf. Williams 1930), and thus came to see themselves in this light; while just down the coast we find the Maisin, who are usually ready to contend that their reception of Christianity brought a real diminution of sorcery and, thus of their fear of it (Barker 1983; cf. also chapter 7). Overall, to encapsulate these points in terms of individual practitioners themselves, the local image of the sorcerer has been radically transformed during the colonial era. Eliane Metais, who has essayed the longest single study of Melanesian sorcery (on La Foa practices in the western New Caledonia outliers) could not turn her back on this important datum. For all her lack of interest in pre-colonial patterns and her concern with psychoanalytic issues, she came to concede that the traditional sorcerer was 'born into the bosom olafree tribe', and was thus 'the respecter of its vital structures', but under colonization he has taken on permanently 'haunting' qualities indicative of ethnic disintegration and the extorting of 'new psychological needs'. He has become the fearful 'archetype' of unpredictable destruction (1967: 9-10, cf. 135), and in certain clusters of societies—the southern coast of Papua and in coastal and hinterland areas of the east Sepik in New Guinea being the most obvious regions—virtually all deaths become ascribed to sorcery (Trompf 1991: 92). Not that sorcerers ever came

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to be considered omnipotent in their malevolence. It was often recognized that they were subject to limits, and that overdoing vengefulness could bring death on the practitioner himself and perhaps his whole family (cf., e.g., Harrison 1982: 99; Durkia 1983: 8). There was also the common perception of checks and balances, that a sorcerer had to be consulted or paid to counter the threat of another sorcerer's powers. And this perception is very much related to the issue of social control, including the manipulation of the sorcery factor by skilful leaders. So as to maintain an analytical balance ourselves, and to reiterate our caveats that we are dealing with relativities, and that inner-directed sorcery was not entirely absent from pre-contact traditions, we shall have to deal with 'sorcery and social control' as a separate issue. In advance, however, two short case studies will illustrate here how the processes we have been describing actually produced 'neo-traditions' in which sorcery was exploited to secure social hegemony. The first case, from the eastern Abelam (hinterland Sepik) shows how new hiring principles played into the hands of aspiring bigmen, whose prestige and clout became increasingly dependent on the putative possession of sorcerizing power. Before pacification, moreover, the ways and means of making sorcery accusations were clearly limited; a man with close ties from the victim's village was allowed the licence to drive a bamboo stake into the suspected group's ceremonial ground, before he walked 'off without a word or a glance at anybody' (Forge 1970: 265, cf. 262). In the 1960s, by contrast, there were some imported techniques of divination, and it was then not unusual to find intra-, not just inter-village sorcery, with bigmen using power accrued from contact with sorcery-wielders outside their village 'to pursue their ambitions and to thwart their rivals within' (271, cf. 263-67). In the fluctuations of war, previously, bigman rivalry was less intense, and confirmation or change of leadership was most often decided by the outcome in battles. The sinews of war demanded of sorcery a loyal outer-directedness, not the deceptions of a traitor. Upon the inhibition or cessation of physical hostilities, by contrast, complications entered the picture. Once the colonial authorities claimed the exclusive right to inflict capital punishments, sorcery came to be seen as a bigman's alternative device for maintaining, not only his own control, but also something of the old military and legal expectations. Alongside this shift grew greater general concern about the sorcery problem. Whereas witches were once entrusted with the care of wounded warriors, supposedly turning themselves into rodents to extract spear splinters, now they are only feared as the killers of infants, and local sorcerers themselves have been enshrouded in a new ambivalence, now being as threatening in the new context of power struggles as they were once supportive in the old (cf. 265, 268). The second case is from Wuvulu Island (far west of Manus and on the

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very fringes of the Melanesian region), and exemplifies how sorcerers could emerge in the post-contact period as a society's centre of 'total' power. Wuvulu suffered perhaps the most devastating of all population losses in the Melanesian region, witnessing a drop of 90 per cent of its numbers (or, from 3000 to a mere 300 persons) under sixteen years of traders' intrusions and German overlordship, ca. 1897-1914 (cf. Cilento 1928). Deaths were mainly due to the introduced blackwater fever, which cut through the separate island groups all the more when they were being organized for plantation work. And what was the social effect of these events on the local people? Serious inter-group fighting. The Wuvulu sorcererpriests, or custodians of the protector and law-enforcing spirits known as puala, blamed their counterparts in other communities for the miseries, so that (apparently) unprecedented wars erupted to add to the dead. Once these were halted under German rule, significantly the puala-sorcerers were now unquestionably the chief power-brokers of the society (warriorleaders losing their vital role) and the fear of their actions dominated village life. Certainly, a traditional role of these sorcerers entailed a measure of social control over their own people, including a select number of (welcomed) local deaths, but now more and more deaths were attributed to the one near at hand, to the 'sorcerer-ogre', who could no longer be relied on as protector against the outside sources of fatalities and disorder (Lagercrantz 1980; Lopa [pers. comm.] 1983). Once again, through such case histories ethnographers are called to be cautious about the extent of change that has occurred in the uses of sorcery retribution before they enter the field. The Abelam and Wuvulu examples, moreover, suggest that Melanesians were able to retain a degree of control over their affairs that colonial authorities intended to debar. In proscribing the local right to effect capital punishments as well as the right to initiate war, the new authorities did not anticipate how sorcery could be utilized in certain societies as a device for reclaiming some autonomy. That is, again, not to deny that in many and various quarters, sorcery was already a vehicle for social control. Sorcery and social control, with a case study (Mekeo) The phrase 'social control' can betoken legal sanctions, and one may wonder whether discussion of it is best reserved for the section on punishment as payback (see below). Matters are not so simple, however, for sorcery could be a mechanism of control within a primary group without being under the aegis of the 'highest' leadership. 'In the earlier days' among the Busamo (Morobe), to illustrate, 'the fear of black magic spurred people to overcome temptation and meet the legitimate claims of their kin; and, in addition, it served as an innocuous outlet for feelings of irritation' (Hogbin 1963: 155). In this society, evidently, sorcery was available to all as a vehicle

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of recrimination, but it was not generally feared as lethal within the group. That only goes to confirm that there were less harmful techniques of sorcery (bringing on sickness such as vomiting or enervation, let us say, but not death), which were tolerated within communities. The typical rationale for deploying these practices was tabu breakage, yet whether their utilization was informal or left to group-leadership varied (cf., e.g., Chowning 1974: 160, 173-74; 1987). These techniques usually involved little expense and only specialists close to hand, and they were differentiated markedly from extremer measures of revenge. Going too far could mean punishment as a 'traitor' to the solidary group, as among the Melpa (Strathern 1976: 4), and some tribes even had rituals to unveil and purge such disloyalty, as the Mae Enga Kauma tuu pingti illustrates (Brennan 1977: 4749). Without this relative weighting between internally and externally focused recrimination, traditional small-scale societies could not hope to survive (Murphy 1957: 1030-32; cf. also Dynes and Quarantelli 1971: 20004; Trompf 1979a: 288-89). As the Wuvulu case already suggests, however, and important studies outside Melanesia would lead us to surmise (cf., e.g., Marwick 1965), precontact cultures did exist in which sorcery specialists were supposed to deal as severely with 'dereliction within the camp' as against outside enemies. Among the Okena (hinterland Oro, Papua), for instance, as for most neighbouring Orokaiva groups, sorcerers paid particular attention to younger warriors, protecting and healing them, and supposedly directing power against their foes, but also applying sanctions against unwanted miscreants (very severely) and those who did not fulfil obligations (more leniently) (OT: Aruga 1979; cf. OT: Jojoga 1983). In well-known and notably stratified Trobriand society, to take another example, there seems to have been a long-inured fear of sorcerers as independent power-brokers who might act 'on their own behalf, yet it was also recognized that they generally followed 'the weight of public opinion', as well as the attitudes of chiefs or other sorcerers, so as to avoid any serious reprisal which could prove 'unpopular' (Malinowski 1926: 85-86; and for comparisons with the Tolai, see Sack 1974b: 401-08). The very mention of a more stratified society leads one to ask whether it was under hierarchical systems that sorcerers were more commonly the chiefs' instruments of punition. I suspect that we should answer in the affirmative, but only careful oral historical investigation will yield a corroboration. In some chiefly societies already well documented, for example, as with the Halia of Buka island, the chief (tsunono) was from his very installation thought to be the butt of sorcery activity both near and far, and his mother would ceremoniously weep on this account (Parkinson 1899; cf. Rimoldi 1971: 35-45). This datum, however, possibly reflects the recent disengagement and new 'free-floating' operations of sorcerers after pacification, and thus the need to reconstruct pre-contact collaboration between two types of power-wielding.

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With the Mekeo of near-coastal Papua, certainly, chiefly supervision of the community and utmost respect for the local sorcerer were traditionally well integrated. Although the 'war-magician' (jai'a) and 'domestic sorcerer' (ungaunga) were authorities in their own right, their arts were meant to be practised under the superintendence of the senior chief (lopia fa'aniau), the oldest chief in the most senior lineage or clan of the whole descent group (Hau'ofa 1981: 185-93). Today, on the other hand, it is widely admitted among the Mekeo that sorcery is out of control. Many people claim that the chiefs have lost the powers which once gave them control over the sorcerers. Ordinary men may, for a stiff fee, hire the services of a sorcerer. Though in theory he cannot act unless the chief of the intended victim gives his permission, people believe that the sorcerer, through greed or simply malice, may not bother to consult the chiefs, who in any case have become too weak to oppose his will. (Stephen 1979a: 152, cf. 150-51)

What has happened to bring about such a noticeable deviation? Written and oral material are fortunately available to permit an answer along diachronic lines. Before contact, 'war-groups' consisting of related lineages dwelt in separated if proximate hamlets (on the alluvial plains of the Angabanga River). If the senior chief of any group normally kept aloof from military conflicts as an august figure of peace and hospitality, the war-chief (lopia eke) or leader (iso), thefai'a and the ungaunga, for their parts, each figured prominently in ongoing conflict (Stephen 1979a: 150; Hau'ofa 1971:152-69). Whereas the iso andfai'a were directly involved with what occurred on the field of battle, or in raids, which were carried on in a characteristically small-scale, kill-for-kill fashion, the ungaunga's role was especially concerned with the deployment of death-dealing spiritual powers between skirmishes. That the war-magician and sorcerer were largely in the same game of inflicting outside enemies, though, was reflected in their frequent collusion to make sure of 'defences', for both were protectors of the group. Bribes might have been sent from outsiders to kill within his own hamlet, but the sorcerer was, even if he had the freedom, unlikely to accept them. Anything done to his own clansmen, in fact, he did more ostentatiously than surreptitiously as a quasi-institutionalized act of condemnation, and this (theoretically) at the behest of the senior chief (who had power to direct capital punishment as well). In the pre-contact situation, further, little was done by the sorcerer in his own house at the end of the village (in contrast to the situation now); his centre was called a fauapi, some 45-90 metres from a given hamlet, which was picketed off and surrounded by scrub. Young boys cooked and served his meals, although he underwent much fasting. It was from the fauapi that he killed, yet the hamlet dwellers thought of him mostly as their defender (a countersorcerer against enemy powers) as well as a reflector of chiefly rule.

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Thus in the 1870s, and just before the arrival of the Catholic missionaries, it is of interest to learn how the clans of Veipa'a, the best-known Mekeo grouping, were swelling with both people and sorcery power. The very opposite applied with the three Aipiana clans Fagu'opa, Faila, and Inanefai; they were few in numbers and, what is more, they had no sorcerers at all, these having been killed off in fighting. The three Aipiana clans, significantly, struck a bargain with Meauni, the most disaffected of the clans in a somewhat over-enlarged Veipa'a, Aipiana's reasonably reliant ally. And what was their proposal? They were prepared to give the Meauni land in return for an ungaunga. Far from fearing the likelihood of a sorcerer turning against them, or from being relieved they had no such functionary in their midst, they were desperate for spiritual protection. It was through these pressures that the Meauni, bringing their sorcerers with them, split from Veipa'a and integrated with Aipiana instead, as remains the case even now (OTs: Kavo apud Kanava 1982). The loss of life and sickness the Aipiana had experienced, furthermore, had been ascribed to outsiders, with 'feelings of payback', and not to their senior chief (who in any case had no ungaunga by which to utilize sorcery as punishment). Even while acknowledging this evidence, however, the Mekeo explanatory framework was not so narrow that it precluded the possibility of enemies bribing sorcerers as agents from the neighbouring clans of one's own grouping, or of chiefs organizing the deaths of persons popularly berated as irritants. During periods of lessened inter-group stress, in any case, jealousies between clans were more noticeable, and thus proportionately more deaths were thought to issue from grievances within the war-group. The senior chief, however, was held to be the final arbiter without whose permission no act of recrimination could be effected (OT: Kavana 1982). Under missionary and colonial administration's supervision, the previously separated Mekeo clans formed into large villages, and since each clan had possessed at least one ungaunga, these sorcerers were now thrown much closer together. With drives of Mekeo negative energies becoming less focused, and the sorcerers now being highly mobile and bent on freely negotiating with each other in coteries, they fast emerged as a fearful power bloc, accumulating real local political power as steadily as chiefly authority was sucked under expatriate control (cf. Stephen 1974; Aitsi 1984). During this phase (ca. 1880-1940), sorcerers operated more and more as their own men, often acting for payment over and above traditional loyalties or popular opinion. The illusion remained that the senior chiefs were still in command, admittedly, but only because it suited sorcerers to work behind a cloak of legitimacy. Since the Second World War, to be sure, the general situation has become steadily more unsettling. Not only is recourse to sorcery now still less reflective of traditional inter-group hostilities, and thus more of 'jealousies

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in general' but more people have become sorcerers, and many more the active satellites of such. Wider involvement is dictated by the need to protect oneself against unpredictable attacks (the nocturnal stroke of one's leg by a sorcerer, perhaps!) (Stephen 1987: 70; cf. Herdt and Stephen 1989) and by the rising envy resulting from certain families' greater financial success in the thriving betel-nut trade at Port Moresby. Still the illusion of chiefly control lingers, but many now see through it, regarding this village impasse with despair and fear, and bewildered that the adoption of Christianity has not brought about sorcery's demise (cf. OT: Vangeke 1974). The ethno-history of the Mekeo, then, despite the special, traditional warranty of their sorcerers to police internal affairs, bears out the general trends we have already plotted. The upshot is the typical one: there is now a greater unpredictability about the source and threat of sorcery, and thus a greater strain on the average persons in deciding how or what forces are affecting their lives. Under traditional Mekeo arrangements the domestic sorcerer was perceived to have a much more structured role, and we would be right in presuming that his punitions were recognized to be discriminate, or falling on the particular individuals deemed deserving of retribution. Under recent, more uncertain circumstances, as also experienced elsewhere (cf., e.g., Young 1983a: 268; cf. 1971: 127-229), there arises the ever-present possibility that vindictive sorcerizing will overcome a surrogate, the payback hurting all the more for befalling a relative of the 'real victim'. In these circumstances, deciding upon the cause of a sickness and impending death is a much more confusing business, as to whether a sufferer committed some delict, provoked someone's ire, or was an alternative butt of attack in a conflict between bitter enemies (cf., e.g., Kopi 1979: 20-28). In these circumstances, indeed, every family in a village might choose to buttress itself with some knowledge of the black arts, as among select Roro settlements in Papua (OTs: Aitsi, Apa, Wani, 1973-74), or the Bougainvillean Torau (OT: Garuai 1974), or else seek marriage links with peoples notorious for sorcery, as do Motu with the Koitabu (Tom 1983; cf. Chalmers 1887: 15, 310), in case it is necessary to get one's own back in the course of time. There is more to be said about the complex subject of sorcery (see below on punishment and see chapter 3 on traditional epistemologies). Confining ourselves to ostensibly traditional matters here in Part I of this work, we shall make special additional observations about 'modern' sorcery techniques, sorcery vis-a-vis Christianity, and other related matters, in Part III. Discriminate homicide and general patterns of violence It is a reasonable surmise that, concomitant with the rise of intra-village sorcery during the colonial period, there has been a relative increase in the

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level of violence, including discriminate homicide, within communities, whether as solidary groups still more or less intact under the new order or social amalgams; Alas, we do not possess anywhere near the amount of data necessary to confirm this suspicion. Historically orientated ethnographies are few and far between (for notable exceptions Gewertz 1983: 1-16 and Lederman 1983b), and almost all research has been dominated by the categories of traditional vendetta warfare and plain murder with hardly any broaching of the shady areas in between. But no thoroughgoing analysis of retributive themes in Melanesia can neglect consideration of the evidence supporting this probability, and I will still analyse the available evidence, such as it is. The substantive as well as the methodological issues treated here will round off what we have had to say about the more explicit expressions of revenge before we move on to a consideration of punishment. Despite their advantages, pacification and colonial control put tremendous strain on traditional Melanesian patterns of life by removing the main outlet of human aggression. To be 'civilized' (in the 'classic' sense) is to repress those primitive urges to destroy or rape the outsiders who surround and threaten the primary 'horde' (Freud 1918: 182-86; 1961: 46-63), yet it follows that aggressive energies are bound to continue exerting immense pressures on a society even while the most volatile side to life is kept subdued. One expects to discover, then, as indices of adjustment to an enforced peace in Melanesia, not only an increase in the significance and disintegrative power of sorcery, but also new undercurrents and discharges of violence that were not characteristic of pre-contact times. Much more careful scholarship is needed, however, to verify the symptoms of malaise in post-pacification situations. One wonders whether many gruesome stories recounted earlier this century of the slaying of mere passers-by to satisfy mortified men after the untimely death of a favourite pig, or of women being killed because children did not stop crying (e.g. BNGAR 1908-09: 13; Murray 1912: 214-15) are the telltale signs of the near breakdown of what were once proud, highly disciplined (yet tense and atomized) societies. It bears reflection as to whether violence against animals, feigned threats with weapons to terrify children, or even the lessened supervision of children's aggressive tendencies increased proportionately after the cessation of hostilities, although the literature does not touch on such possibilities. In any case, cultural idiosyncrasies make generalizations hazardous here. Patrol officers and missionaries commenting on the Fuyughe and Tauade in the 1930s, for instance, noted how pigs were killed before feasts with the utmost ferocity—a sideshow not seen today—yet it appears that for the Tauade at any rate, such a slaughter was meant to mimic war (it was literally 'war on the pigs') in the presence of guests from other tribes (Hallpike 1977: 74, 164-67;

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cf. Dupeyrat 1955:139-47). As for such phenomena as 'wild man behaviour' or uncontrolled psychotic-looking outbursts against property or people, it is hard to decide whether these have been more or less frequent since the end of the old order, because researchers have shown a singular lack of interest in the oral history of behaviour patterns (cf. Clarke 1972-73; Burton-Bradley 1975: 50-68). One thing is certain, it is possible to render ethnologic injustice to cultures that combine a resilience to social change with some of the more unpleasant signs of a traditional world in disintegration. Hallpike's Bloodshed and Vengeance is a (by now notorious) instance in point. Convinced that the Papuan highland Tauade are 'savage men in the grip of a collective obsession with blood and death', Hallpike has characterized their 'traditional life' as 'a prolonged fantasy of power, a religion whose rites were burning villages' or a gloomy amalgam of killing and dancing (1977: 253). His over-reliance on patrol post records results in a dossier on Tauade 'criminality' (Gordon 1977: 315; Norwood 1981a: 81-82). In documenting the high insistence of homicide and assault (he calls it 'crime') within rather than between tribes (e.g. 119-20), however, he nowhere makes it clear that inner-tribal conflict has increased markedly following pacification because the growing numbers of 'migrants' (people who left the once tightly fixed localities to become 'temporary residents' in other hamlets [cf. 80]) destabilized social relations within tribal areas. Both inter- and intra- tribal expressions of violence, moreover, are explained under an inadequate general rubric (the 'endless struggle for glory and prestige', or the desperate need to satisfy 'passion' and 'rage') (1, 234-35, etc.), when what was called for was a probing attempt to uncover reasons for acts of violence, and to find whether reasons for in tra-tribal clashes were in any sense new or special. Hallpike correctly recognizes that 'reciprocity is a dominant theme' of Tauade and related societies, and that it can be 'summed up in the one expression—'pay-back' (kakit) (189, cf. also McArthur 1961: 50 for the Kunimaipa). But he has virtually taken away the rational basis for the complex interplay of vengeance, compensation, and gift-giving by imagining it to be in the nature of Tauade traditional society that its members are slaves to their emotions. Of a people caught between a striving to hold on to a warrior ethos and the almost irresistible deterioration of traditional values under colonial control there is not a whisper. A challenge presents itself to researchers, then, to assess and explain the relative degrees to which Melanesian societies have experienced ongoing social conflict in documented times, before confidently talking of their data as (pre-contact) tradition. All sorts of factors of a comparative nature that have not yet been mentioned could come into view in meeting this prescription. With the Tauade, for example, missionary impact was superficial, participation in development was hampered by isolation and the rugged

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terrain, even the coastal peoples treated them as inferior savages, and in any case the time-inured cultivation of warrior ferocity simply died hard. New sorcery fears on top of this do not make for a pretty picture. It must be asked about any human group what social restraints existed against persons carrying out their own punishments without resort to arbitration or to sanctions provided by leadership. Some societies, such as the Tauade, have far more, and some far less, than others; and if they have far less, the self-help nature of bringing about retribution as punishment will appear to the outsider like mindless hatred and criminality (Malinowski 1973: 81). The Tauade do not present a solitary grouping in a sea of more 'disciplined' cultures, yet the extensive documentation of their society now raises the question as to whether enough oral historical and sociological research has been devoted to patterns of rural violence and social change across the board (cf. chapter 7). Although local colonial reports of relevance are already to hand, the officials making them usually deemed all homicidal acts not carried out by the whites themselves to be criminal, and too often made no clear distinctions between 'revenge killings', 'murders' and 'executions' in the equivalent indigenous senses of those terms. Furthermore, the evidence will go only a small way towards confirming what I suspect has been increasingly the case since white intrusion, that proportionately more particular culprits have been singled out for requital by local people than traditionally applied in the days of indiscriminate revenge killings. The introduced stress on individual responsibility purveyed by missions and demanded by patrol officers was not without its effects, especially in areas of greater interaction with the whites. Take the Tolai causal thinking referred to previously. If, prior to the impact of European principles, a tribesman would redress the theft of his wife by spearing the first outsider he met (p. 47), the new order put pressure on him to wait and find the real culprit. That he or his companions might have taken the (new) law into their own hands by killing the real culprit (instead of working for compensation or a colonial court decision) was part and parcel of the growing pains of acculturation, yet the basis of such actions can be said to have edged closer to Western notions of punishment and justice. On the other hand, unsanctioned homicide against particular guilty parties might also arise within tribes or security circles, and because traditional leadership had lost its mainstays under colonial rule, culprits in one's own fold could be violently despatched by aggrieved persons, who were perhaps as much frustrated by the absence of battle opportunities as anything, as was clearly the case with the Tauade. On account of newly introduced influences, moreover, many venerated (and culture-specific) rules were questioned and broken, and not always without accompanying traumas internal to a given primary group. A dominant patrilineage on

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Atchin (off Malekula), for example, deliberately abandoned the curious leviratical-looking custom of marrying one's deceased father's father's wife (by the 1930s), thus sparking off a conflict so out of control that 'civil war' best describes it (Layard 1942: 125). In the circumstances of social change, new comparable tabu-breakages by individuals were bound to arise, although it is a matter of ethnologic finesse to distinguish society- or leader-sanctioned punition of the recalcitrants from the proportionately increasing amount of 'unlicensed' violence. It goes without saying that, within communities, both punitive and unsanctioned recriminative acts of a direct physical character were almost always carried out discriminately against genuine or accused culprits, and to that extent the cue for adopting Western principles of pinpointing, trying, and punishing actual offenders already lay in Melanesia's traditional security circles. The paradox remains, of course, that whereas earlier in colonial times these circles might have tried as hard as they could to retain their right to punish malefactors, even kill them, it eventually took daring individuals or freebooting coteries to keep alive this privilege in spite of leadership groups that kowtowed to colonial authority. We are thus left with two competing appeals to legitimacy: on the one hand, abettors of the colonial order looking to the appointed officials for solutions, and, on the other, apparent 'traditionalists' taking matters into their own hands. This latter group, particularly in the eyes of administrators, tend to look no different from those who, in the view of traditional society itself, committed violent offences (such as outright murder). For our own working purposes, though, we may fairly affirm that rates of homicide and direct physical violence within indigenous settlements rose above precontact levels, whether because of 'real malefactors' who were unacceptable under any legal system or out of a sense of justified outrage. That shift is symptomatic of the collapse of warrior cultures, and the passing of that time when 'quarrels, discord and strife were reserved for outside enemies' (Sallust Bell. Catal. 9: 2). Whether the proportion of discriminate (over and against indiscriminate) killings increased in both intra- and inter-tribal relations, however, is difficult to say. The effects of colonial and Christian pressures notwithstanding, the traditional payback principle of physically despatching anyone in the enemy group if the balance of affairs required it (and opportunity allowed) is still alive and well in most of western Melanesia, albeit with fewer outlets and under newer guises (chapter 7). Punishments We have been approaching this subject all along, and now what are we to make of it? First, let it be clear that we shall proceed on the assumption that Melanesians have developed distinctions between acceptable and

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unacceptable behaviour through reason-based consensus assessments, and adaptive interpretations of events in their cosmos. Ethological explanations of human rules and conventions may have some value for speculation about long-term evolutionary processes, yet in all documented societies past and present biological and military survival have become 'intimately bound up with, yet subordinate to, [the human being's] awareness of the truth of things' (Burridge 1973: 83). Second, we can expect that, although the 'costing procedures' as such are endemic, there will be cultural variations in the classifying and scaling of good and bad actions, in the relative harshness of punishment or legally retributive measures, and in the relative exertion of sanctions or punitive power by recognized leadership. Third, we accept here in all seriousness that Melanesians have long been in possession of their own 'customary' law. The image of traditional society has suffered from a paucity of legal anthropology, yet such specialist studies as do exist convince one that each society had a definite corpus of tabus and prescriptions, and the means of enforcing them within the security circle (cf., esp., Pospisil 1958; Epstein 1974; Scaglion 1983; O'Sullivan 1986). It is preferable to begin with those punishments that are more distinctly legal and then proceed to those of a less formal nature. Legal Leopold Pospisil's detailed study of Kapauka law (in the western Irian Jaya highlands) serves well as a centrepiece around which a short comparative appraisal of punishment procedures can be developed. The Kapauka had up to 117 binding rules, and in the isolation of 176 'cases' Pospisil has shown how rule-transgression and quarrelling over allegations of such were settled in the light of accepted prescriptions (1958: 144-247). A select number of episodes will show punishments were made to fit the crime. Starting from the obvious, the deliberate killing of someone in one's own 'political confederacy' calls for death in return, usually at the hands of the murdered person's close relatives. In cases of injuring somebody in an attempt at murder, the culprit was to be similarly injured—an instance of equivalence or lex talionis (Cazelles 1946; Redfield 1967: 12)—a man who shot his brother in the abdomen, for example, receiving an arrow in his leg. As for sorcery, it was 'very seldom used against a person from the same village or political unit' and capital punishment was incurred for doing so, Pospisil listing only the rare case of a man sorcerizing a rival, successful suitor (1958: 146, 149, 154). The Kapauka punishments are typical enough for the whole region, but responses to these same offences can vary nonetheless. The Gadsup also found these misdeeds the most reprehensible, for comparison, and required physical infliction for them all, but did not demand death for either murder

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or intra-settlement sorcery. They thus retained lives that could be valuable for survival and left the ancestors to dispense with the felons, if and when they should choose (du Toit 1975: 86-87,99-100). The Elema, for their part, exacted requital from such delinquents simply by removing the privilege of having their deaths avenged (Kiki 1968: 45), while with the Tolai there seems to have been no crime for which atonement in the form of shell money (tambu) was not possible, although resisting payment meant immediate death, even at the hands of warrior bystanders (Schmiele in DKZ 1888: 131-34, 148-49; Sack 1972a: 96-103). To continue with the well-documented body of Kapauka law, sexual wrongdoings could also evoke the death penalty, usually upon adulteresses. A husband could waive the execution of his wife, however, by beating her instead, and pressing for an indemnity from the male offender. Some Kapauka have also managed to get away with virtually incestuous sexual relations (Pospisil 1958: 164-68, cf. 108-09). Elsewhere more stringent regulations apply, but on which of the offending partners is a matter of difference. Most typically, as among the Wedau of eastern Papua, women were killed for their unfaithfulness (OT: Sapenta 1972), yet in the nearby matrilineal Massim complex, husbands were the target and female culprits more than often just 'thrashed or sent away' (Seligmann 1910: 567). Sometimes social status made a difference: chiefly standards and arbitration dictated on Florida and Sau in the Solomons that female culprits in a chief's family must face the death penalty, while chiefs could turn other adulteresses into harlots (rembi) for their own pleasure (Codrington 1891: 243), and in other societies opportunities for compensation were more determinative (e.g. Klaintischen 1907:198 on the Tolai; Hallpike 1977: 132-33 on the Tauade). As for incest, if it was the norm that sexual intercourse with one's direct cosanguine line of ascendants and descendants was punishable by death (e.g. Sarei, 1974: 47-48 of the Solos, Bougainville; Sack 1974a: 83-84 of the Tolai), there was no uniformity over in-law relations, and there are even some rare cases in Melanesia (as with some Fuyughe) of fathers legitimately cohabiting with daughters (pace LeviStrauss 1949). Among other delicts incurring severe punishment within 'jural groups' we may list disobedience in war, theft, and the non-observance of sacred rites and the violation of special tabus (cf. Nevermann 1972: 112). Once again, varying degrees of punitive severity should be expected. If Kapauka fight-leaders imposed a hard log-bashing on the head for anyone leading an unauthorized, maverick war-party and a (dreaded) public shaming for those who refused to participate in war (Pospisil 1958: 236-8), other cultures, such as the Wain (Morobe highlands), followed alternative procedures: exile, ostracism, or (for warrior hotheads) positioning in the front line of the next battle, to be killed from recklessness or 'cured' by some

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success that raised their status (OT: Okona 1983). If the Kapauka handled internal theft with fines (Pospisil 1958: 153-54, 158-59, 237), others made strikingly different responses. On Bougainville island alone, for instance, punishments for thieving range from the death penalty (Siwai), to the severing of a finger (Nasioi), down to the pressing of hands into a flaming coconut shell (Evo) (Oliver 1955: 223; Mirino 1983: 2; OT: Duinarinu 1983, and for situations elsewhere, e.g. Fortune 1947b: 244-55; Meggitt 1977: 190, 195). But of course theft had to be discovered or admitted, and there existed other retributive procedures to force out a confession. A Choiseulese left without clues, for instance, would take to a canoe, appealing in a concentrated effort to his nearest deceased male kin on his father's side to send a killer shark upon the culprit, the whole seagoing exercise being an ostentatious attempt to get the thief to own up (Anon, n.d: 103). In general, such Melanesian 'regimens' had the advantage of legalistic definiteness: acts considered wrong or disallowed were as boldly and precisely delineated as the penalties they incurred, with no attention to motive or excuse (note Hogbin 1938:223-26; cf. Marett 1932:53; Miller 1976: 257-63). The use of corporal punishment was prominent, although if fingers were fair game for removal, a more severe maiming of malefactors, as prescribed, for example, by certain ancient Near Eastern codes (Pritchard 1969: 175), seems unknown. Offences meriting the death penalty were most typically those endangering the security circle, yet occasionally were those amounting to a terrible and highly specific insult, such as an intrusion 'on the privy area of the opposite sex' or some public obscenity, as among the Sengseng of west New Britain (Chowning 1974: 156; yet for differences applying elsewhere Sack 1974a: 88-89; Read 1966: 54-55; Berndt 1962: 12027, 195-202). Legal punishment, however, never appears to have involved forced incarceration or torture, and ordeals were rarely prescribed. Punishment, indeed, was rarely conceived in exclusively physical or human terms. Not only was shaming a common and feared punitive device, but violations and punishments were never conceptually divorced from a sense of 'spiritual' (or 'supernatural') sanctions, so that gods and ancestors were offended as much as anyone, and they as much as anyone were interested in appropriate retribution (see above). That punishment (of community miscreants) and revenge (on enemies) were conceptually related, moreover, is borne out by the high degree of lexical and semantic interchangeability between the two notions in Melanesian languages, as even the usage bekim in Papua New Guinea pidgin already foretells for the layperson (Trompf n.d.). This relationship was not just an organic outcome of the fact that the people with whom one fought could also, on affinal grounds, be considered part of one's communitas. The relationship reflected as much, if not more, the almost endemic assumption that (outsider) acts against one's fellows and (insider)

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delicts against basic laws were both disruptions of positive reciprocities and biocosmic life and had to be satisfied by requital. It would amount to prejudice, however, to view this relationship only in terms of societies or culturo-linguistic complexes as wholes (as, e.g., Sillitoe 1979: 4-11). The resulting picture would be of many conflict-torn societies fit only for adverse judgement, whereas in fact it has almost always been the 'micronations' (the tribes or primary social units) inside each society that have acted as law- and ethics-maintaining bodies, much killing, theft, rape, and property destruction against those outside the tribe not having been considered punishable 'crimes'. Custodial Many punishments in traditional Melanesia had a less manifestly legal basis and were administered in a more ad hoc manner (pace Pospisil 1958: 238-43; cf. Moore 1978:24; Roberts 1979:1961-97). A commonly distinguishable class of these pertains to custodianship, there being special interest in a husband's control over his spouse(s), a wife's management of family affairs, the parents' and relatives' discipline of children, the elders' testing of initiates, and the application of group pressure on those held to require 'training' or correction. Bearing in mind variations, yet with typical expressions of requital in mind, we shall treat these features of custodial authority in turn. Acts of punishments by husbands and wives cannot really be properly understood without placing them against the broader sphere of sexual antagonisms. Male fear of female pollutions typically kept the living quarters of the two sexes apart, as has been well documented from as far apart as the Houailou of eastern New Caledonia to the Irian Jaya Mappi, who kept the work of male and female strictly separate and built the women's houses on long, high stilts (e.g. Leenhardt 1930: 6; Boelaars 1957: 41, plate opp. 64; 1981:49). In most (and therefore patrilineal) cases, women were suspected of potential disloyalty for 'marrying in' from an outside clan, radically subordinated to their husbands, if not treated as 'property' and pressed hard for their labour and childrearing (e.g. Brown and Buckbinder 1976; A. Strathern 1969; Glasse and Lindenbaum 1969; M. Strathern 1972a; 1982; Godelier 1972; Donaldson 1981; Pouwer 1984; van der Grijp 1984; Josephides 1985). In the shifts of military conflict, women were not only vulnerable targets from outside but sometimes dispensable from within. Even among the Kwaio of Malaita, for example, who have recently been compared so favourably with the neighbouring Lau for having no 'ideology of pollution . . . as an instrument of the exclusion, subordination and denigration of women', excuses were not uncommonly found to kill undesirable women, especially if it meant picking up a 'blood

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bounty' when military imbalances dictated eliminating one of their own number (Keesing 1982a: 224-27; cf. Maranda 1976: 177-85). Cases of more specifically sexual exploitation are also known: such as western Gulf concubinages (Holmes 1924: 64), Roviana prostitution (OT: Pratt 1978), Elema and Manus 'wife capture' (Williams 1930: 106, 144-45; Mead 1930: 147), Marind-Anim wife-lending (van Baal 1984), middle Ramu wifeswapping (Kasprus 1973: 80-81), and the bragging-based custom among young Kogu men of 'hunting' females for sexual intercourse (cf. Berndt 1962: 148-67). With this characteristic ethos, in which girls almost always 'waited in turn' to eat, or even to get married, as among the Mekeo (Mopio 1983: 8), or in which young boys were subjected to bloody circumcision to remove 'weakening female influences' as according to Chambri myth and ritual (Gewertz 1977: 173-75; 1982: 286-95; cf. Hogbin 1970; Meigs 1976 for variations), the harsh physical punishment of wives by husbands was bound to be common. Among highlanders it was almost universally assumed that men had the right to punish their wives for misdemeanours, most commonly by beating or slapping. Among the Kapauka, perhaps, the ideal husband was not to punish his wife physically but to reprimand instead; yet force was still an option, including wounding for serious offences, even killing in the case of adultery (Pospisil 1958: 167-72). If farther east, with the Bena(bena), only a minority of men acquire a reputation as wife-beaters (Langness 1972b: 176, cf. 1967: 161-77), 'wronged or suspicious husbands' among their Asaro/Gahuku-Gama neighbours were 'known to punish a wife by thrusting a stick into her vagina' (Read 1965:213; cf. 1967:191-206). These differences tell us to look for distinctions between more formally custodial, 'legal-looking' bases for husbands' punishment of their wives and informal, personal excuses used to legitimate male aggression. Some curious formalized inflictions arose from the nature of special community beliefs. Kapauka wives faced a beating, for instance, if they failed to report nightmares to their husbands before their first two menstruations (Pospisil 1958:237), since the men had to time their preparations for avoiding pollution. Others derive, however, from the general (though still in a broad sense religious) ethos in which 'female otherness' was subjected to masculine power (cf. de Beauvoir 1961). This male domination was instilled from childhood, when as one Buin informant put it, boys were quick to allege 'disgraceful things' of girls to justify physical beatings (OT: Nabnai 1983), on to the time of widowhood, when Wahgi women were struck hard by menfolk if they so much as raised their bowed heads from under the mourning bilum before the long period to lament their husband's deaths had elapsed (OT: Aipe 1975). That there are important connections between the punitive power of warrior males as spouses and the whole nexus of religion and externally

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directed violence we began exploring earlier is suggested by a mass of evidence, but rarely analysed in depth. Jan van Baal provides one exception in recent reflections on the intricacies of Marind-Anim tradition. He claims that male anger led men into headhunting but unconsciously rather than consciously because the fertility rites (which entailed ritual sodomy with young boys to generate their manhood, as well as subsequent excessive copulation with females) only 'rewarded them sparingly', with barrenness being all too common among the over-used women (1984). Whether we take or leave van Baal's interesting appeal to unconscious factors and their possible expression in ritual, what is important here is the end-product rationale, that Marind males could 'place' and give reasons for their aggressive acts towards both women and far-off human prey as necessary for fertility and group strength. Women, for their part, had almost as much manipulative power as males in a minority of societies (e.g. Mead 1938 for Arapesh polyandry; Weiner 1977 for the Trobriands; Kaniku 1989: 369-71 for Suau and Massim; Nash 1974: 5-75 on Nasioi), and they also had punitive power within situations of glaring inequality or sexual exclusion. Aside from opportunities for ritualized taunting between the sexes (as among the Solomonese Gari, see p. 30), women could withdraw their lives and productivity. Among the highland Melpa, for example, about whose women more than a usual amount has been written, female suicide commonly followed when both trouble with husband and with home kin (in her natal clan) cut off the avenues of succour; women usually killed themselves as an act of popokl (payback in anger) against their husbands, unless managing to poison them first! Such was an extreme recourse,13 whereas a more common recriminatory act against a husband was for a wife to nag, or stand over her cooking, exposing it to the 'dangerous pollutions' of her genitals (M. Strathern 1972a: 166, 183, 256; cf. Josephides 1982: 10-11, 42-44). If she has the sympathy of her parents, who had nonetheless received a brideprice which they would be under pressure to return, she might dare to run home (A. Strathern 1969). Many variations are known: including non-cooperation with husbands or male leaders to the point of gloating over their failures (cf. Burridge 1973: 89-90; Hallpike 1977: 144-45); exploiting fears of pollution, as 13

For other literature on suicide, see especially Pospisil 1958: 153-54 (Kapauka); Chowning 1971 (Sengseng); Hoskin, Friedman and Cawte 1969 (Arawe); Langness 1972b: 176 (Bena); Trompf and Aitsi, fieldnotes 1974-75 (Roro), cf. Parker and Burton-Bradley 1966: 1126. Note also Fortune 1932: 48-49 (female self-pity as payback, on Dobu); Reay 1959a: 17978, 198-202 (Wahgi); Johnson 1981: 332 (Gainj female suicides inter alia bringing disgrace on husbands); Counts (forthcoming) (suicide after wife beating among the Kaliai); and on harming oneself to show anger, among the Orokaiva, Schwimmer 1973: 202. See also Johnson 1981, and for suicide as revenge in general theory, Meerloo 1962: esp. 13 (on suicidalists enjoying contemplating a revengeful anticipated future), cf. Durkheim 1963.

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perhaps nowhere more strikingly illustrated than in the practice of Sengseng women (west New Britain) standing over their spouses to get their way (Chowning 1971); and maintaining the psychological sway of a group, as when Ye'in males (southern Irian Jaya) had to wade through many females to get their daily food in the cooking-house and thus felt disinclined to complain (Verschueren 1983). Not that we are to forget those cases when women were able to establish their own ground in spite of male hegemony, especially as child nurturers and caregivers. Recent work by the missionary anthropologist Hylkema shows this to be true even of a highland society, as among the Ngalum, in the Starr Mountains of Irian Jaya (1974: 194-236; cf. van Baal 1975: 102-09), where women's well-managed 'private units' become 'power bases', and thus psychological counterweights to masculine physical coercion. The love that could and did exist between a man and woman, let alone the sense of security that men were under social pressure not to harass women accepted into their own community (cf., e.g., Boelaars 1981:188; Strathern 1988:161), were parts of this counterbalancing. Parents of both sexes, or those who by adoption procedures were cast into parental roles, acted to discipline their children. Despite popular impressions of thoroughly spoilt children left by the writings of Margaret Mead (especially 1930: 25-44 on Manus daughters), punishments inflicted against children for culturally significant misdemeanours were generally harsh. A small child found to be crying in fright on a seagoing Roro canoe, for a good coastal example, would promptly be thrown into the sea—even if quickly recovered! (OT: Wani 1977); while in the highlands, parents from the Wahgi (and neighbouring Ni'i) tribes often punished their children for theft or destruction of relatives' property by tying them to a tree at night and denying them food (Paraka 1983: 4). Countless bits and pieces of data could corroborate this harshness, from Papua highland mothers characteristically biting at the arms of a bothersome two-year-old (Trompf, fieldnotes 1972; 1984-85) to the slicing of parts of fingers by irate Mekeo fathers who found their daughters eloping before their brothers were married (Mopio 1983: 8-9). In their traditional settings these stringencies prepared the young for the sharply defined regulations of survivalist, solidary units and for the realities of warriorhood culture. Margaret Mead once perceptively noted 'the balance between defence and attack' running 'through the whole upbringing' of the Iatmiil child, parental slaps without warning making children 'alert . . . to the slightest tensing of an adult's body' (1950: 105), and reinforcing common impressions of traditional Melanesian societies as inculcators of wariness, self-preservation, and group conformism. Under these general circumstances, and despite variation, we can expect the disciplining, even bullying of the initiated over the uninitiated (e.g. Mead 1935: 170-71 on the Chambri, 1950: 107-08), or the vocal encouragement

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of boys to carry on vigorously with a scrap (e.g. Langness 1965: 264; cf. OT: Rasinakafa 1978 on the Bena, although note Mead 1937: 32, 46 on the Arapesh). In this kind of ethos it will not be surprising to meet infanticide (e.g. Kasprus 1973: 85-86; Carter 1981: 110), the neglect of the unproductive child, such as those with Down's syndrome (Trompf, fieldnotes on the Mekeo, 1985), or the amputation of children's fingers in the mourning of the dead (e.g. Meggitt 1977: 106, 115 on the Mae Enga). Certainly childrearing was a preparation for orders of life in which violence was integral (cf. Miller 1987). Other custodial punishments figure in initiation procedures. Initiands entering male cults or warrior status could be put through the most arduous of tests, ridiculed and struck with rods by adults, and left for days to fend for themselves without food in the bush (e.g. Roberts 1977 on the Kiriaka, Bougainville), or virtually dehydrated before a blazing fire in the men's house (mid-Wahgi) (OT: Kuma 1976; cf. Strathern 1970a: 373-79; Lindergard [forthcoming]). In some cases the physical markings of initiation were punishment enough; Negrie circumcisers, for example, slicing the boy's penises open like sandwiches' and then binding them together with leaves to heal (and ofttimes fester!) over subsequent months (Gesch 1980). Something we learn from van Gennep (1960) and the Africanist Victor Turner (1969: 80-118) usually seems to apply here: in their liminality between childhood and a new status, initiands are tamed as if potentially dangerous, or at least as not-yet-worthy, likely to betray secrets, and too close to the women who brought them up (cf. Allen 1967). 'Novices' in fact, were often 'more-than-merely punished' at initiations, with the exaggeration of shame and scorn, scarification or wounding, even the occasional deaths of unacceptable youths being used to instil heinousness of infringing the rules of the 'jural groups'. To offset the potentially boundless callousness of initiations, however, it was common practice for the ritual custodians to be brought in from another (allied) tribe or clan (e.g. Williams 1928: 180-210; Jojoga 1983: 35-45 for the Orokaiva; Tobung 1977: 8-10 for the Tolai; Tuzin 1980: 62-63 for the Ilahita Arapesh, cf. la Fontaine, 1985; Herdt 1982 on others). Together with more obviously legal penalties, these custodial corrections all go to confirm how primary communities as a whole, as imaged in individual and clan consciousness, were invested with disciplining and punitive power. No more powerful pressure existed for preserving acceptable behaviour, it seems, than the prospect of shaming, or serious loss of face and prestige (cf. especially Hogbin 1946-47 on the Busamo; Valentine 1963 on the Lakalai). There were many verbal means of casting the shadow of shame as everyday censure: the disapprobation of elders and managers for not living up to one's obligations, rhetorical jibes and the pointed use of

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proverbs by parents against their children, and also gossip. Sometimes acts spoke louder than words: a young Motuan who showed fear while hunting, for instance, perhaps retreating from the charge of a wild boar, would soon find his fishing net cut up by chiefs and clan elders (OT: Kopi 1976). Nothing was worse, however, than shame 'by public reprimand', which was one common instrument of distinctly legal punishment. Lasting 'for several days', for Kapauka wrongdoers it was thought 'much worse than anything except capital punishment', and out of the 176 adjudications Pospisil cites, 24—the most important being in response to disobedience in war—had public reprimand as their sanction (1967b: 38, cf. 1958: 236, 245). The curse of an elder, often an uncle or aunt (the former commonly being connected with initiation) was an individual act of shaming and 'magical justice' particularly dreaded in various cultures (e.g. Wagner 1967: 63; Kilangit 1976; cf. Crawley 1934; Winans and Edgerton, 1964: 749). In other circumstances shame befell persons because of their status or condition. Initiands, for example, were sometimes conceived to be 'halfshamed', as were those Marind-Anim boys who, ritually sodomized by warriors and painted black, had to wait in seclusion before being 'reborn' a man (van Baal 1966: 671). The insufficiently unproductive, too, faced shame in another kind of liminal situation at their deaths. Tolai men dreaded the shame brought by spirits and their surviving fellows alike if they had not accumulated enough rings of tambu (shell-money) for wealth distribution at their funerals. Such 'a travesty' was 'worth punishment by the ancestors, and one's body left unburied for the dogs' (ToVaninara 1979: 35-37; Trompf 1980b: 7). And being sick could also amount to the experience of shame, especially following the theft of fruit from a clansman's tree that had already been bespelled for protection (OT: Leona 1973 on the Aroma-Velerupu). The dialectics of shame, we should summarize, are only superficially simple. On the one hand, it was a 'consequence' of one's dereliction, or of social attitudes however justifiable; on the other hand, it could itself be turned into a reason for shaming those who inflicted so depressing a consequence. Suicides could thus combine self-punishment for the loss of 'esteem-sustaining roles' with a shaming of one's deprecators (cf. Hoskin et al. 1969: 204-05 on the Arawe). One intriguing redeployment of shame among the Orokaiva groupings, further, was for a person feeling unjustly treated to take more and more of it (meh) upon oneself, deliberately forcing out of others a sense of pity and obligation (OT: Jojoga 1983). That only goes to show that shame was intuited to operate in a world of working calculations and equivalences, and that it is one weighting in a constant flow of interactions involving productivity and its material effects, the social and psychological relations between people, and the alleged influences of occult powers. Undoubtedly, though, when members of

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traditional Melanesian societies appealed to insights that gathered various levels or types of punishment into the one sense of effect on individual or group wrongdoers, it is usually best translated as shame, denoting in relations between warring groups and not just within solidary communities the very tearfulness of social rejection in a survivalist world. Personally redressive and other We use the term 'redress' here to cover other expressions of punishment that are neither clearly legal nor custodial, which were the informal, frequently spontaneous means by which individuals or groups sought redress against wrong or (more often) 'hurt' within security circles. Oneto-one conflict was common among siblings and younger-men competing for prestige and women. Resorting to fisticuffs or staves in such conflict as an extension of childhood struggles was the most typical course of 'selfhelp' redress, but there were also ritual procedures for adults. Duelling was not affordable, although it was known to preface and substitute for tribal warfare, as among the Mae Enga, Arawe-Kandrian, and Kukukuku (Meggitt 1977: 18-19; Todd 1934: 193; Simpson 1962: 73-75), yet mock fighting and ceremonious assaults were very common. An aggrieved Huli warrior, for instance, would carry learnt curses and imprecations to his adversary and challenge him to a joint oath. If taken up, they would slap each other's faces with pork, exclaiming 'If I lie, may my eyes be blinded, my hearing fail, my skin become dry and my penis fall off!' (Glasse 1965: 40). For the Wahgi the comparable phenomenon was a formalized, mutual shinkicking (Reay 1974:203), while with the Toaripi, the two parties would start by verbally abusing each other's feet and then proceed upwards (OTs: Brown 1976; Knight 1977, cf. Lawrence 1970: 45; Sack 1972b on related matters). Almost ritually restrained expressions of group redress within clans and tribes were also known, homicide being deliberately avoided. In such conflict, for example, the Kapauka handled sticks only, not weapons of war (Pospisil 1958: 108-09), and among the Mae Enga a rowdy group intrusion by one fraternal clan on another, with the singing of boastful, insinuating songs, came with an understanding that inflicting a wound on one or two of the offending side was enough to make the serious point (Meggitt 1977: 29-31). As will now be manifest, one of the consequences of the more rule-bound, stringent mentalites of pre-contact Melanesian life was that conflicts within primary communities tended to be articulated more publicly, ostentatiously, ritualistically, and generally more physically than one finds with the 'Christian'/'law-and-order' balance of forces common in the West (and now emergent in Melanesia today). Put warily, traditional internal disputing

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in Melanesian communities did not tend to fester under the surface, and was more often than not literally bellowed and screeched through towards a resolution in the open. Who needs reminding at this stage, however, that all those more personally redressive outbursts or enunciations of negative payback, or those not clearly governed by legal and custodial sanctions were bound up with life's daily vicissitudes,, with the never-ceasing impulses of social dynamics in small settlements, and with community temperament in general? Thus, distinctions require to be drawn: first, between what is more a 'private domain', involving ongoing tensions between families or individuals (who often 'represent' them), and the meting out of penalties that a community as a whole might ('in principle') be expected to have an interest in. That hazy line between a well-grounded (let us say 'justifiable') exercise in retaliation, moreover, and counter-blasts of ill-will or recurrently ill-tempered dispositions is one the researcher can only delineate adequately with the deepest experience. One has to discover by dayto-day involvement in a community who are the cantankerous individuals, which coteries might be bent on exploiting regulations to their own ends, and even whether, as the Tongan Hau'ofa asked of Mekeo society as a whole, there is a chain of repressiveness by which the young, the inexperienced, the less influential or entitled, as well as the over-confident, are put down with characteristic acrimony (1981: 5; cf. Beteille 1969: 365-66). Some methodological strains will be felt by fieldworkers in this connection. In writing about temperament much will depend on how welcoming the people are to the outside investigator, or how the researcher takes to the people. On the one hand, also, there is the pull to romanticize apparent egalitarianism in primal societies (thus Mead 1937, yet cf. Pospisil 1963a; Strathern 1982b), and on the other to lament the impoverishment of societies that lack phrases for saying 'sorry' or 'thank you'. More to the point of this study is the problem of developing a diachronic perspective on negative payback through oral historical investigation. What anthropologists tell us about the propensity to cherish a grudge or quarrel, for instance, as reported of the Muyu and Sengseng respectively (van Baal 1966: 694; Chowning 1974:153), or a general absence of the forgiving spirit among the Ambrym, Vanuatu (Tonkinson 1981:82), may tell us more about relative disintegration in post-contact times than situations in what were previously more cohesive societies. Paying back animals and things What of non-human parts of the cosmos? Were they also the objects of antagonism and retaliation? After all, were not the material tokens of group wealth indices of social (including spiritual) relations? Certainly, when

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enemies were being assaulted, it was just as likely that their property and livestock would suffer, too. But then, such destructiveness was an indirect method of paying back humans. Admittedly, too, pigs both wild and domesticated, or even taro, as with the Orokaiva, were cut up as Victims', even ones with which the slayers could identify themselves for gift-giving purposes (Schwimmer 1973:114,138); yet that only confirms that such nonhuman objects are being made to stand for something in human interactions. And in such a ritual as the Mae Enga mena lyaanya pingi, when a large pig was hit on the snout by a bespelled club to drive off a ghost believed to cause sickness, the beast was 'equated' with an inimical spirit, like an Azazel in the desert (Brennan 1977: 42; cf. also Schwimmer 1973: 139-41). What of situations, however, in which animals or creatures killed or harmed humans? One will look for set attitudes in vain, as so much depends on individual or hunting-party reactions. Bitten by a snake, it will depend on the state of a man or the extent of the sufferer's ire, as to whether he chooses to pursue it and wreak vengeance. One of my Chimbu informants even derided me when I asked if a wild pig who killed someone would be hunted down in reprisal like a human enemy. Associations were not made like that, although he conceded parallels were occasionally drawn between humans and either pigs or dogs, since 'they come in from different areas, face one another, fight, and then go back to the place from whence they came' (OT: Nam 1984). Here we note that, according to some cultural outlooks, animals were recognized as getting their own back on humans (cf. Schieffelin 1984:1-14 on the Bosavi), and widespread in rural Melanesia to this day is primal resistantialisme, or the notion that objects can actively hurt one, as is nicely illustrated by the Papua New Guinea pidgin phrase that something 'fights' you (i paitim yu) if you bump into it. All these caveats and related matters aside, however, there are various cases of 'reprisals against things' that are distinctively enough focused on objects themselves to bear interest, although these cases are still displacements for acting upon humans in one way or another. A small host of minor episodes ought not to go unacknowledged. A mother from the Murik Lakes area (coastal Sepik) firmly touched the hard object that brought pain to her child, so dispossessing it of power (OT: Tamoane 1977); a beautifully decorated Buna dancer was found by a missionary at Marienburg (on the Sepik River) to be kicking a stone in anger for a good five minutes, because he had 'accidentally' spoilt his decorations by falling over it (OT: Tschauder 1976). Here there is a projection and reification of responsibility or culpability outside human purposes, a propensity also exemplified by the destruction of the property of the dead, as among the Manus (see chapter 8), or of an evildoer, as among the Tolai (Sack 1974a: 88-89). Opportunities to redirect one's anger away from another community member, as with an Ilahita Arapesh woman's right to uproot part of an offending daughterin-law's garden (Tuzin 1976: 152), are also relevant here.

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One of the earliest recorded ritual scenarios of Melanesia, fascinatingly, concerns an assault on things, and helps tie up the threads of this chapter for involving military action as well as punishment and shame. At the death of a Baled chief (on northeast New Caledonia), especially if it has occurred in wartime, 'social shame' and an 'unbounded desire for vengeance' came together. The shame led the clan(s) most affected to self-inflicted wounding and the destruction of their most precious possessions, a punishment taken on collectively for not having prevented such a calamity, and one in demonstration of intense sorrow. More interesting still, the crippling commemorative rites held by the host tribe (to which the chief had belonged) permitted bands of visitors, especially the clansmen of the chief's maternal relations, to ravage the trees and gardens of the hosts, who had to provide for their guests! (Leconte 1847: 843-44, cf. de Rochas 1862; Leenhardt 1930: 81, 85; Douglas 1970: 189-90). So strange a series of onslaughts on non-human objects, however, still lies quite inseparable from the complex of human-to-human interactions that help explain it, and it is apparent that both the material losses soon to be felt by the bereaved, and the future dependence they would have on their (allied) guests, would make their quest to avenge the chief's death all the more intransigent. Here we find a kind of displacement of (self-)amputation in a mourning rite, and here it is symptomatic, as are virtually all the acts of requital we have been documenting, of a characteristic impetus in traditional Melanesian religions to 'cover' and 'satisfy' loss or wrong. Overall, as our survey intends to show, group complexes of thought and action seeking to bring about revenge or requital in traditional Melanesia do not lack rational coherence and, as we are beginning to demonstrate, reasons for negative payback hang together in readily decipherable logics of retribution. Not all the members of each small-scale society comprehended the consensus logic in its inherited complexity—for that required specialization or initiation—but group-consciousness was determined by the general range of 'agreed possibilities' covered in a working (if commonly loose) system. In that sense 'ethics' and 'religion' were utterly enmeshed in intelligible 'cultural statements' (of 'who we are', 'what we think and do'), so that institutions and behaviour patterns did have a reason for being and were placeable in an accepted world of meanings. It may appear novel anthropologically that motives, reasons, and social contexts for reprisal and punishment be treated as filaments of religion, religion often having been cut down to 'ritual' or 'beliefs about spirits' or considered too elusive for social scientists to pinpoint. It is precisely because the management of serious delicts, tabu breakage, sexual and structural tensions have to do with 'ancestral inheritances', however, because shame in Melanesia has as comparable an importance as guilt in the JudaeoChristian-Islamic trajectory, and because inter-group violence and sorcery

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were reinforced by ideas about spirit realms, that the logics of retribution conceptually reflecting them must be examined under the rubric of religious phenomenology. Of course there will be loose ends. A crude identification of such logics with religion, for example, will not wash; as if every little expression of spite on the rebound should be explained as being in some sense 'religious' (see chapter 2). It is being argued, rather, that religion is the best frame of reference for understanding the multifaceted expressions of these logics. These logics shed crucial light on what is distinctive about traditional Melanesian religions. They explain the purposive bases of negative payback—the killing of the enemy or stranger as someone not rating 'social or moral personhood' (Barth 1975:153, cf. Read 1955), or the rigidly applied exercise of a punitive regimen—as the pressing necessity in a survivalist situation to eliminate what is ostensibly or potentially destructive of one's solidary group. It may be that in certain situations the immediate requirement to punish took precedence over the impetus to fight. If, for example, a senior Mekeo peace-chief seeking to quell armed conflict between two clans had his lime-pot knocked from his hands, the warrior culpable would be beaten to death by members from either party (Hau'ofa and Trompf 1974: 234). But the basic necessity remained. Traditional Melanesian societies, admittedly, may have managed with varying measures of destructive energies within their own ranks; yet, on balance, group-survival depended on channelling all these things—sorcery, jealousy, resentment, lust for power, cruelty, wariness of pollution, and so forth—for the value and continuance of the primary community, and thus for 'Life against Death' in a 'total' rather than merely ethological or economic sense (cf. Brown 1959). In this orientation primal peoples were no more or less innately 'savage' than so-called 'moderns', nor by dint of some intrinsically different psychic make-up more open to the realms of the unconscious, or less rational; it is just that their logics of retribution were more naively honest and less reflectively rationalized, and more unrestrained in their permissions for drastic action, than modern states or urbanized communities would tolerate as public policy. These points of comparison have a great deal to do with the history of consciousness (cf. Parts II—III): not a history, however, in which Melanesians have to be placed in a condition of barely awakening consciousness at the start of a long journey towards Selbsbewusstsein. Rather it is a history in which premises, axioms, and frames of reference for appropriate behaviour can differ while the essential human mode of 'exacting negative payback for culture-specific reasons' remains intact, at least since the beginning of recorded time (cf. Trompf 1990c: 129-33).

CHAPTER 2

Reciprocity

Negative payback, as thought and action, does not exhaust the scope of retributive logic and its practical implications. Melanesians reward and forgive as well as punish and avenge, and they are famed for their reciprocal principles of exchange and sacrificial generosity; so, it now bears looking at the other face of the coin. An adequate examination will be arduous, however, not only because the relevant material continues to be complex and unmanageable, but also because the coin of retributive logic can be flipped between 'heads and tails' more easily than we might have imagined, so that punishments (such as those brought upon a child) may be rewards in the long run, while rewards (as in sumptuous presentations of food, among the Massim, for example) may be signs of aggression or of the desire to be magister (Young 1971; cf. Serpenti 1977: 217-64 on the Kolepom). In an enterprise already too daring, we must needs play the game of hermeneutics very cautiously indeed. Concessions for peace: gifts for alliance Peace-making makes a good starting-point, since the concession to arrest fragrant war has at least potentially far-reaching consequences for whole groups. A moot point though it is as to whether traditional revenge warfare could ever be 'finally closed' between long-standing enemy groups; most cultures had devices to bring about at least the temporary halt to hostilities. A compensation payment in valuables could be accepted as covering a death the responsible tribe itself considered unfortunate (thus, the Wahgi, OT: Tongil 1975; Paraka 1983), and a retribution killing left as 'justified' if both sides admitted that an actual 'culprit' in a recent killing or violation had 97

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been despatched (as on Choiseul, cf. Scheffler 1964: 796). Other courses of action brought short-term respite from fighting: fraternizations by affinal relatives from opposing sides; invitations to feasts (cf. Maralis 1981: 9697 on the Nalik); 'peace piping' of local tobacco, as among the Fuyughe (Trompf 1981: 36-38, 57); betel-nut chewing between Massim field-battles (Young 1977: 136-37); displaying a broken bow, tied with the 'cordyline of peace' in common Malekula fight-grounds (Deacon 1934: 223-24), and even, so the early documentation of an unplaced Papuan practice has it, the waving of 'greenboughs' of truce (Spencer 1883: 22). With the logic of action in view, it is significant that one side in a given war often pressed for peace because they were winning decisively, thus making their enemies (who longed for vengeance or a 'just balance') feel all the more intimidated. This applied with a peace-making ceremony I witnessed near Kup in 1976, for example, involving the Kumai and Endugla tribes at the Wahgi-Chimbu boundary. The Kumai had the advantage; so, their warriors ate and drank the 'food of peace' bespelled by the magicians and, after acting out some mock belligerence, they wrapped up their weapons in the men's house. The Endugla, learning of Kumai designs, were meant to be going through exactly the same motions at virtually the same time; but they did not, and had no intention of appearing on the morning of reconciliation because they had just lost three good men. Although risking loss of face, the Kumai could be less care-bound, fill their stomachs and pay off warrior allies. Besides, making peace was not a tiresome prospect, since other ceremonials could be used for the purpose, one involving open encounter, for example, when sub-clans staged mock fights closer and closer to a boundary zone, and later listened to speeches and received pork distributed between both sides (Kerpi 1975: 21). Peace-making, we find, demanded some effort at concession to the other side, so the losers found it the harder to make sacrifices. Logically, the loser was never to forget the task of avenging, while logically, if one had more than requited the enemy (and did not want to provide more reasons for vindictivenessl), it was time for constraint. Prehistoric instances of unrestrained expansionism there surely were (see chapter 1), but in documented pre-contact times, groups over-excelling as victors were often ready to be pliable. A few exceptions aside—such as the war-exhausted Chambri, who were pushed out of the river flats by the Iatmiil until Pax Australiana redeemed their lot (Mead 1935: 182; 1950: 107; cf. Seligmann 1910: 196; Thurnwald 1934 for other cases)—tribal war-units usually saw the unwisdom of excess, halting hostilities before alienating all their neighbours. Sometimes restraint showed because of the nature of a prize; when a clan chief (sera) was captured among the Waropen, for example, his captors would favour a rich ransom over his killing (Held 1957: 224-25; cf. Layard 1942: 10 on Malekula). Sometimes geoclimatic factors made war only

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seasonable: during the morau im paun, the period of turbulent weather between April and September, offshore island and hinterland groups on northern Manus refrained from cultivating warlikeness (King 1978: 46-47). In odd places, excessive aggrandizement brought on shame (or guilt), which with the Orokaivan Jaua actually led to migrations of contrition (Jojoga 1981b). Consummate peace, to take another possibility, could allow the dominant force to dictate a peace policy that entailed intermarriages with the losers. Such was the case with the triumphant Ikaroa Raepa, the Papuan 'Ned Kelly' made impervious by his armour of thick bark. Ikaroa made a marriage peace with the Moripi after carving out a large territory for the western Mekeo, although in so doing he set the stage for the severe reversal to come after his death, when his own descendants were driven out (Trompf 1977a: 34-35). Victory, then, was always assessed for its consequences, and often carried with it the logic (or pragmatic sensibleness) of concessions towards enemies and rewards for active supporters. In so far as such assessments were made in terms of a blood feud, entailed collective ethical decisions, and issued in rite or culturally formalized behaviour, they constitute religious data. Already there have been many hints that the sphere of war and peace bears an important, if antiphonal relation to that of exchange and gift-giving. They are two spheres of payback or retribution, the one more focused on recrimination and the other on reciprocity. With ethico-religious issues in mind, an analysis of reciprocal principle and action is best begun with its inter- as against intra- community realizations, and with 'economic acts' that are the most extravagantly concessive. I think of various pig-killing and grand food ceremonies in which hosts heap gifts upon guests from other tribes with apparent excess and no guarantee of repayment. At the spectacular Wahgi Kongar festival in the central New Guinea highlands, for example, or at its Chimbu counterpart, the Bugla Yungga, guests from other tribes rarely bring gifts to the ceremonial grounds. It is for the hosts (a given tribe whose clans enact the rites simultaneously in different singsing compounds) to do the giving. When the pigs are killed in hundreds on the last of three crucial days, the meat is carried away by the visitors. But this magnanimity is preceded on the second day by a fantastic demonstration of the host tribe's vitality, by its richly decorated dancing warriors, and by a pandemonium-like burst of tribal ferocity (plate 3). If this last action is an explicit reminder that the hosts are exceptionally dangerous and best kept as friends, the whole scenario implies cultural aggressiveness and, thus, a planned verisimilitude of unconditional generosity. The very sumptuousness of the ceremony is meant to 'wound' the visitors, who must ask themselves whether they can possibly emulate the celebrants or do better; and the exhibition of power will 'prove' to the hosts' own ancestors (usually thought to watch from a small 'grandstand'

As part of the ceremonial prelude to a Kongar, a mid-Wahgi warrior begins a mock attack on visitors, 1973. (photo: Trompf)

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called bolimgar) that their tribe is flourishing and desires continual life. Not anyone, of course, was invited to a Kongar; consistent enemies were excluded, in contrast with tribes wooed as allies or those expected to return the invitation. In the moment of truth, though, when the pigs are lined in hundreds, squealing before their slaughterers one by one, and when the taste of freshly cooked pork is on one's lips, all this is nothing more nor less than an immense gift, the reward received from seven to twenty long years of others' labours. It is like the black Australian's totem, regenerated by its soul-mates every year, but eaten only by the other clans, who have done so little to keep it alive (Trompf fieldnotes 1974-80; cf. 1979:130; 1987: 156-58; Luzbetak 1954; Reay 1959a: 20-23,97-104,141-42,290-96; 1974:205; O'Hanlon 1989). Edward Schieffelin once suggested to me that the great Melanesian ceremonies were 'modes of philosophic reflection' acted out rather than written (cf. also 1977: 211). Certainly, there is a sense in which the Kongar elevates thinking about giving and receiving to a plane beyond the routine reciprocations, akin to the way 'aristocratic' ritualized Kula presentations by chiefs surpass the humdrum gimwali exchange in the Kula Ring trade of Papua (Malinowski 1922: 95, 189-94, 473; Strathern 1983). Since Melanesian 'social life' was such 'a constant give-and-take' (thus Mauss 1967: 27), admittedly, one expects to find cultures in which the excitement of exchange is gathered up to a point of culmination (as with the Mae Enga Te or Melpa Moka) (cf. especially Lacey 1973; Strathern 1971). But when sheer giving marks the ceremonial highpoint, we can the more easily detect the presence of shared values such as prestige, honour, magnanimity, spirit-power, 'total' (and therefore more-than-physical) prosperity, which are rated above material objects and mere bargaining techniques, and which the concessions of gift-giving themselves symbolize. Indeed, in the Kongar, and comparable occasions of one-sided generosity found elsewhere (the western Fuyughe Gab(e) in the Papuan highlands [see plate 4], the Yombi Maghal or the Kaupena Mahal in the southern highlands, the Atzera Kras on the Morobe plains, and many more), one finds an incipient 'theology of grace'. The great Wahgi pig-kill is inconceivable without the ancestors, who are part of the community; so, what is given amounts to the benefits of the spirits as well as the living. In as much as this grace is mediated by struggling humans, of course, giving was tempered by selfinterest and the competitive spirit, let alone the common fear of humiliation if one's family or group failed to meet their obligations as contributors. Giving, too, was to win friendship. Since bonds of cooperation were cultivated between allied tribes, the recipients of the pork and food included many relatives by marriage (or affines); and in any case the allies invited to such an event as the Kongar soon feel the weight of their obligations to return the invitation (Trompf, fieldnotes 1974-77; cf. especially Schmitz

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At a Fuyughe 'pig-kill', the slaughtered beasts are lined up after the dance. Taken at Ononghe, in about 1920, this is perhaps the earliest photograph of a Melanesian pig-killing ceremony, (photo: Dubuy) 1959; Eyde 1959,1967; Ryan 1961; Ploeg 1973; Groves 1982; Gregory 1982:61). But the realities of granting or receiving great concessions and generosity in a world better known for balanced give-and-take remained highly significant, as surprising, excessive gratuities of Life (cf. Mantovani 1977; Gesch 1990). Being unable to encompass here the complexities of a thousand indigenous exchange systems, or of different peace ceremonies, it suffices to reflect here on the counterpoised, yet paradoxically binary relationship between giving and revenge. As much as they are distinct in their consequences, it is characteristically Melanesian to conceive them as a totality, or as the two faces of payback. Although outside interpreters tend to box them separately—under 'warfare' and 'Stone Age economics' (cf., e.g., Sahlins 1972; MacCormack 1975; Schwimmer 1979; cf. Hallpike 1975)—and usually treat both as secular, the 'autochthonous outlooks' of traditional Melanesia invariably hold them together in religious frames of reference. The configurational paralleling between negative and positive requitals may owe itself to unconscious factors (cf. Pouwer 1974), yet of still greater importance is the common feature of costing, or finding reasons for either taking initiatives or holding back. It is precisely through the investigation of consensus assessments of both military and economic situations, and of the rationale for acting one way or another upon them, that the centrality of religion becomes ever apparent.

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Some anthropologists will baulk at my reference to religion in this context. 'Give-and-take' they might argue, is 'just life' (with a small T ) , socioeconomic life at the most, the usage 'religion' being an alien, inapplicable Western category (Sillitoe 1979; cf. Meigs 1984). That reaction, however, usually results from following too limited a definition of religion, and can even stem from researchers' real relief that traditional Melanesia does not have the kinds of religious structures they spurned back home, and that indigenous exchange systems, however ceremonialized, might as well be dubbed 'secular' (e.g. Lawrence and Meggitt 1965: 19-20, 24, yet cf. Chowning 1975: 91-102; Trompf 1991: 63-65). The most perceptive analysts, however, have begun to sense how socioeconomic reciprocities have been an integral part and indicator of a general outlook on the world, or of a whole bundle of serious practical concerns that can only be ripped apart from ritual life and explicit references to the spirit-order through sheer arbitrariness (cf., e.g., LeRoy 1975; Schieffelin 1990). Divaricating economics and religion in traditional Melanesia, in fact, like separating religion from the artifices and rationale of war, entails the unworkable disengagement of religion from ethics, norm confirmation, behaviour patterning, and the encultured 'ground rules' of interpersonal relations. Certainly, the so-called 'cargo cults' (see Part II) would be inexplicable without grasping the prevenient interrelation between religion and economics in traditional society and the endemic (primal) assumption that material well-being and surfeit are the signals of spirit support and human right-doing (Trompf 1988a: 208-12). In 'concretizing religion' and 'spiritualizing economies', Melanesians arguably achieved an integration between 'spirit' and 'physical environment' that forms of world-denigrating religion have tended to preclude. In that sense one can fairly talk of Melanesian 'materialism' as a prevailing ideo-religious 'complex', though bearing in mind the predominance of wealth distribution over accumulation and 'primitive capitalism', and relative egalitarianism over the fulfilment of rulers' sumptuary wants (Pospisil 1963b: 3; Sahlins 1963; cf. Epstein 1968). Rubel and Rosman put it all quite sanely (despite their heavily LeviStraussian approach) when epitomizing various ceremonies of remarkable prestation and magnanimity through northwest Papua New Guinea. They rate 'large-scale ceremonial distributions' as 'total social phenomena', manifesting the complex 'interplay' between 'kinship and marriage [since hosts and guests may be clinching marriage arrangements within the context of peak celebrations], the nature of political leadership, the economic structure, and the religious and symbolic systems' (1978: 1). The operative word being 'total' (hailing from Mauss), one might as well press further to defend the appropriateness of 'religion' as the term covering the existential and group struggle to 'make do' and be empowered

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materially—though not eo ipso every economic artefact, exchange item, and the bare bones of economic transactions as well!—and to locate the concessive reciprocal, donative, and sacrificial elements in this struggle as positive aspects of the whole complex (cf. Thompson 1987 for a comparable approach). There is no category mistake here. My approach reorients anthropological 'materials' in accordance with the understanding of Melanesians themselves, impressive scholars among them. Even despite the absence of its lexical equivalent in a thousand local vocabularies, 'religion' describes the conceptual and motivational webbing that holds material subsistence and social dynamics into a working (but not particularly systematic) coherence, with the men and women involved assuming or appealing to the involvement of more-than-ordinarily-human agents in their affairs. It is not being pretended here, however, that a host of minor exchanges (at least in themselves) were all somehow 'significant religious moments' for their participants. Whether they were such depended on culture and situation. Take, for instance, trading arrangements. Motuan traders on Hiri expeditions to the Papuan Gulf, for one set of arrangements, were basically concerned to exchange their pots for sago, but on arrival ashore their first move was respectfully to enter the great cathedral-like dubu house—as a gesture to their Elema hosts' gods and practices. It was through these reciprocities that the Motu and Elema came to have two deities, Semese and Kaivakuku, in common (OT: Rearea elders, 1977; Guilliam 1982). When Wahgi warriors trek to trading points in the Jimi Valley, by contrast, a comparable protocol was absent, yet high prices were paid nonetheless for magical spells and items (Trompf, fieldnotes 1975-76). Trading, however, as well as a multitude of minor transactions within and without one's group, were not taken in isolation. A larger network was always revealing itself, until some higher, collective, and momentous ceremonial occasion fully disclosed it, and gave summation and cosmic meaning to every small interchange. It is much less true that 'traditional cosmic systems' stand apart for ready observation (thus Lawrence 1984: 1-7, 200) than that they are inseparable from the drive of wealth, abundance, fertility, and material strength. This inextricability confirms what also applies to most other primal traditions around the globe, that Melanesian ways of life present themselves above all as 'prosperity religions', periodically centred on a cultus, a 'cult' of transactions between humans, and between humans and spirits, climaxing in displayed excess of food or livestock (Trompf 1988a; cf. also Eliade 1958a: 265-366). Such 'cults', though, however concessive, are operated to acquire that very same strength meant to be secured by warrior action against enemies, and there may still be an element of puzzle as to why either positive reciprocities or the negativities of war should be dubbed 'religious'. After

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all, why write off 'secular' features? Or why not view war, sorcery, and economic transactions as 'power struggles', or law as 'social control', for which religion is rationalization and of merely epiphenomenal significance? Why not treat the manifestations of retributive logic more as social psychological realities in their own right rather than as expressions of religion? The answer simply is that this does not do justice to any Melanesian people I know. As anti-religious tilting, it would mock them; as a methodological ploy for social scientists it would be reductionist (Trompf 1990c: 62, 68, 74, 124-28). It will not do, for example, to declare the Melpa Moka ceremony basically an 'economic' and 'secular' affair because the only 'apparently religious' sides to it were a prefatorial 'sacrifice of pigs . . . at the clan cemetery', and a bigman's request to the ancestors 'for success i n . . . ceremonial exchange' (Strathern 1970b: 573, cf. Tine 1984: 4 on the Wahgi). A totality is at stake; and to pass decisions over any complex of reciprocity that 'this part is purely economic', 'that part religious', and other components 'political' or 'secular', only brings scissors to the seamless fabric of traditional society. Divorcing 'religion' (as propitiation of deities, prayer, and so on) from both 'magic' and 'work with one's own power' (so Malinowski 1948: 51, 60, 67; cf. 1965: 70, 238-39), moreover, or the 'secular' from the 'ritualized' (Keesing 1982a: 169), or even for that matter the 'sacred' from the 'profane' (Durkheim 1915; Eliade 1959), all likewise present problems for preserving the sense of a shared, total vision of life. I suspect the 'ancestral ways' conceived as a whole (in Papua New Guinea pidgin as pasin bilong tumbuna) come nearest to preserving this 'wholeness', this indigenous recognition that one's whole culture is permeated with spirit-based significances, which we seek to encapsulate. Of course, one can hardly be criticized for noticing aspects of a culture that anticipate later shifts towards secularization (and, thus, the practices of 'modernizing' economics and politics in colonial and post-colonial contexts). One can hardly quarrel, either, with an intelligent noting of the more secular-looking features of a culture. Take Daniel Shaw's analyses of the Samo expeditions into the territories of their Kubo and Bibo neighbours to the north and of the plateau-dwelling Biami to the south (Western Province, Papua). In that these incursions are prepared for by elaborate ritual, they are neither merely boisterous economic ventures advertising the peaceful desire to trade, nor underhand military exercises (for the expedition members were always on the lookout for cannibal victims). On the other hand, Shaw is right in concluding that the Samo present an unusual case in the ethnography of cannibalism; they hunted down outsiders only for meat and thus, in this particular respect, leave an interesting impression of secularity (1976; 1990: 144-54 and OT: 1983; cf. also Woods 1982 on the Kumula). By the same token, ethnography can be forgiven for commenting on the

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unexpectedly 'secular' dimensions of some quite obviously religious activities. The distribution of a dead person's valuables during mortuary rites, a common Melanesian phenomenon (Barraud et al. 1984: 441-56; yet cf. Bateson 1958: 48), is a case in point. Consider the Matangkor tribes on Los Negros Island (Manus), for example, who send gifts back to a deceased man's maternal aunt and her family. Because marriages are inter-tribal or exogamous, this means the distribution of these gifts is among outsiders. No one should miss that this practice cemented what to such tribes as the Loniu, Naringel, and Mokereng were absolutely invaluable alliances, and that the whole process will smack of politics. For the Loniu and their like, however, singling this 'political' compartment out from a wider understanding of survival and group identity rather misses the point. Sending the gifts in this fashion, for a start, comes from a concern to honour and protect the dead man, because outside forces could disturb him in his postmortem state. Indeed, a great worry was not that living persons outside the clan could cause an upset, but that someone already dead in another clan who, feeling his people had been badly done by in the distribution, might be angered enough to kill the deceased's freshly departed spirit (OTs: T. Polume 1982; 1989; S. Polume 1983; Kolowan 1983). One may still be left deciding which factors are more important here, and whether distinctly 'religious beliefs' are primary or secondary, but for a Loniu all is enmeshed and logically at one. To unyoke wealth distribution, military alliance, the proper disposal of the dead, and assumptions about spiritual activity is for them just an academic exercise. Comparable cross-cutting phenomena are innumerable. If harvesting can be part of sacred festivals (as in the Ngaing Kabu> Taiora Orana ceremonies, and the like), ritual objects can be sold in bits and pieces to make wealth (or mis, to cite a key purpose for the Mandak malangan masks of New Ireland) (Lawrence 1964a: 16-19; Unero 1977; Brower 1980: 161-13). And, as more research reveals, social structures can no longer be interpreted sui generis, but need to be related to myth, totem, ancestral and generative spirits, ceremonial groupings, and so on, in each case (e.g. Scheffler 1965: 244-56; Forge 1972: 531; Gewertz 1983; Gesch 1981; Keesing 1982a: 75-111, cf. Levi-Strauss 1970: 312-32). Certain hermeneutical adjustments have already been made, then, which anticipate my call here for both a non-compartmentalized and 'emic' approach to traditional Melanesia (cf. Platvoet 1982: 16-17). The thematic rubric we term retributive logic is but one handle upon this methodology to absorb and distil complex intersections within culture and indigenous consciousness. In the task to develop a 'holistic' approach, clarity may well suffer; yet, to convey reality, unfortunately, 'clarity is not enough' (Lewis 1963), and the evocation of such 'slippery customers' as feeling, emotion, and effervescence should never be baulked.

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These arguments can be further developed by examining the phenomena of 'compensation', an element once again linking the spheres of retaliation and economic exchange through the group accounting of scores, obligations, debts, and expected returns. 'Compensation' 'Compensation', a word deriving from the Latin compensatio, denotes the giving of an appropriate 'equivalence' to make amends either for wrongdoing or for being forced to deprive someone of their life and liberty. In legal terms it means the attempt or requirement to 'make up' for an illicit deed or 'give back' an equivalent of what has been unlawfully 'taken'; while in the context of warfare, compensation refers to payments (in kind or money) to the wives and families whose spouses or male members have been victims on the battlefield (Brand 1968 for background). Compensation of the first kind, as fines or penalties usually applying within the security circle, has already had space under the heading of punishment, although we cannot presume such concessions were always forced out of a wrongdoer, since they could also spring from a person's feelings of remorse for having violated rule and custom. For better comprehension, however, this first kind is better termed 'restitution' (M. Strathern 1972b: 25). As to the second kind, any followers of contemporary news reports in Melanesia will hear next to nothing about a company of fighters paying back its own allies, and would be excused for forming the opinion that compensation denotes payments or acts of contrition between war-groups, or as if there were wellused traditional devices to pay 'blood money'. In fact, although already having alluded to some instances, such enemy-to-enemy transactions were rare in traditional times, and have only recently achieved prominence because administrators, missionaries, and local peace-makers in the trouble-racked New Guinea highlands hailed them as the alternative to revenge killing (see chapter 7). In the past, by comparison, compensation was much more typically the indemnification of one's allies for their services, risks, and serious losses. As Gordon (1981b: 910-12) summarizes, 'generally the situation was one in which no blood money was paid between two enemy groups. Where blood money was paid, it was not seen as an alternative to payback', even if the recipients of such Wergeld in some cultures (e.g. Huli) thereby precluded themselves (but not others!) from exacting vengeance (cf. A. Strathern 1972a: 139; Gabi 1973: 181-83; Chowning 1974: 72; 1977: 47-49; Kamiali 1984: 1-24). There are some people, however, whose peace-making activity could involve payments to both allies and foes, even if the former were naturally assuaged before the latter. Daryl Feil has recently argued that an evolved difference between eastern and western highlands cultures of Papua New

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Guinea is that the latter, beginning from the Chimbu, make provision for enemy-to-enemy compensation (1987: 88-89; cf. 1979: 359). Take, for example, certain procedures of the Mae Enga. Following an inter-tribal/ clan war, the amount of pigs and valuables gathered together to secure temporary peace with enemies will be determined by loss of life incurred against the two major contestants' allies. Once the compensation process is under way, the 'owners of the quarrel' wisely settle matters without delay, appropriately indemnifying clan helpers and allies for any death by giving pigs, and by rewarding them for their services with pork. Non-clansmen who managed to retrieve the body of a clan member also need to be paid. There remains the pressing duty to pay back those who have offered refuge. Enga women hate the prospect, not just of death, injury, and being remarried by leviratic arrangements to men they do not like, but of being forced to flee with their children during the fighting and to live 'for a long time on charity [but really very much under obligation] in another person's house' (Meggitt 1977:144,124-25, cf. 99). With such compensation to allies being widespread in Melanesia however, Mae Enga practice is hardly unique (cf., e.g., Riebe 1968: 24; Strathern 1981; Sillitoe 1981:11-16; Merlan and Rumsey 1991). On the other hand, the Mae make an unusually greater use of homicide appeasements to enemies; that is, from victors to losers. One pretext for such action is that warring sub-groups often belonged to the same phratry (chapter 1), and victors can exploit these wider connections to get compensation gifts to a major enemy group (and thus perhaps keep legitimate any foothold they may have on enemy soil). Another spur to such compensation comes when a relative of a deceased man is able to visit the killer's group with immunity because he is also related to it. Such an inviolable visitor may touch a large pig, formally announcing: 'This pig will eat the head of our dead man!' thus hastening an appropriate offering by jogging memories about a very crucial debt (Meggitt 1977: 199-20, 124). Negotiation for such inter-clan homicide compensation, needless to say, can be extremely precarious, especially in unstable military situations. Mae Enga bigmen, if serious about it, will make sure that warriors still smarting under the impress of hostilities do not attend the formal offer of appeasement. Although parties at a compensation ceremony leave their weapons off the dancing ground, there is a constant fear of treachery or violent irruption. The hosts first share cooked pork to calm those due for donations, and after much rhetoric by leading warriors about long-deferred or apparently forgotten liabilities, the moment comes to relinquish the precious pigs. Meggitt's reconstruction of the scene is striking, because he recalls that, over and above tension between compensators and compensated, scuffling can result between the recipients of the payment and those to whom these recipients owe pigs or obligations. These 'creditors' in fact, can try to drag pigs from the women allotted to receive appeasement, but

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their 'husbands intervene and loud arguments explode around the danceground. Women throw stones, men scuffle and swing pig stakes. Elders intervene to disarm the combatants before blood is shed and the brawling escalates into serious fighting' (Meggitt 1977: 134, cf. 118-20, 130-36). Men forever walk a 'tight rope', then, between ritualized aggression and genuine violence, between magnanimity and belligerence, between giving and taking life, or between receiving and meeting their obligations and debts. The situation was forever altering. If run-of-the-mill exchanges were always under way and changing the balance of affairs, no one would want to assert that compensations between enemies ever finalized good relations. In such a ceremony as the one just discussed, indeed, the normal quota of (forty) pigs might not be offered. This may be because the initiating donors (or hosts of the ceremony) predict that they can escape completing the payment during the course of future instabilities. Pigs for this and the covering of other insults can, in any case, be skilfully re-diverted by senior men towards the culminating, major Enga exchange known as the Te; the final destiny of the beasts, therefore, reflects a 'ceaseless struggle' or an imbroglio of reciprocities involving ambitious men and tenacious [sub-]clans in the pursuit of prestige (Meggitt 1977: 22-23, 120-37; Feil 1984: 38-40). Significantly, too, moves towards compensation are affected by more obviously religious considerations. In a stalemate between two warring clans it will usually be the allies who will begin to sue for peace, the major contestants not wishing to show cowardice to their ancestors. During all stages of negotiation, naturally, close agnates of any deceased will be contending that only blood can assuage the loss, mindful as they are of ghostly vengefulness, while for their part the compensators will pay the relatives of killed bachelors a higher payment, sensing danger from the ghosts of the untimely dead. Overall, Enga compensatory ceremonies are just as much placatory sacrifices as anything. Every segment of them— especially the impressive songs opening them, the communion meal between the two parties, and the 'fighting with words'—is consciously acted out in the presence of the dead as well as the living (Meggitt 1977: 115-19, 138; Brennan 1977: 47-49; Lacey 1973). The Mae Enga situation neatly illustrates how the two sides of bekim, of taking life in military struggle and granting of it within the restraints of ceremonial, are related and interwoven in thought and action. For practical purposes, of course, it was always useful for both the pressures of war and the economic capacity to compensate to be assessed together. In some societies, in fact, the southern highland Wola and the Solomon Island Choiseulese for a notable two, sub-groups seeking revenge would be hard pressed to get a large military action out of their leaders if they did not look like being able to pay the debts inevitably incurred

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(Sillitoe 1981: 74-78; Scheffler 1964: 796-97). Yet, in traditional Melanesia war and 'economics' were not considered beside each other as secular modes of operation. They were ancestral ways and served ancestral purposes: and they were logically tied together by essentially religious conceptions of payback. Considering common Melanesian worries over the ghosts of the slain, many acts of compensation amounted to the careful keeping of tabus rather than the giving of gifts. An Orokaiva manslayer, to illustrate, could not join others to eat the flesh of his victim for fear his own genitals would swell, his joints become twisted, and his head turn bald. The club he used for the kill was exchanged for another man's: for several days he drank only unclear water muddied by a non-slayer and abstained from taro cooked in a pot and sexual intercourse, until it was time to eat the same purificatory suna stew that was given to young men when they re-emerged from initiation seclusion. Before this ceremonial eating, at least among the Binandere grouping, the reparatory attitude is taken to an extreme. 'The slayer climbs into a certain tree which contains a nest of . . . large and aggressive . . . "green ants" . . . He crouches in a fork of the tree, branches are broken off and laid over him so that he is almost completely covered and thoroughly bitten' (Williams 1930: 173-75, cf. also Barth 1975: 151 on the Baktaman). These actions are deliberately cleansing, but before all they are defences against his victim's ghost, the slayer having to suffer for his success. In other societies, killers slept in separate huts for up to a month (southern Massim) (Seligmann 1910: 557-58), or had need of apotropaic sacrifices (Kwaio) (Keesing 1982a: 131), or else weapons bringing death were exchanged, discarded or even 'punished' (Frazer 1922: vol. 3, 165-70). Still other compensatory actions claim attention in their own right, for sitting obliquely to the typical rounds of warrior and exchange activity. Among these are the fascinating gisaro dances of the Bosavi. As Schieffelin asserts, this dancing is usually undertaken by a small coterie of males, who may choose a (non-funerary) ceremonial occasion, especially a bridewealth presentation, to carry out their actions. The gisaro group, in fact, may be somewhat heterogeneous, some of the dancers lacking strong kin connections with the parties negotiating a marriage; yet, they have in common a membership of the same security circle (or longhouse community), and make off in procession with a 'wedding party' to perform in the longhouse of another group. Since this other group will have had hostile relations to the dancers' own community at some stage, it is precisely these tensions of the past that gisaro is designed to recall. The object of the dance is to bring on such a feeling of sorrowfulness from the audience that they burst into tears, to the point that they demand su (compensation for loss or injury) from the visiting performers! (Schieffelin 1977: 25, 161-96; Feld 1990).

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This phenomenon will seem paradoxical. The Bosavi possessed traditional institutions to compensate for certain individual killings, since after an aggrieved group identified a murderer or sorcerer and successfully dispatched him in a raid, they would be only too willing to round off their actions with a presentation, usually of pork. Discriminate inter-group homicide was thus distinguished from indiscriminate, with sorcerers being pinpointed by sick persons about to die or by mediums conducting eerie nocturnal seances (Schieffelin 1977: 78, 98, 103, 213, 222). The Bosavi considered that the offering of bridewealth, moreover, was itself a type of compensation (fud). A clan had lost a woman and, after all, in virtually all Melanesian societies the sending of a woman in marriage is viewed as an act of exchange itself, or a gift, even the 'supreme gift' as F. E. Williams put it (1936: 168; Schieffelin 1977: 59-61,198-202). But ihegisaro dance was strikingly distinct in that visitors enacted it with the express purpose of putting themselves and their own community in the position of having to grant compensation for carrying out so sorrow-inducing an act. The dancing evokes an opposition scenario between longhouse communities that have inflicted raids on each other in the pursuit of individual culprits. Memories of tensions mount with the 'beauty and pathos' of the dances, which are put on by performers who, though painted, are deliberately bedraggled and bearing a mass of long cordyline leaves on their backs. The hosts, in being moved to tears, are perforce sufferers, so that they then try to burn the dancers and their costumes with tapers lit from the longhouse fires, 'in angry [but nonetheless ritualized] revenge for the suffering they have been made to feel'. Compensation is demanded of the dancers, and yet it is they who endure the greater physical ordeal, for they could be savagely attacked if the defenders with them are not quick enough. Nevertheless, if the gisaro has been carried through to its denouement and has not broken up in uncontained violence, it is the performers who complete it by passing around items of compensation to their hosts, perhaps a small knife, or shell necklace, 'to soothe the feelings and terminate the anger', and to 'establish reassurance of the mutual spirit' as they leave. In this way they help render the other ceremonial transactions (usually marriage) a fait accompli and have also put pressure on the hosts to plan sending their own vulnerable dancers in a return of 'equivalence' (wel) (Schieffelin 1977: 24, 194-95). Above all, gisaro reflects the social reciprocations entailed by marriage. Different communities, linked together through constant exchange and 'countless minor gifts of food' between the respective relatives of a husband and wife, were also susceptible to ruptures because of sorcery and violent actions. Gisaro was the specially detached piece of drama that compensated for the human tragedy, but it also reaffirmed in action rather than philosophic reflection that the essence of life lay in the excitements and rhythms

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of give and take, elation and pain. Key myths as to why gisaro is danced among the Bosavi, for instance, or when sorcerers first became objects of killing confirm in orality what the gisaro articulates as drama, that the processes of retribution or reciprocity themselves are already meant to be valorized above mere routine, and already endowed with more than mundane significances (Schieffelin 1980; cf. 1977: 20). Not that compensation always has to be expressed in ritual or typical reciprocity. It can also show up as some 'act of mercy' to forestall aggression or punition. Usually, however, the self- or group-interest behind such actions is palpable: a captured rather than a killed woman can make a good wife; a young boy caught from among the enemy could be adopted as an asset. Among the Wagawaga (southern Massim), for a good case, tearful women took off their skirts and flung them on any boy they could not bear the warriors to dispatch, and a man of the same totem group as a captive could have concern for this special allegiance to ransom him with valuables (Romilly in BNGAR 1887a: 36). But here we approach aspects of the different but related subject of sacrifice. Demands for sacrifice Obligation Peace-making, compensation, and grand-scale ceremonies constitute major processes of outer-directed giving, though not exhausting them. What more can be introduced about reciprocity between human groups, however, we shall present through discussions about reciprocation within one's own security circle and between spirit powers and their venerators. The Melanesian security circle normally takes in more than the extended family and cluster of closer relatives within one's tribal area, for it incorporates trusted in-law relationships (arising mostly from exogamy) and special-exchange partnerships as well. Under such connections, people grow up learning how to behave towards close relatives and note those from whom to expect the choicest gifts; they learn which are the more pleasant families or groups with whom to make untroubled exchanges of foods and goods. The nature of this genuine comfortableness is also forged into strong feelings of obligation between families and lineages over long periods of time. Family members learn the subtleties of giving, not to repay with exactly the same amount, let us say, if that is considered unseemly, but with a little more or less (as with the Manus), even much more or less (as with the Kove). They learn to assess equivalence, or to gauge whether somebody has been given an inadequate amount at a feast, whether someone is too greedy or has failed to meet their obligations. They learn to interpret pointed hints, or repeated rumour and gossip about families

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not doing enough (Trompf 1975a: 76-81; cf. Watson-Gegeo and White 1990; Brison 1992). Precise estimations of value are lacking, as natural in economies not 'fully' monetarized, so that especially in each act of giving between very friendly families there is no expectation of 'immediate return' and the givers 'do not [always] consciously calculate the value of the products' by toting, pricing or budgeting in ways familiar to so many modern urban-dwellers. But this 'general reciprocity' (cf. Friedl 1975: 22), which interestingly involved many more transactions in cooked food (rather than raw, as with outsiders), is nevertheless a family's focus for a sense of balance, achievement, and pride of place in the cosmos, and thus requires a continuous general reckoning by its members. In this ethos, Melanesians have had social pressures upon them to be relatively egalitarian, and to make sacrifices for the community and its survival. Competition is hardly precluded, and men also find that they are materially rewarded for their greater contributions. But in such small-scale societies one cannot exceed certain collectively estimated limitations in a rampant undermining of 'production rivals', and in any case land arrangements and the very technological difficulties of production itself almost always withhold this possibility. Some accumulation of 'personal' wealth goes uncondemned, perhaps, provided the rich man is generous with his possessions, and by generosity such a man can enhance his prestige enormously; but the absence of benevolence or hospitality and the preoccupation with acquiring personal possessions lends reasons for others' scorn poured out upon niggardliness. The big are big precisely because they make others dependent on them as splendid bestowers and as organizers of bestowal. In reality, the chief, bikman, wealthy manager, or influential specialist, are often symbolic representatives of the group, thus being brokers or embodiments of spiritual power beyond ordinary human reach. Even in those homogeneous small-scale societies we find in Melanesia, it is necessary for somebody to have this auctoritas, special knowledge, or supernaturally sanctioned power, for the organization of ceremony and maintenance of peace, as well as for the master-strokes of vendetta (cf. Sahlins 1963: 285-300; Guiart 1963; Burns et al. 1972: 104-12; Hogbin 1978; Standish 1980; Godelier 1982a; Jaeschke 1978: 154-58; Prendeville 1983; Lindstrom 1984; Lederman 1986; Strathern 1987; Godelier and Strathern 1991). And on the other hand, we can hardly be left denying that those who do not succeed in productiveness and exchange, who have lost and owe only dues, are without spirit-laden influence, let alone distinctly 'economic' clout, in their societies; they are 'nothing men', worse still 'rubbish men' (as the highland pidgin has it) (Vicedom and Tischner 1962: vol. 2, 49-51, 149-50; Strathern 1971: 132, 205; 1982b) or worst of all 'slaves' (cf. chapter 1). Thus, on the one hand, there is the quality of sharing, mutual benefit

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and support, cooperation, and the constant passage of smaller gifts within and between residential communities; yet, on the other hand, men may be jostling competitively for prestige and authority in the midst of exchange complexities. A 'feel' for the hopes, joys, excitements, and anxieties that go into actualizing these motions, and an intuiting of the transactions involved as parts of a cherishable vital way of life (rather than mere networks or organizational mechanisms to be plotted), is badly needed in scholarship. After all, reciprocation has long been the object of indigenous pondering and gnomic truth. 'Our life is like the sea', mused a Lolo elder (west New Britain), 'it goes up and it comes down, it goes and it comes and there is no end to it' (Janssen 1974: 4). 'Of seasons', runs the Jaua (Orokaivan) proverb, 'there are always good and bad' (OT: Jojoga 1983), both sayings being as true of the ceaseless interactions within security circles themselves as of any other process. There also exist in most cultures those key utterances encapsulating a sense of complete well-being and fairness in day-to-day reciprocations, or a rounding-off of some important sequence of transactions, as found in the Tangu mngwotngwotikil ('all's fair!') (dwelt on by Kenelm Burridge 1960: 58-59) and the ejaculations kable ('fine!') among the Wahgi or namo ('good!') among the Motu (Ramsey 1975: 87; Clark and Lister-Turner 1924: 107). In all this ongoing interplay and assessment, particularly within the security circle itself, food and traditional money are crucial factors. Food is not the mere object of economic transactions, but is (symbo-)logically, even magically, the instrument of changed social relations. It is integral to the way people do their costing and frame their reasons for taking initiatives that will make, sustain, or break existing associations. Traditional money and valuables joined food as a less common and usually secondary means of calculating transactions of a day-to-day nature. Whether shells (such as the famous kina, toea, tambti, cowrie, and clams), feathers (including feather coils), dogs' or fish (even whales') teeth, axeheads, stones, or snails, these items of exchange value were never detached from 'the regenerative processes of human life' (Weiner 1977: 231; cf. Quiggin 1949: 149-86; Hocart 1972; Tanaka 1981; Chowning 1983; Whiteman 1984: 94-95). In the passing on of both food and valuables there was almost endemically 'the force of nature', which was rarely embodied in gifts themselves so much as in 'the complex of social relations and the constraints of the gained dimensions upon these relations' (Thompson 1987: 76). The 'paying back' involved in daily exchanges, then, is not just the handing over of abstract, impersonalized denotations of value, as in monetarized society (cf. Marx [1857-58] 1973: 156-59, 221-25; Weber 1946: 331), but forever entails for givers and takers the sense of fulfilling obligations, and thus the heightened awareness that their (economic)

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activity is conditioned by social and more-than-human expectations. The measuring of possibilities, liabilities, and status is more continuous and less fitful than is common in the West, and worked out within an ordained cosmic scheme of things (Herskovitz 1960: 108-78; cf. Lawrence 1984: 13133; Gregory 1982: 41-70). Such 'socioeconomic systems' (cf. Firth 1954: 4; Redfield 1955: 23-26) are hardly without their 'incentives and rewards'. Within the constraints of the relative egalitarianism they cultivate, there is always competition for higher status, and in chiefly societies there is a prior acceptance that select individuals merit advantages over others. In Melanesia, political leadership or management is generally held by those who have acquired more of a personal control over the flow and distribution of exchanges. These persons have done so, however, usually because of their own remarkable sacrifices. They are basically patrons, who acquire prestige as generous circulators of wealth, putting others in their debt and inducing services as 'payment' for their patronage. No one could attain to high status, or live up to an inherited position of eminence, without edging others into service. Supported by agnates or members of his extended family, a man might start by hosting a feast to put the members of other clans or sub-clans in his debt, or he might attract a return of obligations by contributing more to a large group presentation of wealth. But the procedures for achieving personal hegemony varied. Whereas with tanepoa 'aristocratic' power on Manam Island (Madang Province, New Guinea) hereditary rights were crucial (Wedgwood 1934), across the central highlands organizational skills to compete with potential rivals were more fundamental than being a bigman's son (cf. Standish 1980). On Malekula and in other Vanuatu contexts, by comparison, we find 'clubs' with a hierarchy of grades, men buying themselves into lower ranks with an appropriate payment to a sponsor, and then climbing higher 'with heavier expenditure and greater display' (Deacon 1934: 49, 198-200; Layard 1928: 142-43). Ian Hogbin (1934b) has documented a process of Melanesian individual 'social advancement' in his work on Guadalcanal society (Koaka, Solomons). A 'man of moment' (mwanekama) earns acclaim only by lapses into the most straitened circumstances. Emerging as a potential leader in his lineage, married and usually around thirty years old, he will press many of his 'close relatives and neighbours' into his service, to harvest, raise pigs, and build a new house for his acts of hospitality. In organizing a feast his generosity will set tongues wagging. At one feast, given by a certain Atana, Hogbin counted '257 separate presentations', and after this occasion of 'conspicuous consumption', the host 'was left with the mere remnants for himself, just a few bones and one or two cakes' (so Herskovitz 1960: 46869). Such an ambitious man will begin afresh, working for the time when he becomes patron of a dance festival, and then truly emerges as a

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mwanekama, to whom the whole community owes a great debt, and whose reputation has peaked (Hogbin 1934b: 305). To secure the 'psychological and material advantages' of a community leader, with 'special ornaments associated with his rank' and power to deploy assistant kinsmen, great personal sacrifices and striking acts of generosity were mandatory, as was typical throughout Melanesia (Herskovitz 1960: 470; cf. Hogbin 1938-39: 323-25 on Wogeo; Oliver 1955: 216-25 on Siwai; Schwimmer 1973: 94-98, 104, 109 on the Orokaiva). The most characteristic paradigm for leadership in Melanesia is the cultivation in others of debts and obligations and of one's own prestige by magnanimity. Differences between pre- and post-pacification conditions are not to be forgotten here. Drawn-out processions of husbandry, exchange, feasting and upward mobility will flourish only under conditions of stability. Traditionally they were always vulnerable to serious disruption by war, and a diachronic perspective needs to be developed in research. Outside investigators in post-pacification contexts will be impressed by the extent of non-violent competition, trading, display, and dance; yet, mobilization for positive reciprocity will be accentuated the more open hostilities are rejected. The famous Kula trade 'ring' for example, worked only fitfully when war was common fare, and operated never so well as when the early missionaries established a new cross-tribal aegis (Maclntyre 1983; cf. Brunton 1975; Egloff 1978). Oral traditions from the Wahgi Valley indicate that actualizing such a grand summation of the Kongar was a truly staggering, never-to-be-forgotten achievement in pre-contact times, so much greater was the chance that whole clans could be dislodged from settled lands, even fleeing over considerable distances as refugees (e.g. Kondwal and Trompf 1982: 103-05). Under less stable traditional conditions, groups were readier to find excuses for not fulfilling their obligations, even if it meant taking the consequences militarily. Pacification, thus, made the fulfilling of obligations more operationally normative, and the enhanced possibilities for inter-group 'feasting and dancing' created the impression of 'social development' (cf. Hambly 1925).l Oblation What, now, of the oblationary, propitiatory, atoning, or placatory side to sacrifice? The sacrifices required for 'pooling' resources and the rise of an individual 'tribal banker' seem less distinctly religious (Sahlins 1963: 1

Note also the emergence of new 'classes' of men able to manipulate blossoming systems and thus to obscure the previously important role of chiefs or traditional leaders. What happened with the rise of 'big lenders' in the Sukwe organization on the Banks Islands (Vanuatu) is a good case in point (Deacon 1934: 49, 198-200; Layard 1942: 142-43, cf. 688, 692-93).

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188-89), yet they must not be analysed in a false isolation from transactions between humans and the spirit powers. These human-to-human economic relations we have been discussing, in any case, can be shown to 'rest on moral foundations . . . far more than we ordinarily suppose' (Firth 1951: 144), and they were always related to the fundamental issues of group struggle, and thus to the group legitimations of negative payback towards some and positive reciprocity towards others (cf. Godelier 1982a: 272-73). Getting used to a given context, one will soon be able to perceive how the most balanced and intense reciprocity reigns between friendly outgroups or those linked by marriage affinities, while a susceptibility to unevenness, broken contracts, and deceit prevails between groups with previously fractured relations (Sahlins 1963: 19). All these human and deceptively secular activities and propensities, however, can be properly understood only when they are viewed in the wider context of the sacrificial mentalite. How and when reciprocations, gifts, and offerings were first given in time immemorial and whether gods or humans were the first recipients are unanswerable questions; all we need to acknowledge here is a relative comparability and indigenous parallelism between dealings in the two spheres. In each set of dealings lies the concern that the other party should not be neglected, but instead pleased, if the business of life has required them to come to terms with each other. Thus, behind each there also lie general assumptions that offence to those with whom one has frequent and normally rewarding interaction can only bring trouble. Moreover, ritual encounters with the spirits call for the greatest scrupulousness when the members of a whole security circle or large segment of it have to reforge their relationship with these agencies, sometimes in the presence of members of allied out-groups. Such dealings with the 'spirit-other' were crucial for the life of the mini-nation (Mantovani 1977), and were usually tied in with the biggest exchange transactions between human groups. More flexibility, occasionally noticeable offhandedness, however, is likely to be found in human-spirit relations within households or extended families, whereas towards the gods of most other tribes or foreigners indifference is typical (unless trade opportunities, perhaps even the trading of deities themselves, dictate otherwise). Coping with unwanted or inimical powers In Melanesia, then, it is very rare to find the 'owners' of deities or ancestors ever paying them back negatively for their uncooperativeness, as when Africans smash fetishes that cease to be 'odedient servants'. Nor can a Melanesian become like a great Jain yogi, 'whom even the gods fear' (Smart 1971:103). Admittedly, on the death of his father a Manus head of household will cast aside the skull of his grandfather into a lagoon, because only fathers can be venerated as 'Sir Ghosts'. Only the father's skull can hold

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pride of place, in a carved wooden bowl on rafters above the entrance of a family house. Both 'illness and failure in fishing' are ascribed to the father's 'just wrath', and only he demands 'confessions of sin', whereas the ghostly grandfather deserves discarding for failing to protect his son from death (Fortune 1934: 1, 165). Admittedly, too, Melanesians are known for a pragmatic change of deities or cults (e.g. Canadian Broadcasting Commission 1974 on the Mendi; OT: Garuai 1975 on the Torau). Among some peoples, techniques for killing dangerous ghosts are to be had (Nevermann et al. 1972: 108, 110; Chowning 1975: 87), and the spirits of complete outsiders were sometimes denigrated contemptuously as objects of 'mere superstition' (Trompf 1981b: 24). In general, however, the gods and spirits in one's own language area were typically treated with the greatest respect, the despoliation of their sanctuaries, if considered at all, being done as a most extreme act of both vengeance and risk (e.g. Barth 1975: 149 on the Baktaman). The spirit-world called for care and caution. Melanesia's manifold deities, demigods and ancestors shared with humans the potential for harm as well as welfare, and no traditional religion thus far studied in the region lacked procedures to placate certain spirit forces that might prove dangerous. Most frequently among these were place-spirits and the ghosts of the recently deceased. 'Place-spirits' (PNG pidgin masalai), very often fearful inhabitants of stagnant pools and eerie locales, were usually thought capable of killing. In Wape lore (a west Sepik culture), for instance, the dreaded Kelfene can smell out a menstruating woman as she approaches his pool of water, bringing on a fatal haemorrhage, and can kill any child who dares to complain of hunger while in the bush (McGregor 1965: 5). Sometimes coupled with such beings are spirits connected with winds and birds, to which various sicknesses are ascribed (see chapter 3 on the Wahgi), and what may be termed monsters, demons, ogres, and ghouls appear sporadically in the spiritual 'rogues galleries' of different belief complexes (e.g. Bulmer 1965: 136-37; Hesse 1982: 143-86). The incursions of such forces were not only averted by good precautionary advice, but by acts of appeasement. If many appeasement rites to such 'spirits of the environment' are minor, some involve considerable, even elaborate, mobilization of resources. Before the restless one-armed, one-legged masalai of the giant Elam Bari (between the highlander Siane and the Chimbu), a few pigs were slaughtered whenever conditions were too wet or too dry, his mollified temper being thought to improve the weather (OT: Knight 1977). Elsewhere, as with the spectacular Hevehe ceremony among the coastal Elema, 'spirits of the environment' are actually allowed temporary residence in the villages (under the guise of masked figures). Once sufficiently 'fed and fostered', however, they are 'killed' with arrows, their masked symbols heaped up

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and burnt in the most matter-of-fact fashion, and their remains cast into the ocean to be taken by the monster Hevehe of the sea (Williams 1940: 372-84, cf. 162-68). In contrast to the more typically nervous handling of such 'nature spirits', the Hevehe rites show how some of these powers could be manipulated and cyclically integrated into human affairs, by being feted and thus appeased before being disposed of, and expected to return for the same enactment a score or so years later (Eliade 1958b: 33-35). Comparable, if less playful, ceremonies can be found elsewhere (cf. McGregor 1982: 4089 on the Wape). The other class of dangerous spirits worth assuaging were ill-disposed or vengeful ghosts, particularly of those individuals spiteful in life, badly treated at death, or bent on hunting their own killers. Post-mortem animal slaying and funeral feasts, organized by the deceaseds' uterine kin, were the most characteristic acts of placation (e.g. Meggitt 1965: 112-13 on the Mae Enga), although feelings of recrimination could spark rare acts of desecration against a dead man's belongings (e.g. Meggitt 1977: 31), or of women being buried face down to prevent them from interfering in a man's second marriage (e.g. Reay 1975: 4 on the Wahgi). Ritual reciprocities with helpful powers More common than appeasement and apotropaism, however, were offerings, rites of 'honouring', Veneration' or 'worship', and 'sacrifices' in the contexts of feasts performed before superhuman beings that were capable of benefiting rather than threatening the primary group. Expectedly, the principle of approach was one of reciprocity or do ut des ('I give in order for you to give back'), and spirit-beings were not adored for their own sake but pleased in the hope of gift, concession, or reconciliation (see, e.g., Codrington 1891:118-19; van Baal 1975b: 5-6, 10-15; Scheffler 1965: 250; Keesing 1982a: 46-48, 191; cf. Platvoet 1982:183-84; Trompf 1983a: 132; 1988a: 211 for background on terms and hermeneutical principles). Prima facie, an offering or sacrifice, as 'a gift to the gods' is an instance of 'unbalanced reciprocity' (cf. van Baal 1976); yet, in the views of the sacrificers themselves, almost always, there are real returns to be had, while the cajoling of invocations, the additive power (dare we say 'magic'?) of specialized procedures, and the enactment of whole rites, are believed to bring blessings to the negotiators. Here we are speaking of 'sacrifices' loosely—and appropriately for Melanesia—as any giving to the spirits to bring about some benefit. If such sacrifices to benevolent spiritagents were not always to secure actual material returns, they were almost endemically connected with the quest for power as life and vitality—for mana (mina/namana), or the equivalents of what is evoked by these key Solomonese terms—in order for the achievement of concrete blessings, of prestige and renown, well-being, and security to become possible. The urge to persuade and manipulate escaped possible shallowness and a bludgeoning

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air, though, for being typically hedged about with ritual caution and relational propriety (Trompf 1991: 15, 81). The forms of sacrifice to gods and spirits, of course, if we broaden the compass of the 'sacrificial' to include token acknowledgements, gifts, and minor offerings, are highly variegated. Even remembering ancestral names could be a small gratuity, as when a Roro prayerfully ran off his genealogical chain in the hope of securing a good fishing catch (Navarre in MSC 1888-89: 90-91). Ritual purification, as when a Mekeo will fast before visiting the sacred ancestral site of Isosobapu as a pilgrim, also betokened a start at engagement in 'mystical' reciprocation (Aitsi and Trompf, fieldnotes 1973-74). Verbal confession of wrongdoing was a concession to spirits as much as to one's fellows, since a spirit's propensity to punish even the most carefully hidden misdeeds could require assuagement (cf. Pettazzoni 1934). An evil deed, such as adultery, might be thought to jeopardize a whole group before the spirit-powers, and might need to be confessed ritually by specialists. The Roviana priests, or hiama, for instance, coupled such confessions with the offering of pork, yam, or tapioca pudding on an altar for the gods, even though the perpetrator of a heinous wrongdoing might have already paid compensation or been put to death (Pratt 1986: 21). These last details go to show, moreover, that by far the most widespread and distinctive types of offering or small sacrifices involved the setting aside of food for deities or the dead, or the special slaughtering and/or sharing of a victim in their supposed presence. Many sacrifices in the broadest sense, then, consisted of smaller food offerings to ensure that ancestors did not feel left out of human proceedings, or to remind them that the living were hoping for some 'gifts'. Select morsels from a feast were left aside for the dead to enjoy: a Trobriander, for instance, placed them in a bowl outside the family house, the dead relatives visiting from Tuma (the Isle of the Blessed') to partake of them at night, perhaps in the body of a dog or a pig (OT: Entonia 1972). The Wantoat (Morobe) left such offerings at those secluded caves or trees believed to be frequented by ancestors. In this same culture, as in various others, such as the Chimbu, the first-fruits of garden produce were left aside as 'thanksgiving' to the ancestors (Kaima 1980: 81-82; Nilles 1978: 5), and earlier writers interpreted the Fijian rites known as mandrali as 'thankofferings' of food after successful catches or hunts, or remarkable deliverances from danger (Williams and Calvert 1858: 181; cf. Hocart 1929: 189). Small offerings were even made to the dead to bring on helpful dreams—the Orokaivan Jaua leaving out food for this purpose within the house (OT: Jojoga 1983)—and to alleviate pain or the prospect of further accident. A southern Fore wounding his foot with an axe, for example, could ascribe his trouble to the spirit inhabiting the tree he had cut, quickly handling the suspected offence by rubbing pig-fat on the trunk and hanging

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shells or other valuables from its branches, as well as eating a medicinal meal (Lindenbaum 1979: 56; cf. 1971: 283). As for sacrifices of victims, the size and significance of the rites and the slain varied greatly. If a single bird would be informally despatched to entice back the wandering soul of a sick clansman, a single pig butchered to heal the breach between two exogamously related families (Luzbetak 1956: 92 on the Wahgi), the offering-up of a single dried-out marsupial to a lineage's ancestral skull could be the highpoint of a major ceremony, as among the Baktaman (Barth 1975: 87-88). Various ceremonies in which single or a few animals are slaughtered for whole clans (documented so well for the Ipili Enga by Gibbs (1975: 50-75, cf., e.g., Fox 1924: 113; Keesing 1978a: 33 for other quarters) contrast with scenarios in which clans put very many beasts to death; while if in some sacrificial rites an altar is obvious, and its positioning of decisive significance, in other cases this element is lacking (cf. Aufenanger 1969: 92-94). Greater and 'classic' sacrifices

Strangely, little has been written on sacrifice as such in Melanesia, and this may simply be because traditional shrines in which creatures had their throats cut before some idol, with parts of the victims being held up as 'consecrated propitiations' are noticeably rare in the region. Older ethnological formulas as to 'the nature and function' of sacrifice do not seem to apply so readily in the region (Trompf 1991: 65-67). Piacular or expiatory motifs are not prominent, and formalized approaches to a point of intense 'sacralization' (with the dispatching and offering of a victim), followed by a steady withdrawal from such dangerous intercourse with 'divinity' are uncommon (cf. Hubert and Mauss 1964: 19-49). But then ritual and conceptual variation in other parts of the world, especially black Africa, have already undermined the Eurocentrisms of older schools in this connection (Bourdillon and Fortes 1980; Heusch 1985). One is left attempting an apt selection of diverse materials. Certainly there are interesting Melanesian rites in which animal slaying is performed to affect whole clans or tribes for the better. The habu, a preliminary example, is a Daribi ceremony performed because an angry ghost is assumed to be responsible for a significant enough amount of sickness among women, children, and pigs. Marsupials must be hunted down and their bones burnt to propitiate the spirit suspect, although the ghost himself is not accused of the sicknesses. Instead, the hunters impersonate him in their hunt, blaming the trouble on the marsupials they shoot, which are thus transformed (through Daribi metaphor) into sacrificed 'scapegoat ghosts' of appeasement (Wagner 1972: 152-53). Such cross-signification between human and victim is known in a few other sacrificial contexts. At the end of the great Wahgi Kongar, for one, a single,

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plumed dancer, with round pig-tusks against his brow, 'takes on the "essence" of the pigs' ancestors' before the spectators, thereby hinting at the cultural assumption that 'men appeared in the world before pigs' (pers. comm. Reay 1987). From the Lombaha or Ambai Island (Vanuatu) comes the news that pigs with circular tusks take on the identity of ancestral spirits; the more a man can kill of these, the more soul-stuff he acquires and ancestor-like he becomes (Allen 1987). A more common element of the Daribi sacrifice, however, is the dispatching of several victims to improve or foster human-spirit relations, though not through a hunt. In highlands contexts we find sacrificers of pig-batches seeking the protection of place-spirits, such as at the Lake Iba-Kuyama and the cave Gebeanda, centres of sacrificial ceremony for more than one Huli tribe (Gayalu, 1979: 19-21; OT: 1977), and not for placation only (see p. 118). And there is no reason to overlook the renowned large-scale pig-kills here, which have already been awarded the title 'sacrifice' from time to time (e.g. Bulmer 1965: 142-44 on the Kyaka Enga; Modjeska 1982: 102-08 on the southern highlands Duna; cf. Lowman-Vayda 1971; Buchbinder and Rappaport 1976; Healey 1977; 1985b: 157). These mass slaughters are not just for the human recipients of pork; the events are demonstrations of power before deities and/or the dead, and the 'trophies' of previously successful feasts, usually pig-jaws, as in the case of the Kongar were strung up prominently when the ceremonies were being prepared or actually performed, for the pleasure of spirit participants. Application of the term 'sacrifices' comes the more easily, too, when we learn that in other and associated cultic acts, pigs were killed before altars and under shrines. Mention has already been made of the large Kumai pestle altar (Wahgi), which was smeared with pig's blood before battle (chapter 1), and Bulmer learnt that some Kyaka Enga sacrifices were formerly discharged in special 'ghost shrines', which had all collapsed in ruins by 1955 (Bulmer 1965: 158; cf. Kale 1985: 61). Although unusual, pigslaying on Malekula occurred before ancient rock monuments of various kinds, 'monoliths, dolmens, stone platforms, cairns, and . . . stone circles', probably erected by a people long prior to the island's current inhabitants and such action was 'of a sacrificial nature', having 'as one of its main objects the prolongation of life after death through identification with ancestors, whose memories are kept green by the existence of the monoliths which they have themselves caused to be erected and which their spirits are said to inhabit after death' (Layard 1936: 123-24; 1942: 257-59, 333-35, Campbell 1976: 444-48). In some rare instances, moreover, the slaughtering of pigs and other creatures was actually centred on altars, being carried out by specialist priests. Because of its real interest, one such sacrificial cult has been studied in depth, that of the Toa[m]baita (on north Malaita), and has been recently researched by two young scholars from the area itself.

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Toa[m]baita sacrifices were held in two clans' sacred glade known as biu, which was surrounded by a low stone wall and separated from the adjacent dancing ground by a line of trees. The biu, although also the name given to the men's club-culthouse, was in fact a graveyard, but one in which no women, children, nor even ordinary male members of the community were permitted burial, but only 'priests . . . war lords and other men of status' (Idulusia 1979: 24-25). At the back of the biu lay what was recognized as the collective burial spot of the remote dead, before which lay the largest fire altar, while in the foreground lay the graves of main ancestors of the given clan (or biuiwane). Although warriors could stand surrounding this enclosure, witnessing and supporting any of the ceremonies, only the priest (or 'man of prayer' wane nifoa) was permitted within it, and his procedures varied according to the context. During the main ceremonies (maama), which were usually in honour of a single dead priest or a line of them (and which could also entail celebration of the collective ancestors' contributions to victory in war, or their role in bringing death to a selected enemy), cultic procedures were elaborate. Before the graves of the named departed, the wane ni foa 'cut open the pig, burnt part of it on the altar while saying a prayer to the ancestors'. The rest of the pig could be shared by male participants. On the main fireplace, however, dedicated to the distant ancestors, a whole pig was burnt to ashes in a fire of special kwau wood (the unusual case of a fully burnt holocaust), and the priest dared not eat any part of it (Suruma 1979, cf. Idulusia 1979: 19). In this culture domesticated pigs were 'actually reared consecrated to the ancestors at the piglet stage', being given 'personal names', and were returned to their true owners, then, in sacrifice (Idulusia 1979: 16). Women, incidentally, were never allowed to eat any pork other than from hunted wild pigs, whereas in rites performed for domestic needs (foa mu), and thus for protection of children, crops, and so on, the priest could share part of the sacrificial victim with the male supplicants. Under other circumstances, again, when wrongs or offences within lineages or along marriage lines were to be righted, supplicants gave the priest an opossum or small pig for sacrifice without expecting any right to partake. Such an offering could be an act of contrition or as a petition asking the ancestors to disclose an unknown offence, which had brought trouble, or else it might ratify one's effort at reconciliation, some compensatory gift also being sent to an offended party (Suruma 1979: 10-12; cf. Layard 1942: 689; Hogbin 1970b: 74-76, 105-10; Keesing 1977: 7-9; 1982a: 39 for comparative material from other Solomon contexts and Vanuatu). Reflecting on Melanesian sacrifices, some basic points should be emphasized. First, transactions between humans and the spirit-world are usually conceived to be analogous to those between (living) humans. One key reason for this conceptional relationship is the typically 'lateral' or

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'horizontal' character of the 'non-empirical' spirit-order of the cosmos vis-a-vis mortals (Lawrence and Meggitt 1965: 9-12; Lawrence 1984: 1-4, 200-03). Far from being awesomely transcendental, spirit-powers constantly impinged on human affairs in a variety of observable (and, thus, temporarily 'empirical') forms, in the dancing of masked figures, the tone of sacred flutes, the noise in the dark, the call of a bird, the howl of dogs, luminescent fungus, fireflies, surfacing fish, snails, the silence of sacred stones, or the eeriness of glades, cemeteries, and higher, uninhabited terrain (Trompf 1979c: 123). Through special experiences and the environment, then, these agencies were understood to make their 'reality' and 'interest' known, and so elicited the reciprocal responses of humans. The dead, moreover, especially those whose names and roles within recent generations remained within group memory, were not normally thought to be beyond the ambience of ongoing reciprocations and exchanges. Each culture was bound to have its own methods for acknowledging and identifying spirit involvement (see chapter 3), and thus its own cultural repertoire for appropriate response (cf. Mbiti 1969 for African parallels). Second, virtually all the Melanesian rites that are sacrificial according to the criteria discussed above, along with other ceremonies, are 'rituals of redress' (see Shorter 1972: 143 on comparable African phenomena). If revenge wars are waged to rectify imbalance and make up for tragic loss; if punishments both physically and socially make up for the damage brought by wrongdoing; if processes of exchange also reflect the relative 'squaring of accounts' or the 'making good' of debts, sacrifices are also redressive and restorative. Something needs to be set right, remedied, repaired, or balanced out; and, because the distress, damage, grievance, abuse, or unevenness involves the spirit—not just the human order— sacrifices 'capture' and 'affect' the totality of interactions conceived to apply in the appropriate situations. They are as crucial as any related phenomena for reinforcing retributive logic; for, persons who have once found sacrifice useful in the removal of anxiety, will feel insecure for rejecting similar procedures whenever the threat of the same old problems seem to loom (Homans 1951: 325). Third, sacrifices are all the more significant as religious data for sucking social, economic, political, and military elements into their 'flames' in moments of impressive Gestalt. It is surely far too one-sided to emphasize the factors of 'destruction' and 'alienation' in Melanesian sacrifice (so Gregory) if that means that the conceptualizations and feelings of the sacrificers themselves (as against a method to distinguish gifts-to-men from gifts-to-god) are going to be obscured (thus, against Gregory 1981: 644-65; cf. Feil et al. 1982: 340-42, 548-49). After all, it was not the killing of victims nor the releasing of certain items from human exchange that were crucial as such in these traditional worldviews (cf. Girard 1977), but

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the readjustments, the relief, the rectifications, the 'pay-offs' that these actions made possible in human or spirit-human relationships. Fourth, care is required in analysing how the phenomenon of humans acting as victims reflects a given grammar of retribution. Certain minor mutilations to the body, as we maintained earlier, were not conceived as punishments. In fact, they might just as easily be deemed sacrifices, that is, actions through which those closest to a recently dead person express their utter sorrow, sometimes to prevent the deceased turning malevolent, sometimes vicariously identifying with the newly departed's suffering. Among the Gadsup, both men and women are known to sever their own first joint of a finger at the loss of a loved child (du Toit 1975: 123), and the practice of self-amputation at lamentations is known from a variety of highland contexts (e.g. Burton-Bradley 1975: 49; Hallpike 1977: 235-36, 245). With the Dani, young girls closest to the deceased were chosen for this finger-joint removal, and since such mutilation was believed 'necessary to placate the ghosts', Heider reckoned it the 'only real sacrifice connected with Dani ritual' (Heider 1979: 125; cf. Barth 1975: 43 for Baktaman practice). Human victims of war and cannibalism were also conceived to be sacrificial victims in various societies. Fiji is best known for the formalization of human sacrifice, slain victims being carried to stone-ringed enclosures, where priests offered the corpses to the deities before they were eaten (Rice 1910: 78; cf. Hocart 1952: 178). The Marind-Anim, on the opposite side of the Melanesian region, have been of great interest for having a rite of human sacrifice that at the same time legitimates anthropophagy. In the secret male cult of Rapa, a young girl was engaged in sexual intercourse by cult members and then thrown into a fire ignited by long red sticks. The victim's bones, painted red, were stored away. The myth concerning the origins of fire was thereby thought to have been enacted, and in the form of a sacrifice meant to perpetuate cannibal raids (van Baal 1966: 118-25, 139-42). Other sacrificial themes include those of 'substitution', or of satisfying sharp pressures for scores against enemies by sacrificing an 'equivalent'. On Malekula, for example, if 'empty stomachs and faint nerves' drove a group to sue for peace, it could actually send one of its number as a (male) sacrifice, to be slaughtered, cooked, and eaten by the enemy (Layard 1942: 599-600, 619-20). A less spectacular yet more poignant instance of this is found with the well-publicized 'peace children' of the Sawi (Irian Jaya), these being given from one group to another as a guarantee against further conflict, with their lives in forfeit if and when relations broke down (Richardson 1974: 38; cf. Lyon 1921: 24-27; Landtman 1934: 103-12 on comparable Kiwai data). And to Iova blood bounty and Waropen ransoms, as related materials, we have already alluded (chapter 1, n. 9). Sometimes human sacrifices seem to have been instituted rather apart from the context

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of war and exchange. The Tung (Madang) sacrificed their first-born daughters to the deities, a practice recalling the ancient Phoenicians (OT: Banaku 1983; cf. Exod. 22:29b, Ezek. 20:25-26). There were doleful fates awaiting females in a variety of procedures connected with death; with girls strangled at the deaths of Efate chiefs (Vanuatu) (Gill in Moss 1925:202-03); Sengseng women killed to accompany their spouses (and occasionally their dead children) to the after-life (Chowning 1974:156), or Lemakot widows of New Ireland strangled and thrown on their husbands' funeral pyres (Biro in Bodrogi 1967). The aged and infirm of Fiji had to be prepared for strangulation if it was necessary for the survival and strength of their people (Cowan 1982: 2). On close investigation these sacrificial forms are not tangential to the workings of reciprocity broadly conceived, since they amount to fulfilled obligations rather than extreme injustices. Lastly, one ought not to forget the sacrifices of heroic behaviour. During the instabilities of pre-contact days a group's defenders were frequently exposing themselves to very serious risks on behalf of others, and in that sense daring deeds, let alone deaths, were accepted as great personal sacrifices. To retrieve the body of a fallen fellow, for example, before it was mutilated or stolen, was an especially hazardous enterprise. It was not anybody's task, and only true (or biological) brothers or the closest friends were likely to persist with such an extremity. Cases are known, too, in which brave men who inadvertently discovered the dead body of an allied tribesman would dispatch themselves rather than leave the impression that they were culpable, in order to avoid a reason for tribal war (Reay 1987b). Somewhat circuitously we have arrived at an important area of research barely touched in anthropological liteature concerning conceptions of love between humans (and between humans and the spirits). Sexual love aside as tangential, our discussion of sacrifice allows us to transcend individual and cultural differences to make a simple yet valid assertion about the role of love in traditional Melanesia. Melanesians lacked 'the concept of the person' in the broad sense, perhaps, since people outside their own families or primary and affinal groups were thought 'less-than-human' in varying degrees. Conceptual equivalents to agape and divine love are also conspicuously absent; for, despite various myths about so-called dema deities or culture heroes who had to die to make the present biocosmic order possible, Melanesians are not known for adoring their deities (Flannery 1979: 16465; Aerts 1983: 418; Prendeville 1983). To forget the role of friendship and special affections, however, would be absurd, and it is sad that, with a few exceptions (Kenneth Read's brilliant book The High Valley being one of them), only a few scientific studies have provided us with relevant insights (Read 1966: 141-246; cf. 1967: 199; Burridge 1957: 177-84). About the actualities of love as caring in Melanesia, we possess only one unusual overview (Mordaunt 1979), by which traditional attitudes of concern, mutual support

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and the fulfilment of obligations within groups are likened to the preChristian Hebrew concept of hesed (kindness, mercifulness). At this point we can perceive how one useful approach towards a distinctly Melanesian definition of love, and one helpful in the dialogue between indigenous religions and Christianity, is to conceive love in terms of personal sacrifice. How much one is prepared to suffer losses on behalf of another, or to take risks, even be willing to give one's life and limb, lends greater precision to the location of love as caring (while bearing in mind the need to distinguish it from hotheadedness for one's side in war or reckless selfmutilation, to 'prove' one's fidelity) (cf. Chowning 1974: 157). Most societies fostered regulations that made sure that group members had to show concern for others ('or else'), so that traditional love as caring or sacrifice was much less a personal moral or spiritual quest than the result of social pressure. A Wain youth (Morobe), for instance, on bringing home his first bird, already knows that failure to share his catch will cause all his subsequent shooting to go awry (OT: Okona 1977). To celebrate hunting achievements among the coastal Arapesh, the hunter would seek to contribute parts of his quarry to as many families as possible in the hamlet. If it could not go around, spare fish, meat, or sago would be added, as a sign to all who should not be forgotten that 'one person's achievement was everybody's' (Berry 1983: 5). We can hardly gloss over such communal sharing, even while admitting that disapprobation and gossip always show up when lack of the sharing spirit is evinced, and should note that in some societies such as the Tulu (Manus north coast), failure to make an attempt to rescue a fallen close comrade on the battleground was actually punishable (in the Tulu case by dreaded shaming) (Moha 1983: 4). The full gamut of recriminatory and reciprocal actions has been run, and it remains now to draw threads together, to show both how positive and negative reciprocities can be interrelated and how they connect with human reflections. We shall do this first by focusing on the moulds of a particular society, demonstrating how the various filaments already isolated can be exemplified in a given concrete case, and then by examining the explanatory and epistemological force of traditional retributive logics.

CHAPTER 3

Integrating and Explaining Significant Events

'Payment' in the form of gifts and sacrifice ostensibly constitutes 'positive' activity to heal breaches brought on by antagonism or unbalanced relations; war and sorcery, by contrast, are exercises of 'negativity' (cf. Gouldner 1960: 161-66; Sahlins 1965: 139-49; 1972: 191; Schwimmer 1973: 6, 111-12). We are now to see how the two profiles of Melanesian life can be juxtaposed and interconnected in a given complex of 'payback logic', so that instead of considering cultural components, one society is analysed in more depth to illustrate the integrative power of retributive principles. Erik Schwimmer has produced an ethnography eminently suited to this purpose, following his research on the Sangara, a mountain Orokaiva group of east Papua. Although Schwimmer's work was undertaken well after contact, he has still been able to educe certain notions of mediation and opposition underpinning the traditional Orokaivan mine (exchange system), and to show how they were key aspects of a coherent understanding. His openness to symbolism, mythological charters, and the various implications of reciprocal activity also allows him to explicate the mine in broadly socioreligious rather than narrowly economic terms. Positive and negative reciprocity interrelated: a case study—Orokaiva Putting it succinctly, the mountain Orokaiva conceive all significant social intercourse to be commenced and maintained by the mediation of gifts, and 'they ascribe all breakdown in social relations to an antecedent breakdown in exchange relations' (Schwimmer 1973: 49). In their oscillating moments of war and peace with surrounding javo wahai (which F. E. Williams [1930: 161-65] translated as 'tribes') war was a time of marauded 128

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gardens and severe food shortage, and peace a time when enough produce made feasts possible. Various myths, especially those concerning the ravaging Totoima (who is eventually revenged for his iniquities, and the primordial devouring of whose subdivided body meant all Orokaiva country would be populated with wondrous speed), indicate that the 'original' norm was peaceful settlement, which was then shattered by a breach of amity—by murder, for example, or theft (Schwimmer 1973: 53, 55, 114-16). The present order of things still reflected the momentous issues in Mo tempore (cf. Eliade 1959: 68-115): a pre-acceptance of the peaceful ideal thus motivated efforts to cease hostilities with neighbouring tribes or to maintain unabated reciprocity within one's own; outrages and wrongfulness, ravaging by the enemy or a spoiling of relationships, on the other hand, called forth revenge and anger when they were due. Attempts at positive reciprocity were most susceptible to a breakdown when the contradictory desires for reparation and revenge were evenly balanced. A truce ceremony (peka), then, when 'two tribes would meet in armed force on some common ground . . . to exchange gifts of pigs and ornaments', could turn out to be another stratagem for killing more enemies (Williams 1930: 166). In any case, if peace negotiations did prove fruitful, and a feast was arranged that would involve one community hosting another, a game of strategy continued in which the hosts, especially, had to balance sacrifice with self-interest. The hosts slaughtered a number of pigs and presented raw taro for the guests, and the latter alone ate and took away the food, but in their generosity, which admittedly implied that it was they who sought forgiveness, the hosts often saw themselves making expiation for being rather too successful in war, and invariably tried to impress the visitors with hospitality so as to put them in debt (Schwimmer 1973: 88, 122, 124, 153; Iteanu 1983). It was Orokaivan wisdom, moreover, to put others under obligation 'as much as possible without suffering undue expense, while at the same time enhancing [one's] own status'. The recipients were sensible to offer their tokens of 'forgiveness' in return, openly removing the spells they had directed against the hosts' gardens to ensure the increase of taro for future feasts (Schwimmer 1973: 48, 60). The forging of alliances, moreover, not only entailed exchanges of 'material' gifts but also reciprocal marriage arrangements and the use of affinal links in negotiation. The first emissaries of the peka were women who had married in, or been captured from the other tribe, and subsequent feasts were normally an occasion for marriage negotiations. Marriage itself opened up avenues of positive reciprocity (cf. Blythe 1986: 802 for this as a common Melanesian theme). A new wife made a gift of a pig to her husband's sister and their relation as sisters-in-law was then marked by the mutual term of address bi (penis); the main gift of husband to wife was access to garden land (its withdrawal denoting divorce); in time, the

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exchange of taro between women (and thus families) would bind newly married females into the security circle and provide the 'starting mechanism' for trading partnerships with outsiders. On the other hand, marriage transactions were often precarious. Because wife-capture and elopement were common and were reckoned retaliatory acts, the giving of the bridewealth (dorobu), even when the result of peaceful transaction, was traditionally a 'payment for anger' to placate for the loss of a member from the group; pigs were sacrificed as the typical 'institutionalized means whereby a negative cycle of reciprocity can be made positive' (Schwimmer 1973: 210, 215, cf. 10, 90-92,113, 118-20,131-36; Williams 1930:135-36,166). Among the coastal Okena (to the northeast of Schwimmer's study), the groom's parents shouted their displeasure at paying so much for a woman, and even though the marriage would usually eventuate, spears were thrown and skirmishes often ensued (OT: Aruga 1979). Williams documented similar struggles among the Orokaiva on the occasion of marriage transactions with 'the attempted dragging away of the bride by her people' and 'the damaging of the husband's village' (1930: 149). Marriage illustrated the bi-valency of payback; of taking within an ongoing history of reprisals and of giving in a continuous process of exchange. Above all, (non-human) food as gift and sacrifice is the mediator of positive reciprocity. Taro, especially when cooked and cut, suggests the household hearth, the feminine, the woman's womb and the taro goddess. Its giving not only binds families of the group, but also husbands and wives of particular families, since Orokaivan mythology associated the nurturing of the taro with childrearing. Totoima's wife protected her children from her husband's cannibalism, hiding them beneath the same uprooted weeds used to shelter young taro from the day's heat (Schwimmer 1973: 112-18). Pig, by contrast, denotes masculine virility, or, more generally, ivo (strength, power), an Orokaivan concept crucial for the sense of group well-being and identity. Ivo is ultimately derived from such culture heroes as Totoima and Pekuma, who first bestowed it on mankind (it was from Totoima's dissected body that ivo was given to the ancestors of the tribes for them to multiply). This power is thus connected, on the one hand, with butchered cannibal victims or with any warrior's death (when ivo departs from a person and can be transferred to someone else) and, on the other, with pig sacrifice, which expiates and compensates for losses in battle and marks a (temporary) order of peace to cover spilt human blood. The cutting up of the animal 'victim' 'effectively bestows ivo on guests, provided that they carry the meat away with them, and also upon the hosts, provided that they remove the debilitating influence of any deleterious magic' (Schwimmer 1973: 147; cf. 63-64, 69-70, 144). As for the killing of enemy victims (especially those from outside one's own grouping or confederacy, who were the objects of cannibalism), this also carried sacrificial

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implications. All acts of open inter-group homicide, in fact, even those between members of different tribes within the same wider grouping, were meant to see a transference of ivo, of power from the slain to the slayer. The victim was to give his killer his name, and tell something about himself. Among the Orokaivan Jaua on the coast, it has been shown, the captive or likely victim spurted out all he could tell about himself as quickly as possible, sometimes going through the finest detail as a last embarrassment and taunt against the enemy (OT: Jojoga 1983). To die well was a great sacrifice on behalf of one's own tribe, but it was also an event that transferred life to the victor, who would endow the name of his first victim on himself (and of others on his children), and undergo compensatory purification on each slaying to avert a hostile spirit (Schwimmer 1973: 78; cf. chapter 2). The more the interlocking of this world of revenge and exchange are explored, therefore, the more they are found to be underpinned by worldviews that explain them, or to be defended by modi explicandi legitimating them (cf. also Iteanu 1990). This whole sphere of explanation has not been escaping our attention, but it now needs its own special attention. The (negative) will to retaliate and the (positive) will to concede and sacrifice, we have confirmed, are bound up logically, or integrated into coherent logics of retribution. It is very tempting to deem this continual preoccupation with 'costing' or 'give-and-take', in fact, to be central to Melanesian religion broadly conceived (Trompf 1991: 19-21, 51-77), yet our task here remains incomplete if we do not show how this assessment in motion is inextricably linked with the ubiquitous urge to explain human and biocosmic events. Explanations of weal and woe Crises brought on by trouble, sickness, and death represent the most significant events or situations in any society, along with the moments of salvation constituting their opposites. These events, especially those threatening survival, have always required explanation as the basis for practical problem-solving, and it is in the various ways Melanesians accounted for them in terms of rewards and punishments that we find the most complex, most noticeably intellectualized manifestations of retributive logic. Through this, Melanesians developed science, an ordering of thought that prepared them for change and induced them to action. Any attempt to identify this science with 'magic' would inevitably bear superficial results, in arbitrarily confining a society's ideas about cause and effect to a narrow sphere, and in confusing science with technology. This scientia or way of knowing is different from the naturalistic or mechanistic outlook so influential in the West, but not exaggeratedly so. Certainly, Melanesians almost invariably

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asked 'who caused' a given situation rather than 'what', but reference to purposive, personal agencies still has its appropriate place in Western causal thinking and, their culture-specific premises notwithstanding, Melanesians obviously apply reasoning power (or a mixture of logic and intuition) to their problems, just as Westerners do. The old distinction between (primitive) pre-logical and (modern) logical is obfuscating and detracts from our common humanity; it is more productive to differentiate types of knowledge. Gnomic knowledge, for example, which involves the gathering of immediately perceived experiences into proverbial or pithy truths, better describes Melanesian methods than do such terms as 'analysis' or 'inductive reasoning' (cf. Jolles 1930: 156-67). (Socio-)'mythic thought' has its merits too (Leenhardt 1979: 162-65, 195). It betters Lucien LevyBruhl's rather too influential yet surpassable categories—his earlier somewhat denigrating one being 'pre-logical' (1922), and the later rather unsuitable one, 'mystical' (1938)—because it evokes recent, less pejorative analyses of myth as a special mode of human rationality. Interestingly, the Melanesianist Maurice Leenhardt was among the first to approach this truth in ethnographic fieldwork, subsequently questioning Levy-Bruhl's position when at the Sorbonne (Leenhardt 1949: vii-ix; Clifford 1982: 20102; yet cf. van der Leeuw 1937; Hallpike 1976; 1979). The old, unfortunately widespread presumption that 'primitives' are 'more suggestible' than 'civilized moderns' and more credulous and lacking in critical judgement likewise needs radical modification. Actually, the first serious psychological studies of this greater suggestibility were on Melanesians—by Woodworth (1910) on the Torres Strait islanders and Thurnwald (1913, 1924) on the Tolai and Buin—but the approaches were hardly experimental by recent scientific standards (cf. Moelia 1933: 74-77). The most we can now affirm is that accepted cultural preconceptions appear to make Melanesians more accepting of alleged happenings and causal connections that are less likely to be credible to urbanized Westerners. Yet, that comes to very little! In any case readers are here advised to 'bracket' their possible prejudices about the special (some might say psychoticlooking, let alone 'irrational') features of Melanesian thought (Natanson 1973: 57; cf. la Barre 1970: 49), to explore instead how logical relations as traditionalist Melanesians themselves cognized them help account for their own or others' actions (cf. also Bergson 1962: 148-55). Certainly, there is justice in describing Melanesian thought as 'nonnaturalistic', but again let us be cautious. Long ago Malinowski showed of the Trobrianders that magical techniques to prepare for fishing in safe shoals were virtually absent, whereas complex rites existed to guarantee success in dangerous and deep waters (1948: 25-35; 1965: 70,238-39). If such plain pragmatism can show up, notions equivalent to 'natural' or 'accidental' often claimed to be absent from Melanesian thought, have some

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airing also. The Bena feel no anger over the quiet death of an old man or woman; they just acknowledge it as 'natural' or 'fitting' with the ejaculation uyailotol (OTs: Rasinakafa; Futrepa 1973); a Wahgi sees no significance in a slight bruise or stubbing of the toe; for such events 'just happen' (olim erlim) (OT: Worn 1978); and Ann Chowning has claimed of the Sengseng that they hold some deaths to 'occur from natural causes, including disease and accident' (Chowning 1974: 173). In this final part of our discussion, however, we are confronted with logical intricacies that make exhaustive treatment impossible. Confronting special or exceptional circumstances, primal peoples have means of subtly adapting their frames of reference to meet the case, the new situation becoming fully intelligible only when 'the whole story' of 'what happened' has been told in a certain way, with particular nuances and emphasis intimated. Is it so different in the West? To communicate something of this mainly reflective side to retributive logic, I will be deliberately selective in my cultural references—to avoid a method too magpie-like and thinly spread—and I will treat in turn interpretations of trouble, sickness, death and then 'blessings' (such as prosperity, fertility, and success). What follows, let it be clear, is not a general overview of Melanesian epistemologies or of every traditional principle of cause and effect, or of thought-styles revealing the 'common' structures of the Melanesian mind. Our humbler task, rather, is to delineate how Melanesians claim to make sense of critical changes in their lives and their people's fortunes. Although doing this may bespeak an endemic human need for satisfactory responses to basic existential questions, the material surveyed will be but segments of indigenous reflections, not wholes. While the major examples of explanatory type will not be left as disiecta membra, always being related back to the 'payback complex' they are not intended as distillations of 'authentic culture' or a society's 'essential meanings' (cf. Juilleret et al. 1980: 17; 1982: 350; Asad 1979: 623; 1983), but simply documentations of grassroots interpretative repertoires. Trouble and sickness 'Trouble' (pidgin: trabel, wari) is an unfortunately loose (but nonetheless Melanesian) expression to cover a range of difficulties, running from conflict between two individuals (such as relatives or spouses) to patent social disasters (such as famine, war-ravage, volcanic eruptions, or cyclones) that can also bring sickness and death. Collectively, a group may image 'generally adverse circumstances' calling for a response when a sufficient spate of misfortunes (ranging from sickness to their own number on to animals) befalls specific families. Or it may be that trabel as ill-feeling is perceived to be the cause of sickness, with health only being restorable when bad relations are dispelled.

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A Wahgi example will expose the issues to do with this last, more localized, and very typical kind of situation. The seances known among these people have as their prime purpose the resolution of familiar conflicts. A female specialist (golmolk) is the medium for spirit contact; once the darkness comes, with the fire lying extinguished and an attitude of waiting unifying the participants, an audible whistling, which seems to pass through her, conveys messages from the departed relatives. One seance I documented was precipitated by the sickness of a baby girl in the Zagaga tribe (1976), yet the procedures connected the child's condition to a quarrel. The medium's analysis of the situation was very complex, and all the more so because of new post-contact developments in the society. It all started some time before the sick child was born, when A (who was her grandfather) went on a visit to another tribe. While A was away, he left two kinsmen, B and C, in charge of his twin sons, D (who was the sick child's father) and E. Now, at this time D's wife had recently had a son and the payment for the boy was due. (This is a payment made to the wife's kinfolk when the child is formally named, somewhat similar to a brideprice, but considerably less). As arrangements for this celebration were being discussed, C became very angry with D. The reasons for this anger had to do with the nature of the extended family relationship that now arose because B and C had been entrusted with D and E. Because of this relationship, D and E were expected to behave like elder sons and help B's son and C's son. C, however, felt that they were favouring B's son and doing nothing for his own son. D and E had, in fact, just helped B's son to build a house. And now the celebrations for the payment of the child were being discussed in the hamlet where B and his son lived. C was furious, therefore, and all the more so because there were signs of a departure from tradition at the celebration (there was to be beerdrinking). So C boycotted the celebration. And D was deeply disturbed by the fact that C hadn't appeared at the naming of his son. Now, a year after these events, D's second child, the baby girl, was sick. After the whistling of five identifiable relatives during the seance, the golmolk made it plain that D and C should come together to confess their resentments, which in turn had made C's dead relatives cross enough to harm the child. Thus, a sickness had been explained, but also a family quarrel was brought out into the open. Reconciliation was the prescription for the infant's recovery. The need was answered by killing one pig in the bush (kipe kong), in the presence of the interested ancestors, and the subsequent distribution of pork among the parties concerned. As a postscript, though, it should be mentioned that the late arrival of a reconciliatory truckload of beer led to a midnight brawl, which marred the tradition and re-enlivened the conflict (Trompf 1991: 68-69).

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In the above instance trouble did not arise without the involvement of the ancestors, who form part of its explanation. Whereas a Westerner would normally exclude the motivations of the deceased in accounting for some friction, the Wahgi (as most other Melanesian peoples do) count them as primary in many key situations, lying behind visible individuals as invisible causal agents who can move the feelings of the living one way or another. In the domestic 'conflict resolution' that we have just discussed, interestingly, although the existence of ill-feeling between two present and recognizable individuals is not being bypassed or explained away, the reference to these invisible causes enables both parties to avoid losing face by involving a third factor—a non-observable conflict allegedly affecting the child—to urge them into settlement. On the other hand, this sort of appeal to direct spiritual interference has produced some curious rationalizations, especially by those seeking to avoid culpability for their own actions. In a near-contact case, for instance, a worried husband was found asserting, en route to a golmolk, that he had beaten up his wife with the blunt side of his axe because a spirit of the dead or disembodied soul (minman) had made him do so (Luzbetak 1956: 85). Passing on from such domestic, often minor, cases of trouble, to analyse explanations for disasters befalling whole groups, we can expect that the ascription of spirit-powers with destructive tendencies will be all the more apparent. Thus, in the eyes of the Mae Enga, for example, some great loss, successive military defeats, a rise in the death rate of pigs or people, a high incidence of disease such as leprosy or yaws, or serious crop failures will induce a whole clan to perform a collective, emergency ritual to appease the ancestors under the full moon. Such a rare ceremony marks the very opposite to the Wahgi Kongar as the celebration of ancestral blessing even if the same sorts of logical principles apply. Relations within the community of men and spirits demand urgent repair in the Enga case, so that an admission of the ancestral spirits' justifiable payback against the living leads to a propitiatory rite, in which clan-culthouses are renewed, clansmen lavish themselves with plumes and wealth to please the dead, pork is distributed to hunters and visitors (neighbouring groups remaining at peace when this event is on) and the sacred clan-stones known as the 'eggs of the sun' are gently rubbed and smeared with ochre while an 'expert appeals to the clan ancestors to refrain from injuring the living' (Meggitt 1965: 117, cf. 114-18). This is not to say that such apotropaism is absent from more positive celebrations among the Enga or elsewhere; for, a common Melanesian assumption has it that general trouble arises if such rituals are not properly performed. With the Kongar, for instance, certain conditions must be met—intra-tribal relations must be in order, the pigs fat; the moon rightly positioned, the hosts generally well, the central pole of the last bolim fertility house properly recovered from a stream—for the

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Table 1 Aetiologies of typical trouble in select Melanesian traditions Types of trouble Adverse weather drought rainfall (unexpected)

Causes ascribed

Cultures

angry spirits or rainstoppers garden made in spiritplace

Halia (Buka)

Loss losing one's way in the diversion or 'bite' of jungle bush-spirits person's disappearance offended dead (total and unusual) Marriage difficulties adultery barrenness illicit endogamy marriage breakdown wife theft Disasters (actual/potential) village burnt

woman's disappointment with arranged marriage sorcery love magic failure to pay brideprice inter-village love magic

Mengen (New Britain)

Orokaiva, Ioma (Papua)

Narak, Jimi Valley (New Guinea highlands) Buin (Bougainville) Timbe (Morobe) Sursunga (New Ireland) Haku (Buka) Karkar Is. (Madang)

ritual neglect of ancestors Wantoat (Morobe) or enemy sorcery

rewards of the ancestors to be celebrated. And certain details have to be attended to with meticulous care, otherwise there is the danger, as one bolim custodian put it, 'of no fertility in the time ahead' (OT: Munil 1973). Countless illustrations of comparable thinking from the region could be added, although one's eyes should be keen for the many attenuations. Sometimes trouble will be blamed on the ritualists for failing in their placatory measures; the Trobrianders will blame the magician if he does not stop the hurricane, for not remembering the spell correctly, or the rite, or for not having held strictly to the tabus of his profession (Malinowski 1948: 54-55). On the other hand, some rituals going awry would be treated like bad omens, as when smoke from a funeral pyre spread through a Choiseulese village, in spite of the 'priest-chief's command to the fire to "go straight up!"', an anomaly which betokened the ghost bringing trouble and not the specialist's error (Anon, n.d: 3). Then again, general trouble for a group can be associated with poor leadership (as it can in any society). And trouble to a particular leader (the loss of a wife, for example can force him to drop out of a prestigious role, as among the Tauna Awa of the

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eastern New Guinea highlands, because he has failed to manage in a total sense—not deploying his skills and authority to control the forces of destruction as well as those of fertility and wealth (Hayano 1974: 18-26; cf. Lindenbaum 1979: 99). As illustrated in table 1, various kinds of trouble—the failure to pay a brideprice, the burning of a hamlet, lack of success in hunting, the loss of something valuable (perhaps a straying pig), damage to an important item for livelihood (such as a canoe)—may all be initially related back to customarily accepted 'probable explanations'. The explanations listed diagrammatically in table 1 we take as typical, or the ones most likely to be invoked, but without precluding other possibilities being admitted through debate, consensus, or specialists. These explanations are, therefore, those that are normally vocalized initially, after a given set of adverse circumstances has presented itself, and which will satisfy most but not each and every individual case. The characteristic modes of thought reflected, to be sure, remain recognizably steady. They lie with underlying assumptions about the workings of some living (not impersonal or 'natural') agencies, unless these latter have been brought into being by humans or spirits. If human, the pinpointed or alleged causer himself or herself is usually blamed and deemed to deserve a punishment; if a spirit, the causer is understood to have acted justifiably (or defensibly). In this second case, culpability falls on those who bear the brunt of the trouble for having failed to fulfil obligations, take precautions, and so on. The explanations will not always appear so distinctly religious, although that only confirms the need to broaden one's understanding of what religions encompass. What of sickness? Sickness is both a special type of trouble, yet also one possible prelude to death; its association with one or the other depends on the kind of ailment. A wound sustained in war yet subsequently bringing death was usually attributed to sorcery, as we saw with the Bena. A healed wound, or a salvation in the sense of being hit defectively or in a less vulnerable spot, will often be reckoned the work of a protective dead relative, who also assists the healer. A Wahgi warrior, for example, will be told through seances who it was who saved him from a fatal wound or occurrence. In one case I know it was said that the man's dead sister watched over him. She cared as he bled, while the rite called minmanui was performed for him. A fowl was killed so that his soul (minman) could smell animal rather than human blood and be enticed back into his body. A feast of meat always denotes reward and reconciliation for the Wahgi, and to assure the ancestors' intervention when they are most needed. Admittedly, Wahgi tribes used to ascribe their general victory over enemies to a collectivity of ancestors or to the powers behind their sacred stones (chapter 1), but the saving of a wounded man was left to those 'dead ones' closest to him, including the ancestral female nurses (OTs: Wandel, Kumai, 1976).

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As well as wounding and their consequences in military contexts, there were injuries inflicted by one member of a primary group on another (which could be reckoned as a justified act of redress, or else blamed on inciting spirits), and there were minor cuts, bruises, and the like (which, if not passed off as insignificant, could be deemed minor interferences of place-spirits or non-human trickster-figures (e.g. OT: Mond 1973 on the Wahgi). What interests us most at this point, however, are sicknesses that amount to the failure of the bodily processes, though without denying that some sorry ailments, such as tropical ulcers, may derive from small lacerations or bites of the skin. Classifications of sickness vary with each society. In some the medical tradition is rich indeed, as was shown of Fiji early on by Dorothy Spencer (1941), when she produced the first serious monograph on a traditional Melanesian medical system, and later of other cultures such as the Papuan Motu (Kopi 1979), the Gnau, and other Sepik groups (Lewis 1975: 154-330; Mitchell 1982: 7-11), the highlander Gimi and Huli (Glick 1963; Goldman 1981; Frankel 1986), and the islander Mengen and Moli (Panoff 1970; Foye 1976). In such cultures causal explanations vary more considerably than elsewhere, and diagnosis becomes a veritable art. Not that explanatory simplicity signals cultural inferiority, since any society's tendency to complexify one area of thought as against another has to do with the 'ecology of the religion' as a whole. Certain groups scattered as wide apart as the eastern Toaripi (coastal Papua), the Bosavi, the Bena, the cultures around Dreikikir and beyond (in the Sepik), hold all fatal sicknesses to be the work of sorcerers and the spirit-forces they conjure up, yet among these peoples the arts of sorcery identification, let us say, or group reflection on the dead person's life and his associates are far from simple (cf., e.g., Koroti 1974; Siaoa 1976; Schieffelin 1977: 58-59, 101-09; Minda 1983: 5). Among the Wahgi, to return to our most used exemplar, one finds that the explanatory emphasis is less on the precise details of the illnesses than on the spirit-powers likely to have caused any of them. The magicians share a code of medical knowledge that connects certain states of sickness with at least twelve mostly harmful 'wind'-spirits (kangekes) out of a total of sixteen such beings (see table 2). They must also take into account that, although the ancestors are basically friendly, the recently departed are easily offended through lack of respect or tabu breakage (as golmolk seances reveal), and that sorcerers can be behind the channelling of malevolent powers. They have 'classes of causes', then, somewhat similar to the Gnau (according to Gilbert Lewis's intricate analysis), but while the Wahgi have many more spirits to be concerned about, Gnau medical lore is much richer in connecting specified spirits' activities with various foods they care for, and also with animals and clan linkages (1975: 171, 174, cf. 1980: 136-37).

INTEGRATING AND EXPLAINING SIGNIFICANT EVENTS Table 2

Wahgi kangekes ('wild spirits')

Name of spirit kupel kondol mondo tinma kora kangenji toipal kangenanu hump arimp bang hum kolang barimp jingan wim

139

Symptoms stomach ache fever one-night fatal fever shivering to death, with delirium fever with dream visitations of the spirit at night harmless; whistles and passes by at dusk, but does no good body scars appearing yet without physical injury inflicted same effect as kupel, but spirit lives in the mountains only bush spirit; exceptional for being harmless stomach ache and chest pain swelling along with stomach ache; bush spirit harmless mountain spirit (diff. fr. sorcery) harmless mountain spirit stomach ache and chest pain (but definitely different spirit from arump) same effect as tinma but operates in valleys only picks up discarded food and makes the discarder get fatter or thinner unto death

With so many kangekes to take into consideration in the Wahgi case, the magician as diagnostician operates on the assumption that one of them has caused the sickness, until consultation procedures reveal otherwise. They possess various techniques for probing beneath the surface; the kunjeyi could set some sweet potatoes before the patient, for instance, piercing them with a sharp stick, posing alternatives before each prod, and deciding on the answer by the softness or toughness of a given tuber. In every case the final reason concerns a spirit agency, and pig(s) of appeasement would require killing (with a payment of pork and valuables made to the magician). Curing was not just a matter of bodily but also total change to the better, and of driving out a malignant oppressor. A demon threatens a victim, it is believed, because the latter has intruded on his realm or met him in the dark, while a dead relative's reprisals follow either negligences at his or her funeral and in group remembrance or wrongs against living persons he or she continues to love. Comparable themes and beliefs will be found in every Melanesian tradition I know. In analysing the 'syntax' of any retributive logic, especially in its application to sickness, one should never neglect the consensus norms and the manner in which the young are warned not to trespass against them. Mention has already been made of that class of causes behind sickness to do with the reprisals of the dead—if they are angered or if a community rule has been violated. In everyday community affairs it was hardly uncommon for behaviour considered offensive to the ancestors and rule-breakages

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to be picked up by the elders and, thus, punishments openly exacted by the living. There were certain rules in some societies, after all, that could only be broken in public. On Tanga Island, for instance, one would face the death penalty for refusing; to bow before the Kahltu dok (or sub-clan leader), or for not sitting on a platform that was below his.1 But in many cases in all societies, offences were committed that might go undetected by the group or punitive authority, and it was typically assumed that the dead—whose presumed existence helped cultivate the 'Melanesian conscience'—would act in their own right to requite wrongdoers. Advice to the young not to do certain things, then, often took into account that there were various misdemeanours that could be enacted privately, yet would merit retribution via sickness—or 'the punitive aspect of disease' as F. E. Williams puts of Lake Kutubu thought (1976: 259)—if they lay unexposed. This is not to say that there were not other tabus or strictures, however, the breaking of which did not so much bring punishment as horror and annoyance, as well as the fear and belief that such violations or pollutions would incur subsequent ill-health. Sexual intercourse constitutes the classic example of a (normally) concealed action that could result in trouble. It was held in most cultures that a member of a war-party put himself and others in peril if he was involved in sexual activity before battle. But, depending on the culture and circumstances, badly timed or wrong engagement in such activity was also believed to bring on sickness. Elders among the Mengen, to illustrate, taught young men that sexual intercourse, forbidden to them before marriage, would lead to slackened skin and premature ageing (OT: Mordaunt 1979; cf. also Minda 1983: 7 on the Warn), and typical would be the Bosmun attitude to such matters (in the lower Ramu River valley) in keeping adolescent and unmarried boys and girls away from each other through custom and surveillance (OT: Kapi 1983). It is always useful to discover, however, whether a given group differentiated between sexual actions that were questionable within the security circle, the carrying out of which would augur sickness or punishment, and those same actions done out of sheer bravado against enemies. Various cultures expected male adolescent bands to spend time in mobile isolation before initiation and marriage, and if any one of them happened to rape an enemy woman it was more than likely to be accepted by the elders as a useful though rather reprehensible experience (e.g. Williams 1940: 78-79, 82; Mead 1930: 154). Apart from such cases, however, and setting aside those cultures (such as that of the Trobriands) in which a measure of premarital sexual freedom was allowed (Malinowski 1927: 1

The Kahltu dok was not strictly a chief, that is, leading by hereditary right, but had the power to choose his successor from among his sister's sons (Funmatloau 1983: 2, cf. Bell 1934).

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195-200), sexual transgressions within the primary group—above all, adultery and incest—had spirit, not just human, sanctions against them. With the Tangu, for example, such misdemeanours were often followed by an alleged encounter with a ghost, the man involved thus being induced to confess what happened to a friend or elder, in order to avoid the sickness that followed such undiscovered events (Burridge 1973: 98). As for masturbation, in various societies—I can think of the Negrie for one— elders warned youths that it would impair the health and seriously reduce one's chances of growing into a strong warrior (OT: Gesch 1979). Hardly need one be reminded that it is helpful to learn the nature and role of the spirit-agencies held to cause sickness in any given society, especially because some are quite distinct from offended dead or from malicious spirits such as some of the Wahgi kangekes previously discussed. Occasionally one finds gods whose roles are particularly concerned with ethics and the punishment of rule-breakers. The Huli, for instance, talk of Datagaliwabe, a great being independent of the dama deities or demigods. Datagaliwabe's 'special province' was to punish 'breaches of kinship', to penalize 'lying, stealing, adultery, murder, incest, breaches of exogamy,... taboos relating to ritual... [and failure] to avenge the deaths of kin slain in war' (Glasse 1965: 37). His punishments included sickness, along with accidents, wounds, and death. If we are to press the investigation further, however, querying whether the 'real gods' of a society are in fact its 'disease-makers', as Frazer put it (1922: vol.1, 341), we would be forced to admit that some explanations for sickness in virtually all Melanesian religions place the stress less on the role of spirits and much more on the malevolence of some human (usually a sorcerer) or a special contagion or 'pollution'. On closer inspection, admittedly, it will usually be found that sorcerers putatively rely on an ability to summon and direct spirit-agencies to do their service, and pollution is more than often said to arise from the breaking of a tabu with which spirits have a crucial interest (Douglas 1966: 114-36; Meigs 1978). Sorcery will be returned to again (under the heading of death, since fatal sicknesses are so often ascribed to it). It remains true, however, that many serious illnesses (especially those from which people are not expected to recover!) are attributed to sorcery attack. Poole (1981: 62-63) estimates, for instance, that up to 11 per cent of traditional 'aetiological suspicions in the case of serious illness' among the Bimim-Kuskusmin (west Sepik hinterland) pinpoint sorcery, a significant datum quite apart from whether there has been an increase in the enactment and fears of sorcery in the area since contact (chapter 7). It was held among the Tor (Irian Jaya), to take another example, that although lethal sorcery was very rarely directed inwardly, 'against one's own deme- [or clan]-fellow', milder sick-bearing sorcery (soeangi) was more often thought to be traceable to someone near

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at hand, since anyone could be a soeangi practitioner and so take out a personal grievance (Oosterwal 1961: 265-66; cf. A. Strathern 1984a: 86-87; and 1984b: 34 on the Wiru). As for pollution, sickness was normally connected with it when persons or things that should otherwise be kept widely separate were somehow brought into contact. Pollution, it follows, could be one device of sorcery, because, as among the Tor just mentioned, a sorcerer could pick as his poison some substance (such as female menstrual blood) that was believed to be devastating for menfolk to touch or eat. In the main, though, notions of sickness consequent upon pollution apply to cases in which people fail to take proper precautions, or in which they are unfortunate enough to expose themselves to the 'dangers' of contamination. Fear of women's menstrual blood is apparently the most prevalently enunciated fear of contagion in Melanesia, and not infrequently associated with it are male beliefs that the very sight of blood from the vagina or of a child being born could bring debilitation, serious back pains, weakening of the limbs, etc. (cf. Lindenbaum 1973). But it should be remembered that males may become highly contagious as well. A Roro who has touched a corpse, perhaps not using some protective banana leaf at the mortuary rites, is likely to be placed under a fast or special diet by the chiefs (Trompf and Aitsi, fieldnotes at Rapa village, 1974). A Tolai initiate or member of the Dukduk secret society is highly charged with dangerous spirit-power if he has just come from the Tariau (the society's sacred space ringed with dried coconut palm leaves); he must purify his body with special lime, especially for the sake of women, and must eat from a banana leaf carefully set aside until his condition has passed (ToBata 1983:1). Sickness follows contamination because a tabu has been broken, and the delict must necessarily be requited unless purification techniques are available. Along with the retributions of the dead, deities and other spirits, then, and the reprisals of sorcerers and witches, pollution can be appealed to as yet another form of payback affecting human health. An introductory approach to this area of aetiology and epistemology has been sketched out in table 3. It indicates for the lay reader where the balance of explanatory emphases lies over a random sample of cultures, even though the intricacies of each culture's system are not shown, and the varieties of sick-bearing spirit-agencies—sky beings (of the Trans-Fly), sea spirits (of the Massim), and so forth—not exhausted. There are many other considerations worth exploring, however, when detailed work can be done. One would like to know, for instance, whether the reckoning with possible causes of sickness in a given culture has something to do with the human urge to satisfy curiosity—the 'need for the intellectual life to be fulfilled', as Levi-Strauss would have it (1972: 1-10, cf. Durkheim and Mauss 1969: 10-15, 27-30)—and, thus, with a certain interest in classifying

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Table 3 Aetiologies of sickness in select Melanesian traditions Sickness Head headache headache (serious) Throat cough

Typically alleged cause

Culture

someone else's personal jealousy ancestors warning

Tolai Taiora

hit by an offended ancestral spirit on the head

Bosmun

attack by ghosts of recent dead

Taiora

cough (bad)

inadvertently dropping food near the Mengen holes of allegedly non-eating crabs

throat blockage

sorcery put in food

Bosmun

eating ancestrally forbidden fruit

Orokaiva (Ion

consuming a 'wild spirit' of a wild taro sorcery

Tolai

stomach ache

trespassing on place-spirit's ground

Lamassa

sharp pain (stomach, head)

ancestral anger on the clan of the sufferer for not paying attention to the ancestors personal enemy's (imitative magic) throwing of a spear

Ponam

right-sided chest pain

forest- or water-spirit angered

Motu

malnutrition

sorcery

Halia

Abdominal pains etc. stomach upset/ vomiting swollen stomach

side pain

Skin ailments (tropical) skin ulcer

Buin

Koitabu

eating forbidden fruit

Haku

grile skin rash

passed on from past generations (by ancestors)

Sursunga

boils

trespassed into place-spirit's ground

Haku

return of 'wild spirits' of the bush (in cycles) sorcery, or possession by angry ancestors enemy's 'real poison' (sorcery) angry ancestor or 'wild spirit', if eating strong-smelling food or whistling in the vicinity of the ancestor's grave or spirit's swamp

Malala

Fevers malaria

Haku Taiora Narak

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Table 3 (cant) Sickness

fever

Typically alleged cause

Culture

trespass on place-spirit's ground ghost of the recent dead bent on capturing a soul seasonal changeover brought by wind (spirit) enemy sorcery grievance of a particular ancestor

Mengen Sursunga Malala Taiora Biwat

Lower parts of the body etc. diarrhoea eaten food jumped or walked over Wantoat by a bigman, magician, sorcerer, rainmaker, uncle, cousin or swollen legs (and/or abdomen)

Mental problems in adults unconsciousness

restlessness

dizziness insanity

stepped on, or jumped over something sorcelized trespassed on place-spirit's ground, or stole something

Bosmun

spirit (tutana virakit) forcing a face-to-face encounter person's spirit roaming and evil spirit preventing its return

Tolai

trespassing on the ground of 'place-spirit', which takes hold of the person's spirit angry ancestors looking at you directly in the eyes past wrongdoing, or sorcery sorcery, or a place spirit attack on an isolated person possession by evil or 'wild' spirit

fits Women's stigmas menstruation barrenness deformed child at birth Eve of contact illnesses influenza tuberculosis

Sursunga

Karkar Is. Tolai

Bosmun Hula, AromaVelerupu Tolai Biwat

consumption of a betel nut special to a wild spirit

Tolai

birth of the new moon sorcery

Karkar Is. Wantoat

pregnant mother ate ancestrally forbidden fruit

Karkar Is.

angry ancestors send evil spirits

Timbe

tabu breakages

Malala

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things. One would like to know of the relative pull of such concerns, even though aetiologies are applied and reflected upon out of a practical need to decide who is doing the paying back, and whether sacrifices, compensatory gifts, punishments or retaliations are required. Of vital additional value would be insights into the nature of a given language, as to whether terms referring to sickness and its causes relate to wider retributive issues. Among the Huli, for example, illness is a source of metaphor for talk about hostilities and reciprocities; actions and words can be said to 'poke the heart', to illustrate, and the term for compensation or indemnity is the very same one used to mean recovery from sickness (dabi) (Goldman 1981: 57-58). The focus has thus far been on various reasons given why sickness befalls individuals. Yet we hasten to add what has been hinted all along, that local modi explicandi are integrally related to diagnostic, divinatory, and healing techniques. The explanatory plot will tend to thicken, naturally, when questions have to be asked as to why a patient continues to be sick or why his soul continues to wander from his body after initial assessments, healing, or anti-sorcery techniques, or placatory rites have been carried out. The researcher must therefore seek to learn how treatment fits in with aetiological thinking, looking to see whether specialists are prepared to set aside one technique or medicinal herb for another, or ready to find new causes to blame (perhaps an undetected sorcerer, perhaps an unconfessing patient), or whether they are just as likely to fly into a rage for having failed (cf. Chalmers in LMS 1884: 7 on Motuan healers). It would also be important to learn whether more store was set by the correct performance of the healing or apotropaic rituals than by the attitudes of the wouldbe curer(s) and their supporters or by the contribution of the sufferer; and 1 know of no researchers who have found whether, among the concerned relatives who surround a seriously sick person, there are notions of death as a kind of 'fate' that eventually befalls every individual, quite apart from the fatal illnesses.2 Death Death, the profoundest of all life's mysteries, evokes a variety of profound Melanesian responses. In terms of retributive logic, these tend to fall into three general categories: general explanations for humanity's mortality, explanations of specific deaths, and beliefs about the condition of the dead. Each will be discussed in turn. Who gets the blame for humankind's mortal condition quite expectedly varies across the Melanesian board. To bring disparate mythological 2

cf. also factors for research, e.g., the psychology of fear (Metais 1967: 131-96; Herdt and Stephen 1989) and of contagion (Fastre 1937: 188), the role of self-blame (e.g. Boelaars 1981: 116), and the practical changing of medicines (Schwimmer 1973: 75). See also Worsley 1982.

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material together, however, it is fair to claim that blame is most commonly assigned to humans themselves, even though death may only become a reality when some higher power pays back human beings. Thus, according to the Erave (northwest Papuan Gulf), a sky-being bestowed the gift of immortality on the snake because people had not been patient enough to help him out of the predicament of being suspended between sky and earth (OT: Posu 1977). Humanity pays for its neglect. For the Daribi (south Chimbu), death resulted from a curse by Sau (a culture hero, not a god), who was ashamed after frightening a woman by penile penetration (Wagner 1972: 36-37). Death as a consequence of the first sexual intercourse is the meaning of the Genesis-like Wahgi myth about the first two people, Taimel Dam and Taimel Mam, who could wish for any food to come to them without exertion, until their sexual union brought labour, difficulty, and disease (OTs: Yeki, Kanangl 1976). No punishing spirit is mentioned in this myth, yet it is the woman of the two who is most responsible, for she accused Taimel Dam of laziness and wanted 'to do hard work' (= sexual intercourse, and also childbirth, in parabolic language). A more metaphysical-looking myth with much the same meaning (and anti-female implication) comes from the Mae Enga. Only the sky people had drunk from the Creator Aitawe's 'water of life' (yalipu endaki) in primordial time, and so obtained food and opulence without toil. When they colonized the earth they attempted to supply this precious liquid to humans, but 'Alas, . . . the mothers gave their newborn breast milk, and thereafter all the burdenless accoutrements of the sky world were, of necessity, exchanged for the care and toil known to the earthling' (Brennan 1977: 16). In a spirit rather more comparable to Genesis again, to cite another example, the Kapauka put the blame for mortality on a man of violence and 'bad behaviour'. The creator God Ugatame was once partly in the form of a young girl who was raped by this man in the Kapaukas' main valley. 'Because you are bad, beating and raping people', she castigated, as she gave the man a piece of wood, 'I give you flies, death and darkness. You take It' (Pospisil 1958: 16). Whatever the many variations, the imputing of culpability and acknowledgements of death as either appropriate or unfortunate retribution are widespread in Melanesia, as well as most primal mythologies of the world (cf. Staudacher 1942: 43-44; Schmitz 1960: 25356; Godelier 1972: 200 on the cosmic separation motif). In cosmoi in which spirits can die (and be avenged), the world of the gods above is capable of collapsing and killing all below, as in Bukaua understanding of eclipses as portended deaths of mighty beings (Lehner 1930: 31, 111-12; Aerts 1983: 21; cf. van Nieuwenhuijsen-Riedman 1975:114-16 on the Suki; Meggitt 1977: 63, 65 on the Enga). Specific deaths, like particular sicknesses, are almost always the results of payback—of sorcery, the enemy (usually with sorcery's help), the

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vengeful dead, disturbed masalai, or of a wrathful person driven by a power beyond himself. Admittedly, the members of one security circle or tribe have little interest in earnestly exploring the rationale behind the deaths of outsiders or enemies. If some happen to be captured or taken into the group, moreover, their death at the hands of either captors or temporary hosts will normally not need reflective interpretation (cf., e.g., Barth 1975: 147). Both dying and disease among one's own people, however, are almost invariably the subject of serious efforts at interpretation or divination. This is not to say that deaths or diseases among one's own primary group are always considered the result of unfair, unfortunate, or undeserved retribution. On the contrary, some people fairly beg for reprisal through their offensive actions, and if any such annoying individuals are thought to have been brought to heel by sorcery then this provides a reason for accepting sorcery as a useful part of the social system (chapters 1, 7), or a reason for not striving to kill any witch or sorcerer in one's vicinity. Thus, a death can be seen to result from a person's misdemeanours, a failure to keep tabus (for which, of course, he or she may be directly killed by his or her own people), the breaking of social ties, wandering foolishly in dangerous places or across battle lines, and so on, and any one of these may be identified as the real cause (or as tru as it is in pidgin). But most commonly, particularly when a sickness ends in fatality, thoughts wandered in the direction of outside, enemy sources of spiritual revenge. In all Melanesian cultures people still discuss likely causes of a death for days, and it is normally very important for a group to arrive at a conclusion that embodies a 'consensus view' (see table 4).3 Perhaps the kinds of distinction demanding our astuteness here concern the possible conceptual differences between rule-keeping and moral qualities. Will a person's personality or special faults count for more than that person's possible infringement of rules when it comes to explaining his/her death? And will it be much more likely for a prestigious person's death to be blamed on outside factors and not on his or her own mistakes? How a group answers these questions is crucial for its members and for their relations with other groups, as well as being grist to the mill for any student of culture or religion. As revealed in the first chapter, many consensus explanations for death in Melanesia result from post-mortem divinatory techniques, yet these procedures more often than not make more specific what has already been decided in principle, and it now becomes the task of identifying the village originating sorcery, let us say, or perhaps even the sorcerer in particular. 3

For help with the survey behind tables 1, 3 and 4,1 thank Beka Aisak, Cornelius Bagomas, Yatosa Binot, Louise Kawei, Cathy Kingkei, Ellie Markuas, Ahne Masina, Mirian Mileng, Paul Momong, Mary Nianfop, Lilian Takoi, Afito Unero and Ties Watts. For table 4 I injected some material from Burton-Bradley and Julius (1965: 22-25). cf. also Williams 1936: 254-55 (Keraki, Trans-Fly); Young 1971: 136-37, cf. 90-91 (Massim).

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Table 4 Aetiologies of death in select Melanesian traditions (Deaths other than those resulting from fighting) Type of death

Typically alleged cause

Culture

jealousy (from a man who could not marry the mother)

Karkar Is.

death in childbirth

cause of one woman's jealousy of childbearer, or result of evil done towards deceased in-laws

Narak (fringe Wahgi)

sudden death when young

stepping over a sorcery plant

Tolai

or haunted by a ghost

Siwai

sorcery

Susunga and Karkar Is.

accident

witches

Malala

fall (from tree or height)

sorcery, or dead relative caused a slipping

Halia and Tolai

drowning (jumping in water unexpectedly)

sanguma sorcery attack

Bosmun

ancestral anger

Ponam

enemy using spirits, i.e. sorcery

Mengen

sorcery

Bosmun

Children's deaths stillborn child

Sudden and unexpected deaths sudden death

object falling on victim from above Death by non-human creatures death by snakebite wild pig bite (during hunt)

Narak spirit-protector of wild pigs angry; too many have been killed and hunter has failed to seek prior ancestral protection broken tabu by sleeping with wife Orokaiva (Ioma) prior to hunt

shark crocodile Severe internal pains prior to death terrible pain in the stomach or heart (= variang) pig-bel (disease from eating badly cooked pork)

sorcery sorcery

Lamas: Bosmu

sorcery (poisoned substances) entering the body

Tolai

flaunting rules of the deities

Haku

sorcery

Malala

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Table 4 (cont.) Type of death Exhaustion etc. death following a dance

Suicide suicide

Old age ordinary old age Special classifications death after a very prolonged illness

distinctly strange deaths

Typically alleged cause

Culture

'breaking a string' (= akukubu), because of sorcery, or failure to put on protective power worn by dancers (mainly for winning a woman)

Tolai

shame shame and/or unfaithfulness wife is beaten, and she is incited to kill herself by her dead relatives evil spirit sent by enemy caused by ancestors who also died by suicide and want company worry

Sursunga Tolai Wantoat

'natural'

Malala and Mengen

ancestral or place-spirit annoyance sorcery

Tolai

breakage of ancestral tabus

Tolai

Karkar Is. Malala Biwat and Bosmun

Lamassa and Haku

Such techniques vary widely. We have already noted the collective Mendi dream sessions on mountain-tops in the southern highlands (in chapter 1). Other procedures include: payback runners, as among the Bena(bena), Wantoat and others, which we have long since discussed; clairvoyantdivinatory gifts of prophetesses or ga'in of Murik Lakes (Tamoane 1981); group-holding of a diviner's log among the Nalik, Mengen and in other coastal and island New Guinea settings, in which the log allegedly jumps this way and that, eventually pointing its way towards the sorcerer's hamlet (Maralis 1981: 26-30; Trompf 1991: 95, 103), and so forth. In one electrifying lecture the Motuan scholar Sibona Kopi (1983) added to our knowledge of these matters when he described how, as a mere novice and just wishing to understand his own people better, he went to the cemetery at night with

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a small group of kinsfolk after his sister's death. Upon meditating for a half-hour, he claimed, he heard the sound of a twig snapping beneath the ground, felt the atmosphere chilling off around him as if he were 'in an air-conditioned room', and found his visual field turn topsy-turvy. Out of a 'swirl' before him appeared his sister, naming the specific sorcerer who killed her. It is a name that Sibona, as a Christian and as a public servant in the 'modern' capital of Port Moresby, refuses to disclose. Yet his recounting of the vivid experience, together with the way he handled the hyper-critical questions of his largely Western audience (who kept asking him whether he was on drugs!), makes one wonder whether outsiders have underestimated the capacity of Melanesians to arrive at very specific answers to questions about sorcery, and to that extent be less indiscriminate about their traditional revenge activity than has ordinarily been supposed. To conclude this section, it will be useful to make brief comments on Melanesian beliefs about the after-life. I have written in some detail about these elsewhere, distinguishing between those peoples who conceive rewards and punishments to be dispensed in the next world and those with alternative models (1979c: 132-34; 1991: 44-46, 73). There are only a few Melanesian belief-systems with ideas of both a 'heaven' and a 'hell'. The Erave, for instance, held that all warriors who died on the battle-field, and women who devoted their lives to supporting them, would proceed after death to live in a (heavenly) red place with the sky-people. Those who died in any other fashion, as well as uncooperative wives, were doomed to an earthly brown 'hell' where they forever felt estranged (OT: Posu 1977, cf. Seeman 1862:401; Erskine 1867:248 on Fijian parallels). Such comparability with Christian conceptions, however, is very rare, and in any case the military frame of reference makes the Scandinavian Valhalla (with its Celtic and Vedic analogies) a better correspondence than the Christian 'heaven' and 'hell'. A rough comparison may be drawn between Erave and Huli notions, perhaps: even though the Huli have very hazy ideas about the ultimate destiny of most people, they insist that the ghosts of slain warriors go to Dalugeli, 'a celestial resting place' worthy of their valour (Glasse 1965: 30). But traditional pictures will vary enormously, perhaps because in most cases they are primarily meant to validate the known order of the living, and are not conscious exercises in metaphysics. Sometimes the retributive implications are striking. Many of the highlander Chimbu buried recognizably wicked people away from the ancestral places (Nilles 1977: 83); the eastern Motu, on the coast, if we can accept the reliability of early missionary evidence, believed the 'good' to proceed to the land of plenty in the Gulf, while 'worthless fellows' remained at Poava and Udia, small islands near Boera, waiting for the goddess Kaivakuku to have mercy (Chalmers in LMS 1880:19; cf. Trompf 1991: 44-45,50). On Wuvulu Island

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(at the fringes of Melanesia) the unworthy dead had to eat the waste of the blessed in a dripping-pit hell until the puala spirits were satisfied they had been punished enough (Lagerkrantz 1980: 3). In these cases the next world involves rewards and punishments befitting one's early performance. In most others, however, the ethical connection is clearly absent. According to the Wahgi, for instance, all dead persons will find themselves in much the same situation, in spite of the fact that they will carry their personality traits (some of which are inimical) with them, and in other societies where notions of reincarnation may be found, they are not tied in with any doctrine of karma (Lawrence and Meggitt 1965: 11). Some peoples talk of double souls, the wild one returning to the bush and the preferred one proceeding to the spirit world (Fischer 1965; Jachmann 1969). For the Roro, to take yet another view, one could not share in the peace available by the sea at Cape Possession if one had come to some hideous, unexpected end (being speared from behind, or being taken by a crocodile); for the Muju or Woodlark islander (Papua), by comparison, arrival at the paradisal Turn depended on the skill with which one rode the primordial serpent across the sea, and on bearing the right tattoo marks around one's arm, not on right behaviour or the nature of one's death (Trompf 1979c: 132-33). Salvation from adversity: experience of blessing and well-being Trouble, sickness, and death can be eluded, and it is quite admissible to use the terms 'salvation' and 'redemption' to denote the physical escape from such adversities, especially since most usages in the Bible, the body of texts most associated with these terms, refer to salvation very concretely as deliverance from enemies, from death (or the pit of Sheol), grave difficulties, and the like. Only limited research has been undertaken on this topic; yet, enough exists for one to assert that fortunate and unforeseen freedom from trouble and danger is almost always attributed to invisible spirit powers (cf. Hviding 1988: 37; Mawe 1989: 44-45). The dead relatives closest to the person involved, and considered most mindful of his welfare, are the most popularly recognized source of succour. Still, the role of the powers handled by magicians in war, and of war-gods themselves, is not to be forgotten, while certain cultures, the Fuyughe for one, believe the separate territories of each tribe are guarded by wary protector spirits (sila), who are likely to harass or kill trespassing raiders who try to use the wilder, rugged terrain as a route for an ambush (Trompf 1981a: 14). Whether or not there have existed types of 'thankofferings' to the spirits for their aid or for unexpected liberation, however, is not easy to say in general terms, so neglected has this topic been in ethnography. Certainly, healers were paid for their services, but they usually received them in advance of results,

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just as the many offerings and sacrifices we have already discussed were normally much more important in themselves than any follow-up rites or gifts—if their placations happened to work. (If they did not work, it would either be assumed that the rituals had not been performed properly and should be repeated, or that another ritual or solution should be found.) When there was experience of benison and security, however, especially when shared corporatively, then group pressures would arise to celebrate and to test prestigious magnanimity with other groups. In this sense great festivals of generosity and extensive involvement in exchange, as well as the signs of commanding, Virtuous' leadership (e.g. Hau'ofa 1971: 165-66; cf. Clastres 1976), betoken confidence in spirit-powers for their support, and thus an explanation for success in terms of rewards they bring to the material world from beyond visibility. To capitalize upon the reflections of Gernot Fugmann (1977: 124-25), salvation in a Melanesian context means that the contractual relations between human and human, humans and the other forces, are 'cupped together' or held in a unity and harmony against disintegration. The very experience of this is what makes for happiness and exhilaration; the group experience of a joint sense of wellbeing is crucial in actualizing, let alone motivating, the collective celebration of 'blessing' (cf. Bergmann 1974; Loeliger 1977). In all their manifoldness, however, the world of Melanesian explanations is of less interest when isolated from such expressions of negative and positive reciprocity we introduced in chapters 1 and 2; for, these explanatory modes are inseparable from the mental activity that measures losses against gains and decides either to retaliate or to concede. Explanations determine 'costing', and it is precisely because of the way one views the known order that one tends to follow certain courses of action. On the other hand, retributive logic might seem only to cover a bundle of reasons for paying back others, either with hostility or friendship, until one perceives these reasons to be utterly interlocked or commensurate with modes of explaining significant events. It is no longer feasible to argue that Melanesians kill enemies just to survive or to satisfy either their aggressive urges or their yen for strategy. It is no longer defensible to claim that Melanesians trade and exchange gifts out of what some Westerners term 'purely economic or political' motives. They do these things because of their worldviews, or because of the various ways by which they come to understand the nature of things. Melanesian traditional life is a totality, which is paradoxically military, economic, political, religious (let alone social and psychological) at one and the same time (Leenhardt 1979; cf. Levi-Strauss 1972: 222; Godelier 1977: 215; 1982b). I am impelled to add here 'philosophical', because it is precisely a style of reasoning and a primal scientific outlook I am seeking to identify. Traditional Melanesian logics of retribution have been the working equivalents to the West's natural or mechanical laws,

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but they are to be seen as analogous only while admitting that they presume the existence of the 'preternatural'. That they admit assumptions about non-human spiritual 'interferences', and speak about these intrusions in a way foreign to many Westerners and others, does not make them irrational, and thus non-logical, after all. They remain logics based on indigenous premises, and if they are basically 'religious' (in the broad sense we have delineated, thus impinging on all aspects of a given social order), this is nothing novel in the world; it is only that an analysis of them in the southwest Pacific may well best serve to explain what is distinctive about Melanesian cultures, both in particular and in general.

PART TWO

'Cargo Cultism'

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in the tremor of struggling revolt. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness The Native is not, I fear, very logical. Alexander MacColgie Gibbs in T. S. Eliot The Cocktail Party

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157 LOCATION OF NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS: KEY TO MAPS PART II Main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands (opposite), the Solomons (overleaf); Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu (overleaf). The movements are those cited in Part II: shown by number on the maps, they can be identified from the accompanying key (below). Note: The Index of Melanesian Cultures provides an alphabetical listing of tribal cultures. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Biak Waropen (-Yapen) Kaowerabej Airmati Nimboran Dani Kapauka Kapaour Mimika Asmat Roku (Morehead) Kikori (Porome) Kukukuku Elema Toaripi Roro Mekeo Tauade Fuyughe, Seragi Koiari Motu, Rigo Hula, AromaVelerupu Massim Suau, Bonarua Jeannet Is. Daga

27 Muju/Woodlark Is. 28 Trobriands 29 Managalas 30 Binandere (Orokaiva) 31 Jaua (Orokaiva) 32 Sangara (Orokaiva) 33 Koko(da) (Orokaiva) 34 Hube 35 Kabwum 36 Yabim, Kate (Huon pen.) 37 Kanosia (Nomu, etc.) 38 Atzera 39 Taiora 40 Kamano 41 Fore, Ke'efu 42 Bena(bena) 43 Asaro/GahukuGama 44 Bundi 45 Wahgi 46 Chimbu 47 Dene 48 Siane

49 Huli 50 Wiru 51 Enga (Mae - central; Kandep, Tombene - south; Kyaka - east) 52 Sissano 53 Negrie-Yangoru 54 Manam 55 Tangu 56 Karkar 57 Bogia (Sepa, etc.) 58 Begesin 59 Simbai 60 Yabob 61 Yam, Sengam 62 Sek (Gedaged) 63 Ngaing, Gira 64 Garia 65 Bilbil, Siar 66 Baluan (Matangkor) 67 Usiai 68 Manus 69 Lavongai, Tigak (New Hanover) 70 Bali-Vitu (Unea Is.) 71 Tolai

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

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CHAPTER 4

Reprisal

Melanesia has now experienced over a century of far-reaching intrusions by peoples from the outside world. The first Melanesian region made subject to a colonial power was west New Guinea (or west Papua), when in 1848, a fateful year of European turmoil, it fell under the very superficial control of the Netherlands to the 141st meridian east longitude. By 1853 Louis Napoleon had declared New Caledonia a French possession and was interested in its suitability for a penal settlement. Thirty years later, partly from fear of others' imperial pretensions in the region, the Queensland parliament had the temerity to annex land that subsequently became known as British New Guinea (and, later on, the Australian Territory of Papua). Not to be outdone by rivals, the German government backed the establishment of a trading company in the region (from 1885), although Kaiser Wilhelmsland, the Bismarck Archipelago, and parts of the Western Solomons eventually fell into Australian hands on the eve of the First World War (1914), later becoming the Territory of New Guinea. To the east the British had reluctantly taken over Fiji by 1874 and the Solomon Islands (except for islands west of Isabel) by 1893. A curious sharing of the spoils between France and the United Kingdom resulted in a condominium over the New Hebrides in 1906; while to the west of the whole region Dutch colonial government over the East Indies and, thus, over west New Guinea was formalized in 1898. The overall impact of expatriate (largely white) settlement—with missionization, the imposition of colonial orders, the development of moneybased economies—has seriously affected and undermined Melanesian traditions. It is the object of this chapter and the following one to analyse the consequences such transformations had for religious life, more 159

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particularly for the modes of thought and action we have just discussed at the end of part I. There will always be a dispute as to the correct startingpoint of such an analysis. I have opted, the disadvantages notwithstanding, to place this chapter on 'transitional' religious movements ahead of a more detailed consideration of missions, colonialism, and so-called 'modernization' (yet cf. Trompf 1991). Since this work is not a general account of socio-religious change in Melanesia, but is in pursuit of one grand theme, we shall lean with the balance of the evidence, which in the subsequent pages suggests that black movements in response to intrusion were much more creatively indigenous, rather than mimicry of introduced ways and ideas. The most famous type of response, in fact, the famed and complex phenomenon labelled 'cargo cultism', rarely turns out to be an unreflective acceptance of all the novelties offered by the 'uncanny' intruders, but a reinvestment of traditional values through processes of adjustment (cf., e.g., Lawrence 1964a: 232-64; Steinbauer 1971: 2-3, 7; Christiansen 1969: 109-27). This is palpable when we analyse the logic of retribution within cargo cult (or cargoist)1 thought and action, and in the reactions of other new religious groups that question white dominance in local affairs (Trompf 1989a: 50-56, and cf. Loeliger and Trompf 1986 for non-cargoist movements). In some moments of foolhardiness I once defined cargo cults as collective 'Melanesian activities arising from the expectation of abundant, supernaturally generated, Western-style cargo' (Trompf 1981c: 8). I did so while being well aware that cargo symbolized something more profound and less tangible than European goods themselves, and that in many cults there has been talk about the end or radical change of the known order—some kind of 'millennium' (cf. Talmon 1966:172)—not just about the coming of material objects. Movements whose followers do not hope to receive the foreigners' things, I maintain, surely merit an appellation other than cargo cult, as perhaps do those in which the cargo motif is obviously secondary. Not all cargo cults, moreover, can qualify as 'millenarian movements'; a careful distinction has to be drawn between those groups looking to a 'perfect time and place'—when the known cosmos will be utterly transformed—and those projecting more limited visions (Trompf 1989a: 38-42, cf. Thrupp 1970:11). Such issues will require some cautious treading in the following pages. Remember, too, that the ideas and movements to be discussed in these pages belong to a very complicated chapter of colonial history, covering 1

If Lucy Mair gave scholarly anthropological literature usage of the phrase 'cargo cult' (1948: 68), the abstract term 'cargoism' seems to have been employed first in learned writing by T. G. Harding (1967: 2-6), and soon after by P. Lawrence (1967: 48). Previously favouring the phrase 'cargo belief (1964a), Lawrence came to refer to 'cargo thinking' as well as cargoism (1966: 20-25). On cargoism vis-a-vis cargo cult, see also Chowning (1975); Trompf (1990d).

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the last hundred years or so. The so-called cargo cults have taken on many faces and have differed both in their temporal and geographical contexts. Consider the year 1947: along the Papuan and New Guinean coastlines various cults were erupting after the Second World War. Mostly anti-white, the cultists expected that the huge stocks of cargo seen in various centres during the Great Fight would soon be freely available to the local peoples, who were considered its rightful possessors (Worsley 1970: 124-204). Up in a corner of the barely contacted New Guinea highlands, by contrast, the Dene were dancing to turn small piles of wooden staves and round stones smeared with blood into rifles, tobacco, red cloth, gold-lipped shells, and little else (Salisbury 1958, cf. Wagner 1979). Consider also the history of the impact of Western technology: with no airworthy models operating before 1905, for instance, aeroplanes obviously receive no mention in the earliest known Papua New Guinea cults. They first appear in the Vailala movement (from 1917, Elema, Gulf), its leader Evara 'capitalizing' on a cheap novel with one depicted on the cover (Williams 1923: 29) and its prophet Harea predicting the arrival of 'things like birds in the air with wings' (Kekeao 1973: 4). By 1950, to make points of contrast, bush-material houses shaped like aeroplanes were found in an isolated area near Bundi, Madang Province (PIM1950:85), and in 1976 carefully modelled aeroplanes had replaced roof crosses on places of worship among the Managalasi, Oro Province (Houghton 1977: 1-6, cf. Fam 1976: 9). Again, reflect on geographical factors: cultists close to towns (such as Madang) might see a whole range of material benefits potentially within their grasp (e.g. Lawrence 1964a: 163-64, 201-03), while inhabitants of small islands (such as Iwa in the Milne Bay area) might perform some desperate ritual to obtain nothing else but virtually inaccessible tinned 'bully beef (Kaniku 1977a: 1-3). The uneven course of colonialism, too, has meant that cargo ideas and practices have diffused more readily in some quarters than others, although to upset vulgar Marxists, it is false to conclude that the intensity of cargo cultism or the degrees of its incidence are directly proportional to the amount of outside exploitation or interference (cf. Bodrogi 1951). It is also inadmissible to infer that those who expect less cargo attach less symbolic value to it. For our purposes of defining cargo cults, cargo refers to Western-style goods, but these commodities always imply new, enigmatic, even 'eschatological' forces impinging on the time-honoured, primal fabric of life. As we shall see, they symbolize the power available to whites; thus, with their hoped-for transference into indigenous hands, they amount to redemption from white domination and from the injustices of evident inequality or inaccessibility (chapters 5-6). Furthermore, just because organized cults do not appear in some areas as against others, it does not follow either that there were never attempts to generate them or that colonial exploitation was limited.

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The outward appearances and styles of cargo activities depend a good deal on leadership. Traditional features will be more prominent in a cult if the leader has had little experience with whites or modernity, and the leadership itself will be clearly traditional. Leaders who have been away from their own culture area, on the other hand, and worked in 'the white man's world', can afford to be more innovative and to inject ideas that bridge tradition and the new sources of knowledge. There is, of course, still room for considerable variation here: some of the well-known and really skilled operators have moved in divergent directions. The great Yali of the Rai Coast (Madang) retreated to defend his traditional belief-system after being utterly disillusioned with administration and mission (Lawrence 1964a: 188-215); the famous Paliau Maloat of the Admiralties, on eschewing his own culture from youth, sought success in the world of a new fashion (nupela pasin), yet only on the terms of his special syncretistic philosophy (Schwartz 1962: 252-57); Yaliwan, acclaimed head of the Peli Association (east Sepik), has preferred the life of recluse and mystical interpreter of the Apocalypse, while Jimmy Simbago, once one of his sidekicks, stands as a classic example of an ail-too prevalent recent phenomenon, the cargo cult 'con-man' or trickster figure (Gesch 1985: 27-85, 103-05, cf. Trompf 1980b: 8). All these preliminary and cautionary observations must be heeded if we are to understand the logic of retribution in Melanesian responses to colonialism. The same paradigm used in the first chapter will be adopted, considering in turn revenge, reciprocity, and the explanation of significant events, but this time under a rubric more appropriate to the new material: reprisal, redress, and the explanation of invidious and unprecedented circumstances. Payback against colonialism Many books could be written to document the acts of reprisal between blacks and whites, or between local peoples and outsiders, during the colonial history of the Melanesian region (Rodman and Cooper 1979 and the literature cited there). Suffice it to say that when traders, beachcombers, miners, explorers, missionaries, settlers, and imperial officials intruded on the primal world they called Melanesia, and once prior illusions that these newcomers were immortal had been set at naught, indigenous peoples usually viewed them as dangerous, if not as enemies. Admittedly, there were moments of mutual affection in some of the first encounters, for in various cases whites were thought to be the welcome bearers of new trade goods, such as beads, tobacco, and sugar. When Bonarua Islanders greeted Captain Owen Stanley's crew, for example, including the young scientist Thomas Henry Huxley, their cries of maga sugal were probably for 'more sugar'

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rather than being the vernacular salutations they were taken for (MacGillivray 1852: 257-58; Spencer 1874: 11, cf. Huxley 1846: 50; Lasaro 1975). And in other places and times some of the intruders were initially taken for deceased relatives returning from the dead, or special spirits— as were Patrol Officer Jim Taylor and his companions (including the black bearers of their party), much later in 1933, when they entered the Wahgi Valley in the central New Guinea highlands (Leahy and Crain 1937: opp. 168; Trompf 1989b: 255-59, cf. Taylor in ANA 1933).2 Yet, more or less immediate negative payback was often enough directed against the strangers, who in any case differed among themselves as to the extent of care they showed towards Melanesia's inhabitants. The volatile Italian explorer Luigi d'Albertis took two pioneering boat trips with a crew up the Fly River, Papua (1876-77), for instance, and his aggressive method of travelling safely past riverside villages was to fire rockets of dynamite in warning. If on the occasion of his first journey the villagers were terrified, however, during the second they were better prepared, and d'Albertis nearly lost his crew in a surprise attack (d'Albertis 1880: 213-369, cf. Souter 1963: 40-42). Certain miners managed to wend their way into wild parts of the Papuan interior only to find themselves eventually in real trouble. Both Mountain Koiari and eastern Fuyughe warriors cooperated to intimidate Wriford's mining party near Mount Victoria (Papua) in 1897, for instance, before a government expedition rescued them (BNGAR 1897-98, App. 13, 22-25). George Clarke the miner was murdered in 1895 simply because of an understanding among tribes on the upper Mambare River (Papua) that warriors should 'kill every European who came', and a blind retaliation on the part of prospecting parties only produced a tribal unity that 'had barely existed before', directing 'savageness against a new, common enemy, the white intruders' (Waiko 1970: 27-28, 31, cf. Whittaker et al. 1975: 12-14). Oppressive interference was bound to bring desperate reactions. Local people killed over fifty Europeans associated with the land-grabbing German New Guinea Kompagnie between 1885 and 1900, and the massacre of St Paul in 1904 saw ten Catholic missionaries felled by a Baining group in a few minutes (Griffin et al. 1979: 34-44; Jaspers 1979). Solomonese did not stop short at requiting hated blackbirders, moreover; they also murdered certain missionaries for good measure, when it seemed clear—as it did in various other contexts as well—that 'white men' spelt treachery (e.g. Drysdale 1960; Hilliard 1978: 62-79). That is not to say that even the most unprincipled among the newcomers failed to make an effort at rapprochement with the islanders, for the former were only too eager to part with something—beads, shells, artificial dogs' 2

I know of no encounter situations in which the whites were taken to be animals (and thus shot at as in a hunt!) cf. for a Nigerian case, Afigbo (1972: 67).

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teeth, knives became quickly popular—to secure the raw materials they were after. Nor is it to conclude that the only means of retaliation adopted by Melanesians was homicide. Certainly, most groups drew no distinction between strangers and enemies, but these strangers were likely to be tolerated rather longer if it was possible to steal their extraordinary possessions. As is well known, theft was a common accusation by white settlers against their black workers and neighbours (cf. Wolfers 1975: 17-18). In 1910, to illustrate, while resident magistrate C. A. W. Monckton was working his way up the Chirima Valley toward Mount Albert Edward (Papuan highlands), the surprising number of European artifacts he found either held in possession or left behind by the local inhabitants, as well as the attitude of these Fuyughe to his own party and accoutrements, suggested that trade and bargaining were hardly the only means 'the natives' had used to procure them (BNGAR 1906: 87). Meanwhile, far to the north and across the Bismarck Sea, men of north Manus and the offshore islands had acquired a reputation for stealing as much as they could from European vessels in their waters (King 1978: 58). Villagers, however, could not always get what they wanted, and there were bound to be times when seemingly unjust deprivation would make them violent. J. C. Craig, to take an instance, the captain of a pearl-shelling schooner operating in the Milne Bay area in 1886, fell with all his crew to the spears of Jeannet Islanders, two of the three purported reasons for the attack being that one villager had not received his expected advance payment of pearl-shell, and that Craig had refused 'to give a rifle to the man' (Mayo 1973: 89). Needless to say, however, wood and bone weapons were impotent against imperial steel. Punitive expeditions, however badly organized, were mounted against killers and marauders, the Germans effecting as many as twenty-two major reprisals between 1886 and 1912 (Firth 1982: 44-111).3 Patrol posts were established to keep the peace, more particularly in Australian Papua (e.g. Waiko 1983), and one-time recalcitrant warriors were given rifles and red laplaps to police unpacified tribes in places—such as Tanganyika—they never dreamt existed (Sayers 1930:30). Most of the stories are familiar knowledge. Europeans acquired land at ridiculously low prices (e.g. Nelson 1968: 51-53); programmes of indentured labour took ablebodied men away from their families to distant plantations, at times through intimidation, always for a relative pittance (e.g. Meleisea 1980; Young 1983b); regulations were issued imposing head taxes (thus putting pressure on young men to accept labour recruitment), and some ordinances were to be passed to increase the productivity of the region, expecting a 3

On mistaken or misdirected punitive action in the Jeannet Islander case, see BNGAR (1887: 41). On mistakes made following the death of James Chalmers of the London Missionary Society (hereafter LMS) at Goaribari Island in 1901, see especially Langmore (1974: 105-28).

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given group to grow a foreign crop (such as rice) to make them pay (e.g. West 1968: 184-85). Colonial New Caledonia was notorious for its 'native reservations' and the dreaded corvee system, requiring work on roads and the ranches of colons (Aldrich and Connell 1992). Depopulation set in with the death of many labourers (one in every two dying under German rule of the New Guinea mainland in 1891-92!) because workers were torn out of the quarantine-like security of their homelands (e.g. Firth 1982: 36-37); Asian immigrants laid the basis for a middle stratum between white overlords and 'primitive natives' (e.g. Mayer 1967; Cahill 1972; Wu 1982; Dornoy 1984: 44; cf. Petur 1963: 31); the Christian missions slowly grew in number and influence, the cross superseding the gun as a potent symbol of peace between both traditional and newfound enemies (e.g. Garrett 1982: 161-252; Trompf 1991: 141-87, cf. van Hasseldt 1922). By and large, over the period between 1870 and 1920, remarkable for the above conditions, the Melanesians resigned themselves to the new beginning that came with 'the white phenomenon'. The rate of pacification was far from uniform,4 and considering the sporadic outbursts of tribal fighting and isolated cases of cannibalism during the 1970s and 1980s, its actualization is still not complete. Historians will not find it easy to measure the degrees of alacrity or dejection with which the new order was accepted across the region; the evidence has been distorted by glowing accounts of peace-making and by exaggerated images of traditional bloodthirstiness (e.g. Dupeyrat 1964, cf. Sack 1976). One can only warn that some did not want peace precisely when they made it, and others were rather less belligerent than they appeared. Some peoples accepted the pax imposita for reasons other than those the colonial powers had in imposing it, or because 'the policies of the encapsulating force and the rewards associated with it' were misinterpreted (Ploeg 1979: 161-62). Where opportunities presented themselves to those groups unwilling to accept the steady encroachments, armed protests were organized, such as the important New Caledonian rebellion in 1878, an assault carefully planned on the assumption that the islanders could 'deal with the newcomers on an equal footing' (Kemelfield 1976: 20, cf. Guiart 1968; On the comparatively slow pace of introduced change in western New Guinea (now Irian Jaya) from the beginning, e.g. Rauws 1919; Garnaut and Manning 1974; and for an argument that 'the impact of European settlement on the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) was less devastating than tradition has depicted', see Thompson 1981: 13. In comparison to conditions in Papua New Guinea, note the highly detrimental effects of labour trafficking elsewhere, cf. Corris 1973, and on the often forgotten labour trade in (the northwest of) west New Guinea, note Kamma 1972: 219-21. Note also variations in the role of Asian labour under the imperialists. In the Solomons, for example, the British government discouraged planters from using Asian labourers on plantations (Laracy 1974: 27-37), while Indian indentured labourers were imported from 1879 to Fiji, to make up for the lack of New Hebridean recruits after 'blackbirding' was checked (Mayer 1967:1).

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Dousset-Leenhardt 1978). Even by 1893, certain Tolai districts were keeping up a valiant armed resistance to the Germans on New Britain, inspired by the leader ToBobo, who was dispensing allegedly bullet-proof ointment to warriors (Hempenstall 1978: 129-33). Groups of conspirators from among the Yam, Yabob, and Bilbil islanders (of Madang) carefully planned to 'rush the barracks' of the German Kompagnie on Bilbil Island, and seize the rifles to kill all the whites 'except for the few women and children attached to the Rheinische [Lutheran] Mission'; but one of the plotters gave his companions away and the Germans shot the rebels into flight (Lawrence 1964a: 69; Firth 1982: 83). The story of attempts at armed reprisals can be traced through the history of various groups. The coastal Orokaiva constitute a significant case in point from the formation of the Jaua tribal 'confederacy' to drive back Monckton's armed incursions into (temporary) retreat near Buna (1903) (Jojoga 1983: 26-45), through the later plot of the Binandere Emboge and his coterie to kill white missionaries during the Second World War (194243) (Waiko 1976: 14-18), to the formation of the Eriwo Republican Army (especially among the Jaua) as late as 1975 (Jojoga 1991). Looking at the whole region, this story would mainly include moments as brief as the elimination by muskets of four white settlers on Tanna Island (Vanuatu) in 1869 (Thompson 1981: 1-2), or the collusion of disaffected hill-country chiefs to attack administrative posts and pacified villages on Viti Levu in 1876 ([Knollys et al.] 1879), or the murder of colonial administrator William Bell and his native policemen by Malaitans (Solomons) in 1927 (Corris and Keesing 1980), or the combined Kamano threat to Kainantu township (central New Guinea highlands) in 1975 (OT: van Leeuwen 1977). Yet to these more numerous episodes we can add some longer-standing or recurrent efforts at armed resistance. Those taking up the 1917 rebellion on New Caledonia, for instance, had not forgotten the events of 1878, and both these prior acts of defiance hold precursory significance for the proindependence kanak radicals so noisy since 1985 (Guiart 1970; GW 1981: 12). In Irian Jaya armed freedom fighters or the various military prongs of the Free Papua Movement (which united in 1984) have kept up what is now the longest continuing struggle against colonialism in Melanesian history (Sharp 1977; Utrecht 1978; Savage 1982), and their anti-(neo)colonial activities have drawn inspiration from prior, less physically effective forms of dissidence (Osborne 1985; Trompf 1992a, cf. Kamma 1972: 168-72), as do those of the Bougainville insurrectionists under Francis Ona (Trompf 1991: 233, cf. Sipari 1985a). The whole story would also have to include traditional raiding and fighting, which has been carried on to the embarrassment of the imposed governments of the day. The Kukukuku (hinterland Gulf) were still sending raiding parties against the Elema as late as 1951, for example (West

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1968: 153-54), and the recent return of tribal warfare in the Enga Province (central highlands of New Guinea) can be looked at as a rejection of modern, capital city-centred politics (chapter 7). There have also been collective refusals to pay head tax, strikes, demonstrations, moves for regional independence, the odd rampage, and various other forms of dissent, some of which, like the 1944 Begesin Rebellion near Madang, and the 'Marching Rule' (more properly Maasina) of Malaita, 1944-52, have usually been lumped together with cargo cults.5 What steadily became clear to Melanesians, however, during the earlier years of interaction (ca. 18601910), were disparities in weapon effectiveness. Traditional weaponry might have been useful in continuing to wage inter-tribal wars, and in sometimes defending one's land against isolated settlers and traditional enemies alike, but conventional physical methods of physical retaliation, even if wellorganized, were wellnigh useless as a means of collective anti-colonial noncompliance. The magnitude of the suppressive forces was simply too great (as amply symbolized by the great steel-bellied German gunboats and demonstrated by the quick-firing rifle), or else the colonial administrations' capacities for self-protection and blatant interference in 'native affairs' appeared increasingly unsurpassable to the 'culturally shocked' local peoples. Certainly, single 'murders' could not stem the tide, and powerful curses of the war-magicians fell on 'deaf pink ears. The gulf between the technologies of governed and overlord being so great, then, and the balance of military power weighing so heavily to the one side, we can already begin to see that cargo cults were not the unrealistic and wrongheaded responses to change they are often made out to be. But two factors require closer attention before we consider these cults as outbursts of retaliation: Melanesian attitudes to European-style goods and to the Christian missions. It goes almost without saying that cargo has had a very great attraction for Melanesians, just as it has for most peoples of the world (Belshaw 1955). As for Christianity, although various missionary martyrs fell beneath the blows of men not yet ready to bear the burden of the new righteousness, recent census statistics, the numerousness of indigenous clergy, and the powerful influence currently exerted by the churches in politics—all show how widely and enthusiastically Christian teachings have been welcomed in the southwest Pacific over the last century (Loeliger 1975; Barrett 1982). 5

cf. SNA 1934, for New Georgia District (many people refused to pay head tax); Gammage 1975 (early strike); Gunther 1970 (Mataungan League demonstrations); Griffin et al. 1979: 209-17; Matiabe (1980); Premdas 1977; Beckett 1987; Premdas et al. 1983 (secessionisms in Bougainville, southern highlands, Papua, Torres Strait and western Solomons); Somare 1975: 124 (Kabisawali riot, Trobriands); NBC New Report 18 oct. 1983 (Tauade occupancy of a school and a rampage on Tapini government buildings), cf. Lawrence 1964a: 110-15; Yagas 1985 on Begesin; e.g. Cochrane 1970: 67-96; Steinbauer 1971: 298-307 on 'Marching Rule'.

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Cargo became the symbol of white dominance while at the same time it was never totally inaccessible to the blacks. Not only were tools and foodstuffs stolen, but such items were also given out by whites in friendship or for cooperation; and money, strongly connected with cargo as the means to obtain it, was paid out in small sums to labourers (e.g. Graves 1983a; 1983b, cf. Ivens 1918:225-27). The Gospel, for its part, posed a serious threat to many old customs such as fertility rites, polygamy, sorcery, and the like; yet it was, nevertheless, a potent message of love between all people and of hope for 'the abundant life' (Hueter 1974). Even if few of the newcomers lived up to its ideals, Christianity promised the means, not only of explaining the new order of things (and so supplying an apocalyptic message), but also of making it possible to appropriate and share this new dispensation's fruits to the full. A good deal of the objects accompanying the missionaries, moreover, were intimately connected with astounding techniques of healing (especially since the first decades of this century), and with new systems of knowledge available in schools, catechetical classes, or technical workshops. Thus, the intruders—and particularly the missionaries, because they stayed so much longer than the rest—brought benefits that would not otherwise have been known or made potentially available. The trouble was, however, Melanesians expected greater access to the novel goods than they in fact experienced, and in many cases interpreted Christian belief and ritual as rot bilong kago (road to the Cargo) or as the technology of acquiring European-style wares (Lawrence 1964a: 243-49). Considering the joint arrival of the new items and the new religion, as well as the prevalent indigenous assumption that a group's ritual techniques were essential for its wealth, these expectations were far from irrational (thus Jarvie 1964: 92; Lawrence 1964a: 249-56; Worsley 1970: 46, 85-102, 274-80, against e.g. Firth 1951: 113). Yet, they too often remained unfulfilled; and, with selfdetermination already threatened by the colonial structures, there emerged prime movers in various settings eager to 'make movements' (wokim bikpela samting) out of collective disillusionment, and to recapture lost power and identity by striking back. Have cargo cults been acts of revenge, then, or 'payback mechanisms'? As long as it is understood that this is not all that cargo cults have been, and that a few may reveal no detectable signs of malice against some opposition, then the answer will be a safe yes. One might believe it necessary to err on the side of Christian charity and describe these movements as liberationist or as quests for identity or salvation (Burridge 1969: 4-8; Strelan 1977; Steinbauer 1979: 139-60; Schoorl 1978, cf. also Merton n.d.), but it probably does just as much for their image if Marxists remind us that most of them have been anti-white or that the sighing of the oppressed has burst forth through them into a shout (Bodrogi 1951; Worsley 1970:

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262-64). All of the cults I know identify some persons—some human representatives of an unwanted state of affairs—who deserve opposition or some 'altercation' (to use Desroche's apter term) (1979: 36-37, cf. also Trompf 1990d: 7-8,15). Since it has been the intruding foreigners who have been the ones most often castigated, not a few scholars have already characterized these cults as 'protest' activities (e.g. Kobben 1960; Lanternari 1963; Finnane 1972; Desroche 1979: 70-71; Keesing 1978b; Moritzen 1978; Hempenstall 1981; Laracy 1983). All open opponents of these activities, however, whatever their background, obviously became susceptible to cultist censures (because a two-sided confrontation typically develops); thus, today, cults still continue to appear under neo-colonial independent governments (of Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu) to challenge 'indigenes' as much as anyone. Objects of annoyance varying as they may, retaliatory elements in these outbursts and movements are almost always manifested, and they merit attention more especially for the way the old sanctions for reprisal can be mixed with introduced beliefs about the sins of oppressors, misguided opponents, or unrepentant pagans, and especially about the final judgement of God. The retribution demanded by cargo cultists is characteristically projected into the future, cult members looking to a supernaturally governed reversal of fortunes, rather than preparing for some inexpedient act of violence (cf. Trompf 1990d: 70-73). It is high time, however, to substantiate generalizations by examples. The retaliatory element in cargo cultism Here one must first consider evidence for the percolation of 'recriminatorylooking' ideas and hopes among a sample of Melanesian societies. Movements that express antagonism towards an unsatisfactory state of affairs do not arise in a vacuum, and despite the unfortunate paucity of materials, an attempt should be be made to gauge how cargo cults can bring to the boil a simmering hostility already present in the minds of their potential supporters. A more detailed analysis of select cults follows, first (quite naturally) of those emerging at earlier stages of contact, and then 'classic' examples. In later parts of this section I will review stances taken by new religious movements that lack or have shed cargoist guises since the 1970s, yet which retain a sting of protest in their tails. Myths of reversal To underscore our earlier assertions about the interrelationships between the traditional bases of revenge or reciprocity and cultural modes of explaining significant events, it is helpful to realize that one of the outcomes of black-white and colonized-colonial interaction has been the

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notion or mythic paradigm of reversal. Hopes circulated that the new overlords, certainly those unwanted among them, would be overthrown by some extraordinary means, and the local people would rule over them in return. It is difficult to document the sources and trails of these expectations of reversal (and thus reprisal), but more knowledge of them is likely to reveal their background importance for many cargo cult ideologies and practices. They form part of 'a pool of resentment' from which cargo cultists could draw their inspiration and, although only one ingredient— indeed, one of many devices through which 'the savage' could 'hit back' at the foreigners (cf., e.g., Lips 1937: 60-64, 75-77, 102-03, 113)—they are 'dream-stuff of which a new collective consciousness can be made. To begin with a clear-cut, unsubtle myth (as well as some of its offshoots) is sensible. Around the town of Port Moresby just after the Second World War (and thus near that key colonial centre that became one of Melanesia's largest cities) there permeated among the Motuan and neighbouring villagers the makings of a 'mythological macrohistory' (cf. Trompf 1989c: 628-34) that explained both why indigenes and whites were different and how the colonials would eventually be overcome. The world consisted of two areas, it was said, lying close to each other but separated by sea. Jesus was born just inside the sphere occupied by Europeans; that is why they are white rather than black, and why they have amazing, superior mental powers and technology in comparison with Papuans. One day ahead, however, there would be a reversal. A great warrior would arise in Papua, the blacks overpowering and thus enslaving the whites. I found no evidence to suggest that the myth in this form was the basic ideology of a cargo cult—a point of some interest in its own right and one to remind scholars of their neglect in collecting such isolated materials. This myth may well have derived from Hanuabada, the great suburb-village of Port Moresby, where, soon after the time when Japanese bombs were dropped on the town, the prophetess Kori Taboro dramatically predicted that the whites were all going to be thrown into the seas (OT: Albaniel 1976, cf. Stanley 1950; Trompf 1975b: 62; Temple 1976: 1-3). Later, during the immediate postwar years, Motuan propagandists contended that the whites were deliberately changing the labels of docked cargoes intended by the Motuan dead for their relatives, and prophesied that the ancestors would angrily expose and end this deception (OTs: Gaigo and Kidu 1977). In the year 1953 Taboro foretold that, at their adulthood, all the children of Hanuabada would get back their families' lands (Gaigo 1977: 6), an announcement that partly accounts for the vehemence with which Motuans smashed down every building of the Gemo Island Sanatorium, which was closed down in 1975 (UCA 1975-76). During this same year we know that a Rigo pastor formed a small cult group of some fifty families to the east down the coast road near Kwikila, apparently

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adapting the myth of reversal for his own purposes. He asserted that God destined to give the power of higher technology and education to the blacks, but that the whites were only forcing it on the people, deliberately impeding their progress and confusing them because they are frightened 'that Papuans will become like the white man' and rule the country (Noga 1985: 95). Some years earlier (in 1971), almost 130 kilometres (80 miles) in the opposite direction from the capital, and, this time, inland among the Tauade of the Papuan highlands, it was rumoured that the patrol officers and Sacred Heart Fathers would 'all die, and be born again with black skins, and that the Tauade would all die and be born again with white skins' and much cargo then be delivered (Hallpike 1977: 26, cf. Trompf 1981a: 64). For reasons we can only surmise, admittedly (the comparatively rich interaction between black and white probably being the most important among them), no easily detectable cargo cult appeared where the abovementioned myths were articulated, but we know such myths are quite capable of helping to generate one. These myths, in fact, have a long and (therefore) pre-war history, and one version of them was expressed in the so-called 'Vailala Madness' among the Elema of the Papua Gulf, 1917-23, a cause ceVebre so well-known that subsequent and comparable activities were styled by the same pejorative appellation until the term 'cargo cult' came into vogue in the late 1940s (e.g. PAR 1940-41: 20; PaC, 28 Feb. 1941: 4; Taylor in ANA 1943). When the Vailala leader Evara declared that 'brown skins are no good' and wanted 'the people to have white', he was anticipating a transformation he evidently believed would be brought by the collective return of the villagers' ancestors—a return that would also bring escape from the invidiousness of colonialism (Williams 1923: 16, cf. 14). After all, a head-tax on 'natives' had been imposed on the Elema by 1918, plantation labour recruitment had disturbed village life, and the overlords in Moresby (and Samarai) were trying to make the Gulf District pay its own administrative running costs by requiring the people to plant rice fields (West 1968: 188, 123, 142, 159, 184-85, 243). Evara's hopes for a bouleversement are quite understandable, then, and the notions lying behind them were bound to stick or to diffuse and resurface over the years. The motif of reversal, what is more, is far from uncommon in Melanesia (Christiansen 1969:16; MacClancy 1981; Lattas 1992), although its executors in other places may turn out to be a returning culture hero, such as Manarmakeri, on Biak, to the far west of the region (Thimme 1977: 27), or a great chief redivivus, as with Fiji's Navosa to the far east (cf. FT 15 March 1984: 1). This brief review of Papuan materials prefaces case studies to come. It discloses a world of reasoning that pre-exists cultic activities (or has a life of its own), and which reflects the adaptation and supplementing of

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traditional retributive logic to meet new circumstances. It is this process of adjustment that, though not being the only salient feature or sole explicator of cargo cultism, is the heart of the matter now under our scrutiny. Part of the process, interestingly, can include the integration and confounding of these indigenous yearnings with statements of hope held out for the downtrodden in the Bible. Did not the holy Mary herself sing out that 'He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree' (Luke 1: 52), thus celebrating the reversal foreshadowed by the birth of her son? So, the desire for 'a just overturning' does not necessarily dissipate with greater 'Christianization'. Even in my own home in Port Moresby I could detect the footprints of this process among local schoolchildren, who were reconciling themselves to the unfair differences they saw between the living conditions of blacks and whites. 'When we get into heaven, we'll be white and you'll be black,' contended one little lass from the Morobe, to whom my young daughter quickly replied, 'That's not right'. 'But that's not fair!' came an even quicker retort. Even when the friendship was there, the wider problem could not be chased away. The second set of examples, to take a step further, comes from the opposite side of the Papua New Guinean mainland, from Karkar Island and Madang. A few months before the Japanese invasion of January 1942 there had erupted an anti-white movement on Karkar Island, known as the Malaeng-Kubasi or Kukuaik cult. The trouble seems to have started because Lutheran mission personnel, who were almost all Americans, made known that the United States was at war with Japan, and that they would probably have to evacuate, leaving the local people to carry on the Christian work. There soon circulated among the Karkar a 'myth of reversal'. A time was soon coming named Kokek; it would arrive when all the whites had left the island and the people regained their own 'home rule'. Once that happened, though, Jesus would come again, and the ancestors would arrive in a ship laden with cargoes, signalled by volcanic activity, an eclipse of the sun, and various other phenomena (Tschauder 1942-45: 32, cf. Lawrence 1964a: 99, 122; McSwain 1977: 59-96). Lacking adequate details of this myth (cf. Pech 1979), Peter Lawrence at least provides enough information as to how it was developed in the betterknown Tagarab cult of Madang. Tagarab was impressed by the new Karkar ideas and, after he saw Madang town bombed, he melded them with the well-known Manup-Kilibob myth, which he revamped for his own purposes. The traditional myth of the two competing brothers, Manup and Kilibob, appeared in a variety of versions around Madang, one or other of the two figures being favoured or acknowledged as of greater benefit to the people. Depending on the culture or access to the stories, one or other of them was said to have bestowed gifts crucial for livelihood—the 'power of speech, food plants, a bow and arrows, a stone axe and adze,

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rain, and ritual formulae'—in the mythic past (Lawrence 1964a: 22, cf. 23-24; Schmitz 1960:319-38). Tagarab chose to represent these two cultureheroes as the sources of good and evil. Manup was Satan and loser, who both invented the black arts and kept the blacks in bondage, although at this time Catholic missionaries were preaching his identification with God (OT: Lawrence 1987). Kilibob was the winning creator and bestower of the useful arts who, after quarrelling with Manup, sailed away from New Guinea in a steel, engine-powered ship, eventually becoming the God of the Europeans at Sydney. This God-Kilibob had rejected the blacks because 'adultery and feuding were integral features of native life, whereas the Europeans who had accepted the Ten Commandments, lived in peace with each other'. But God-Kilibob's attitude was changing. He was furious that the missionaries had not told the New Guineans the truth—that, in fact, God was Kilibob, the true cargo deity. He was coming back to take revenge, bringing weapons along with other cargoes from Australia, which would be used to punish and drive out the Europeans at the hands of the ancestors, 'who would appear in the guise of Japanese servicemen . . . heralded by the occurrence of storms and earthquakes' (Lawrence 1964a: 100-02). Thus in these New Guinea cases the myth of reversal expressed both expectation of collective salvation (Kago virtually being a synonym for such) (Strelan 1977: 62-63; Schwarz 1976; 1980) and a desire for a demonstration against the whites (with many Karkar rejecting the missions, and Tagarab's followers siding with the Japanese). The payback did not involve taking up arms, though, because the validity, let alone feasibility, of violence was already in doubt. Vengeance had been left to those who were invulnerable and beyond reproach. The Kukuaik and Tagarab cults square fairly well with the sociologists' category of millenarian movements (Trompf 1990d: 1). Let it be noted, however, that it is harder to be sure that the cult followers anticipated 'imminent, total, ultimate, this-worldly, collective salvation' to use Yonina Talmon's definition of such movements (1966: 159, cf. Mair 1958; Jarvie 1963: 1), than that they expected a very final act of retribution, an act as decisive and as unrepeatable as the coming of the new white order itself. 'The white phenomenon' was itself a kind of eschatological event, bringing to an end the age-old lithic order by revealing an utterly astounding mode of existence, full of power and magic. The fullness of the new mode, however, remained only a possibility if the access to it was blocked or limited. The eschatological course of change was complete and intelligible only when the obstacles were removed: the event of real finality was precisely the removal, which meant the supernatural elimination, oiany opponents to the cargo cult, not just the whites. After that decisive occurrence—the great payback to end all acts of revenge—there was no reason why the cargo could not come periodically, so long as it continued to come indefinitely, or why the living should not die, or Jesus and the ancestors not come and go as they pleased.

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In this light, and in keeping with the important place revenge has had in traditional Melanesian religion, payback actually emerges as the central motif of certain cargo cults. As we shall see, moreover, this hoped-for payback is not merely negative. It also entails the restitution of a reciprocity, of the 'relative equivalence' k n o w n traditionally, which has been placed under threat by intrusions and change (chapter 5). When I write 'certain cargo cults', however, I do not mean all. Further case studies will curb any tendencies to over-simplify, even though I shall continue to limit myself to this theme. Since it is inadvisable to treat cargo cults as an undifferentiated mass (cf. Inglis 1957; McDowell 1988), it seems more sensible to take clusters of examples that illustrate the different points or stages of cultural interaction at which cultism can emerge. It may be true, as Friedrich Steinbauer has shown convincingly (1971: foldout), that there are three features basic to phenomena we name cargo cultist: an attempt at acculturation, magical thought, and a fundamental concern for material well-being. O n the other hand, cults or movements possessing these elements can nonetheless vary in the extents to which indigenous traditions, or Christian doctrines, or modern political considerations influence their strategies. Beginning with more tradition-bound expressions of cultism, case studies reflecting differing emphases will be considered in turn, local reactions being interpreted with particular histories of contact and interaction in view.

Case studies: counterstrokes

of a more traditional

kind

T h e more tradition-oriented cults we shall examine first cannot be said to be very early cases of cargo cultism in the chronological sense. They do belong to situations of limited contact, or at the time of initial and limited interaction, and they have been chosen because my own oral historical fieldwork has enabled me to explore key issues in some depth. Unfortunately, m u c h confusion surrounds some of the very early outbursts—the so-called Milne Bay prophet (of 1893) allegedly announcing a Golden Age, for example, as if local people were acquainted with Eurasian Age theories (!) (Chinnery and H a d d o n 1917), and both the Baigona and Taro cults being quite wrongheadedly ranked a m o n g cargoist activities (Jojoja 1976, cf. Worsley 1970: 64-84). It is preferable to consider examples of cults for which solid background information can be offered.

The Bilalaf cult The first exemplum concerns a culture area that was 'contacted' as early as 1897, yet parts of which have seen only very limited interactions with outsiders, even up to the present time. I refer to the eastern Fuyughe of the Papuan highlands, among whom I have spent time plotting the

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intellectual biography of an impressive prophet (1981a). Ona Asi, alias 'Bilalaf (ca. 1890-1963), arose among the Kailape group in the Sauwo Valley, a man from the dramatic and rugged terrain that forms the upper reaches of the Vanapa River under the shadow of Mount Albert Edward (1300 metres). Each group among the eastern Fuyughe consisted of dispersed, patrilineally organized hamleters living on the mountain ridges and defining their 'tribal' land in terms of a protector place-spirit (or sila), who allegedly supervised its boundaries and warded off intruders. Groups neighbouring each other were frequently at war; although ceremonial feasts, all of which were linked to events in the human life-cycle, gave opportunities for inter-group marriage transactions, and for shifts in alliance, tensions stabilized each group into distinct areas of refuge that were roughly of equal strength. The security sphere was not only watched over by the sila'ate, but each group has its own chiefs, the most special one of whom, the utam, inherited his sacred role by male primogeniture and also embodied the means by which all parts of the cosmos were kept vital or in their appropriate places. All activity, human and non-human, was charged with religious significance in that each thing—a stream that one would pass by quickly, a snake one would not capture or kill, a timehonoured boundary marker one would take with due seriousness— instructed men and women that they belonged within a community of spirit as well as human forces (Fastre 1937; Murray in PAR 1937-38: 3334; Keleto 1983: 2-4, cf. chapter 1). The sila'ate were the most important sources of sustaining power. The dead had to be honoured, and their disposal at the funerary rites properly carried out, otherwise they could be inimical. Apart from a fear of some among the recently departed, however, the possible involvement of the dead in communal well-being produced little interest, and people assumed their spirits (anumusila) rose to the heights (of Mount Albert Edward) to remain there in relative detachment. Another category of spirit-beings, further, were the tidib, who had originally set all things, including the sila'ate, in their rightful places, and who in their bestowals had provided the whole basis for the cosmic order and religious life. As a collectivity the tidib were like deii otiosi (removed gods), though with human form; on 'contact' they came to be identified with the white newcomers. To the eastern Fuyughe, the white person was no ancestor back from the mountain, or from the burial platform laden with dripping putrescence, but a culture hero returning out of primordial time (Trompf 1989c: 626-27). A person famous among the Sauwo Valley group for his prophecy about the coming (or reappearance) of tidib is Ona Asi; as a young man, he made his first impressions by short oracular outbursts in a state of possession (ca. 1909). He let it be known that he was periodically taken over by two sila'ate (Ilalani and Ikodi) as well as by tidib (conceived as the one great

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power who had put each sila in its right position), and two of his utterances under their alleged influence have remained strongest in Fuyughe memory for having foreshadowed the coming of the white order. 'Tidib are coming! with clay skins!' went one of these memorable ejaculations (the white clay of mourning betokening the different complexion of the newcomers); and 'Two tidib will bring things sharper than human bones!' went the other, there being no word for metal in the Fuyughe tongue (Trompf 1981a: 21). It is unlikely that Ona's announcements of impending change were made in vacuo. Two miners had passed through the Sauwo by 1897, while Resident District Magistrate C. A. W. Monckton and other miners had been exploring in nearby valleys to the northeast during the first decade of the twentieth century (BNGAR 1896-97: 35, cf. 1897-98: 24-26; 1906: 84-87; Monckton 1922). The timing of the oracles, however, has striking significance when one realizes that in April 1909 Father Alphonse Clauser, intrepid representative of the Sacred Heart Missionaries already well established at Yule island and on the Papuan coast, had managed to make his way to Ononghe, a village on a high bluff that looks out toward the Sauwo from the southwest (Dupeyrat 1935: 337; Delbos 1985:150-51). Ona, who evidently looked northwards in issuing his momentous words, might seem to have been facing the wrong way. Yet a Catholic mission station was not to be raised among the eastern Fuyughe until 1913, nor was the dangerous, uncharted Sauwo to be entered by a missionary until 1924. Ona was looking towards the distant domain from which the tidib of Fuyughe tradition had first arrived, and that so happened to be in the direction of earlier white intrusions in the general region (PNA 1910a; 1912a). A series of episodes linked Ona to the new sources of power looming on his horizon. First, he undertook an extraordinary and dangerous northbound journey through enemy territory to the settled, well-equipped camp of two miners on the Aikora River. Along with other observers (drawn from settlements much closer to the Aikora), he witnessed the skills and creations of the very beings he prophesied would be coming: the tents, planks and sluices, spades and rifles, tins and clothes. It was near this miners' camp, secondly, and just beyond the fringes of Fuyughe country, that Ona came upon a sacred and potent emblem of the semi-nomadic (or hunter-gatherer) Seragi people (cf. chapter 1). This was a pig-tusk (or keag) believed to derive from a primordial serpent, and it was from the severed body of this creature that the Seragi claimed the rivers and landforms of their universe had been created. According to Seragi mythology, the serpent, captured by villagers, had transformed itself into a dancing warrior wearing the keag; while all the adults of the village were away collecting firewood, getting ready to cook and cut up their catch, the warrior instructed the children to warn their parents that a great cataclysm was to occur. Only some children succeeded in persuading their fathers and and mothers to flee, and, from a safe haven in the mountains, they watched

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as the eruption that followed the slaying of the serpent produced the steep, labyrinthine valleys of the great Mambare River and its tributaries. After the immense transformation, nothing was left of the snake but the keag, which had come to lie, numinous and mysterious, in a net-bag hanging from an odole tree. Ona Asi took in what he could of this local 'superstition' and then acted. It was fundamental for his future career that, passing off the serious veneration of this object and Seragi protests at his intrusion upon a sacred place, he seized the tusk without suffering harm, and made off with it on his return journey to the Sauwo. He had taken with him new power, and it had been drawn from within the sphere of the advancing tidib. Subsequent experiences, which constituted a 'prophetic call', eventually see Ona renamed as 'Bilalaf and thus working in the name of a numen foreign to his own people. They reflect the content of the Seragi myth and confirm Ona Asi's understanding that he had appropriated and been appropriated by a sila, a serpent-spirit. From this time on, Ona used to burst out with strange utterances while writhing like a snake—a mark of the special influence that now periodically possessed him. Yet, it was nonetheless obvious that he wished his access to this new source of power to be of benefit to his fellows. As a result of encounters between the white intruders and the eastern Fuyughe, in fact, Ona gained increasing prestige as the protector of his people, first of the Kailape, and then (as the barriers between the once inviolate tribal areas slowly receded) of surrounding groups. Earlier considered a sorcerer (kovaki'ubah), and a commoner at that, Ona's authority gradually came to match that of the chiefs, who were unable to cope with the new developments of the time (Trompf 1981a: 22-30). What were these developments? Catholic Mission work, focused around Ononghe from 1913 on, presented an obvious threat to tradition, especially given the extraordinary energy and ingenuity of pioneer missionary Pere Jules Dubuy. A police camp was also set up at Kambisi in 1924 and manned successively by such memorable figures as Charles Karius and Ivan Champion, W. H. H. Thompson and Jack Hides. Its express purpose was the quelling of 'native disturbances'—in other words, typical Fuyughe feuding (Sinclair 1969:24-27). By 1930 the Sauwo was considered pacified and could expect to receive biennial visits from the white missionaries, who encouraged local catechists to conduct morning and evening prayers in various hamlets. Such changes met a complex blend of welcome and resentment, as is still the case in some of the more isolated sectors. It was clear that any opposition, or any effort to somehow domesticate the new influences, demanded powers superior to those offered by traditional weaponry or by chiefs unfamiliar with the new knowledge taught at the Ononghe school and carpentry centre. The situation called for Ona the 'superman' or anding'ubab (Trompf 1981a: 63).

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Once it had become eminently clear that, as distinct from the men with guns, the priests, nuns, and their assistants were insisting on peace through the promulgation of a new message and way of life, then it also became obvious that any confrontation was essentially going to be about religion or supernatural power. Dubuy, however, though pious, concentrated on practical matters. He was bent on creating a symbol: Ononghe, like a tiny slice of Switzerland, with the prominent clock-and-bell tower of its large church, the whirring wheels of its workshops and the nearby waterpowered sawmill, bespoke a whole range of new values, rituals, and skills. The Fuyughe were enlisted to 'work' at roadbuilding, so that horse tracks eventually linked all the valleys, and Dubuy, helped by technically trained Brothers, bridged the yawning gap over the Vanapa River with an astounding steel construction (by 1941). Along with all the new animals and wooden-wheeled vehicles came the coloured cloths, tinkling bells, and strange aromas of the Mass, a few books of Bible readings and prayers to be read in the vernacular, and strange newspapers from far-off places. Dubuy imported what was probably the first (hand-winding) movie projector to Papua/New Guinea, and by placing a lens in a wall to catch sunlight, he was also able to show slides of biblical stories in the darkness between the ceiling and roof of the priests' house. In all this, to be sure, Dubuy and his compatriots had certainly proved they were tidibl (Trompf 1981a: 30-33; 1991: 150-52; Garrett 1992: 337-41). The attractions of Christianity brought a new kind of division and a certain irresoluteness, however, in place of the entrenched hostilities and the military definiteness of the past. And Ona came to the fore as the champion of opposition and defender of Fuyughe tradition. Admittedly his stance meant forestalling, certainly not abetting, the influence of the tidib; yet, there was actually nothing in the accounts of their first coming that prevented them from turning out to be somewhat formidable and alien beings who might have to be kept at a wary arm's length. Admittedly, too, Ona's position was ambivalent to the extent that he was receptive to some new ideas; but he was only too ready to transform as many of these as he could to suit Fuyughe outlook and values. In time, through convincing members of the eastern Sauwo tribes (the Kailape) that Bilalaf was a superior power for hunting, successful yam-growing, and multiplying pigs before feasts, and after a memorable oracular prediction that 'two great birds would fly across the Sauwo' (which they did in the form of two companion aeroplanes in 1929!), Ona emerged as the leader of a counter-missionary cult. By 1930 he was ready to try his stand as a barrier against the white threat. One oral account tells how he convinced the chiefs and his Kailape supporters that he had taken the power of thunder (that is, its utam, the thing without which an individual instance of thunder was impossible) and kept it under some bark cloth in his own sanctum. It is difficult to

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reconstruct meanings and intentions here, but it is likely that Ona believed he had the power to control 'big thunder' (avas) (as guns were called in Fuyughe) and thus possessed the essential ingredient in the cosmos to forestall the whites' use of superior weaponry (OT: Esef 1983). These central interests led him on towards some special innovations. He organized the building of two spirit-houses in the non-traditional barracks or colonial rest-house style. Taking what was more a woman's role in custom (cf. Fastre 1937: 185-86), he supervised nocturnal seances, passing up food through a hole in the well-built ceilings of his houses to noisy spirits above. Although Bilalaf was presented as the host spirit, however, these seances were novel for involving direct dealings with the ancestors, who were previously considered to have little contact with the living. Since the ancestors emerged as an additional supportive power (beliefs about their support evidently being absorbed into Ona's developing 'system' from neighbouring cultures, or perhaps those of 'native policemen' from faroff areas), they gained new significance in terms of group security, used as they allegedly were for explaining and identifying the source of any person's death, and thus facilitating the course of revenge on tribal enemies. On the other hand, Ona framed new laws for the Kailape (under Bilalaf's possession) in a way quite reminiscent of the missionaries' teaching: 'Do not steal'; 'do not kill another's pig'; 'do not damage others' property'. The code nevertheless addressed local mentalities and the needs of the previously hostile groups Ona sought to consolidate against outsiders; and it is not impossible that his prohibitions hail from mountain Orokaivan or related initiation teachings (such as those of the Koko), which he could have learnt along avenues opening up to the east, or from policemen, or perhaps even from people at the mining camp he visited (cf., e.g., Chinnery and Beaver 1915: 76). Still, if his was no universalistic ethic, he designed to present himself as a Fuyughe 'man of God', thus stemming the tide of foreign influences. Clearly 'he was interested in the Christian God, liked him in fact and identified him with tidib (as single rather than plural). Bilalaf, he concluded, was also "God" in the secondary sense that Jesus and the Holy Spirit appeared to be'. But the new talk and the new ways were to be appropriated like the keag, and by Bilalaf—on his terms and on the Kailape's behalf. 'Thus by the mid-thirties . . . Ona provided a viable alternative to mission ritual and theology, and . . . deliberately discouraged people from attending church services' (Trompf 1981a: 36-47). Now Ona's activities hardly invite comparison with the open aggression of the Omale group when they joined forces with the mountain Koiari to threaten Wriford's short-lived mining camp in 1897 (p. 163), nor did Ona ever hold out hope to his supporters that they would possess rifles or, as one western Fuyughe proclaimed in the 1930s, that make-believe wooden rifles would change into real ones (Dubuy in MSC 1942). His approach,

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Father Alphons Bohn encountering a party of Fuyughe, late 1930s, (photo: Dubuy)

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nonetheless, was retaliatory. In 1938, conscious of his defence and possession of traditional spirit power, and fearful that missionaries might put a stop to his opposition, a cluster of his armed supporters temporarily blocked the path of Father Alphons Bohn, Dubuy's colleague and eventual successor, until they were satisfied on the track to Ona's headquarters at Indabitu that the visitor had come for another purpose (cf. plate 5). By April 1942 matters came to a head, when Bohn, this time more seriously engaged in his pastoral rounds, was warned that Bilalaf was making the ancestors bring susum ('goods'; that is, traditional items of wealth) among the Kailape, and that whites should keep away. If any person so much as looked on a white man, Bohn was told, a great landslide and flood would sweep over the Sauwo, for it was Bilalaf who was now lord of the valley. Ona was exploiting the Seragi myth to strengthen confidence in his control over immense supernatural forces and to seal off his own area of authority. By this time he was a much older man and hardly ready for what was coming: an arrest. Curiously this was not an arrest initiated by the missionaries, who would have been satisfied with a compensatory pig or sign of contrition, but by Ona's jealous brother, who resented the movement's spread beyond the Kailape and sent an 'official accusation' in the form of wrapped nuts that Ona had burnt his pandanus trees (Trompf 1981a: 47-52). A patrol arrived to take Ona by mule to Yule Island and thus to a totally unfamiliar setting on the coast. Under the charge of Resident Magistrate Thompson's Fuyughe interpreter, he was deployed to burn the rubbish collected by other detainees through the war period (1942-45). It was not too arduous a task for an older man: in fact, the whole experience away from the Papuan Highlands widened his outlook and quickened his thinking. When he returned to the Sauwo, however, he was still not ready to remain subdued, and was eager to test a more effective strategy against missionary influence (and colonialism). Ironically, his detention had brought him into contact with distinctly cargoist ideas. He learnt of the expectations surrounding Filo of Inawai'a, the young Mekeo girl believed to have the power to draw cargo down on to the altars she and her young companions had erected in the middle of her village (Fergie 1981: 96-99). Ona also heard of Louis Vangeke, the young priest recently returned from Africa, who was said to have tapped the secret of the whiteman's power by journeying to the land of the dead (= Madagascar, where he trained for the priesthood), and by spending much time with the Europeans on Yule Island (Trompf 1974). Ona's interest in these hopes, though, lay not so much in what they could teach about the acquisition of Western-style goods, but what they indicated about the potential strengthening power of the ancestors. The main purport of his postwar ideology, in fact, was that the ancestors would return and that he himself was engaged in the work of bringing them back.

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His reputation, strengthened by Fuyughe antipathy towards the Australian soldiers based in the Sauwo during the war, made it possible for the base of his cult to be broadened, bringing in more definite support from groups neighbouring the Kailape. To make himself less vulnerable, Ona built a hideout in the mountains in 1946 and appointed representatives in different villages to maintain interest and to warn against trouble. He carried on with defiant independence for another nine years, until the pressure of local catechists and growing disillusionment with his 'dreaming' eventually forced out a pig of contrition in mid-1954 (Trompf 1981a: 56-62, cf. OTs: Ona, Ine 1974). His barracks-style cult houses were burnt to the ground, so that two years after the great Dubuy's death, Ona's persistent cultivation of opposition was over (Gremaud et al. in MSC 1953-54). Ona's approach as self-appointed protector of his people had been one of wary non-cooperation, of stalking an astonishingly powerful prey with a due measure of realism, while mustering as much supernatural aid as appeared necessary or available. Intriguingly, the Sacred Heart Fathers at Ononghe were prepared to rank him as a cargo cultist, even though at no point did he propose that his cult's purpose was the acquisition of Western-style commodities. On the other hand, all his activities were for strengthening his society and, thus, his roles—as aid to hunters, fertility ritualist, and the harbinger of susum—have everything to do with preconceived beliefs about wealth. Wealth, which already implied the health and vigour of Fuyughe warriorhood and feasting, was the traditional answer to external danger and to the threat of extinction itself. Considering that food shortages, epidemics, and an apparently growing use of sorcery all presented themselves during Ona's lifetime, one can appreciate his association of such troubles with the interference of the whites. His role as bulwark, therefore, and his recourse to both silo!ate and the ancestors, amounted to a counterstroke against the new overlordship. Although he had presaged the great changes brought by newcomers, even taking some 'leaves out of the whiteman's books', such stances still square with his commitment to act as a shield. The Bilalaf cult stands as a significant mix of adjustment and retaliation. It has an importance for the study of cargo cultism for always retaining the essential ingredients of a traditional prosperity cult or religion (chapter 2), yet arising as a special, one might say emergency, appendage to traditional ritualism, which never quite mutated into a cult of cargo even during its postwar phase. Ona did not reject traditional culture; he repudiated those who had the power to reject it. Since the social order had changed substantially during his lifetime, however, in that feuding was banned and traditional boundaries could be crossed with freedom, his own special defence was not a call to reversion— to reinstate the old patterns of war, warriorhood, and survivalism—but a message tailored to altering circumstances. The momentous changes also

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required explanation, so that when Ona paralleled the Seragi myth of cosmic upheaval to the catastrophic potentiality of the whites, this was not only to provide reasons why the whites should be kept away: the myth accounted for the whites' extraordinary power as well. These outsiders represented forces of chaos that brought infliction—perhaps a kind of punishment—and the myth was retold with the implication that whites could disintegrate blacks (Trompf 1981a: 49). In that sense Ona Asi not only met a 'perceived crisis', he incorporated and thus accentuated this crisis in the world of Fuyughe meaning (cf. la Barre 1971). In the Bilalaf cult the tone and the manifestations of reprisal are not sharp. As a preliminary case, however, it reveals a sting in the tail of Melanesian religion despite an imposed pax Australiana. Traditional values and religious powers other than those directly attached to warriorhood could become tools of non-compliance and of 'getting back' at the intruders in a bid for independence. Our next example, in contrast, shows how a comparable appeal to such values could bring retaliatory urges to a pitch. The so-called 'Mur Madness' When the whites first entered the Wahgi Valley in the New Guinea central highlands, their strangeness suggested their arrival from another order of existence, while endemic tribal warfare hindered the spread of 'accurate' information about their doings. The earliest newcomers formed an expedition of eighty-two persons who wended their way along the northern side of the Wahgi River, from the Chimbu to Mount Hagen, during April 1933 (Taylor in ANA 1933: 2; Spinks ANA and Marshall AM 1933; Leahy 1933, cf. Sinclair 1972: 166-67). Their arrival was first linked by the local people to storms and lightning, to the whiteness (kompte) that comes from the sky. Earlier sightings of aeroplanes, but particularly the reconnaissance flight that took gold prospector Michael Leahy a good way down the valley on the eve of the land expedition (March 1933), almost immediately suggested the possibility of a connection between the unusual strangers who walked in and the 'great birds which hummed like bees' and which seemed like the 'Sun's mother (arts mam) looking at her great shadow on the ground'. Leahy remembered how one Wahgi bigman made this very association to the members of the patrol, pointing to the sky and mimicking the noise of engines. And these local suppositions did not wait long to receive confirmation, at least for those near-at-hand to the new events, because the numerous travellers cleared a runway between Banz and Nondugl and, after sending up smoke signals, welcomed the scheduled supply plane to the ground (10 April). To the ground also went 101 bodies, awestruck into instantaneous submissiveness. And out of the shimmering belly of the big bird there certainly emerged a xvhiteman, the remarkably

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tall form of Grabowski, the pilot, white-suited from head to toe (somewhat like a modern-day astronaut), his goggles catching the dazzling sun (Trompf 1989b: 255-56; Leahy and Crain 1937: 163-64). The whites, it was rampantly concluded, were certainly from a realm above. Their black carriers, on the other hand, because it was believed that lightning was effected by forces from under the ground, were connected with the blackness (kopo) of the earth and were considered as the 'groundmoving' men who caused earthquakes. Tradition had it that powerful people lived in the clouds (konekupa), and although these sky beings were nowhere near as prominent in Wahgi traditions as they were in Mae Enga and other highland mythologies, at least the appearance of the whites could be placed somewhere in time-honoured beliefs. Those locals who experienced the effects of the strangers' gun were only too eager to make their astonishment known abroad, and the first use of these weapons against Wahgi, or at least their property and pigs as warning, came when two expedition members, Assistant District Officer James Taylor and surveyor Ken Spinks, trekked back to the base camp at Bena Bena from Leahy's mining camp at Hagen. Warriors tried their hand at raiding and plundering as the party returned, only to find to their amazement that the strangers were armed after all (Trompf 1989b: 256-57). Opinions began to diverge as information filtered through from the eastern or Chimbu side of the great valley, and as items of wealth and cargo given by the whites got some distribution on its eastern fringes. Epithets for the newcomers varied from place to place in the area, and if some spoke of yi-kru (whiteman) or yikondil (shining whitemen), a good deal were talking about 'red men' (yi-bang, yiimbang). Kipembang (red spirits) were spirits of the distantly departed ancestors and, in contrast with the highly dangerous recently departed, they were considered the most supportive 'supernatural' power in bringing Life to the tribe. With the looming presence of the newcomers the distinction between the two categories of spirits—the distant and the recent ones—became blurred; and then again, if this line of thought took the intruders to be ancestral spirits, there remained the competing, confusing possibility that they might be beings of a less familial ilk. Southside warriors who came to meet members of the second government-sponsored (back-up) patrol in September 1934 received some of the whites' tinned food, but they were at first afraid to eat something given by the dead. The whites, for their part, paid for local food with large half-moon kina shells (pinctade maxima), valuables that were rare and worn only by the wealthiest and most influential men of the area. Those prepared to utilize these payments were felt to be courting death if they did not cut up the shells after a large pig was sacrificed and the kina were bathed in blood-filled containers. Even then, those who wore these shells as ear-rings and neck pieces were afraid that they might be kimak

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(or a poisoned object originating from an enemy tribe), and were later quick to remove them upon the drone of an aeroplane for fear of a great avenging bird (Trompf 1989b: 257-58, cf. Connolly and Anderson 1987). While rumours had been diversifying, further patrolling had been taking place in the valley in the wake of the great 1933 expedition. Divine Word Father Alfons Schaefer and companions had managed to reach Kerowagi in November of the same year, guided by Chimbu bigman Karagl. By March 1934 Schaefer and Father William Ross had marked out the likely spots for mission posts on the north side of Wahgi Valley, with the base station to be Mingende; by November newcomer Father Morschheuser had sighted and made plans for Minj to the south (Ross 1969: 322; Mennis 1982b: 43-76). Along with an interest in the 'great birds' flying to Mount Hagen, where Lutheran missionaries Wilhelm Bergmann and Martin Zimmerman built an airstrip, a government stopover camp established on the southeastern side of Mondt or Newman's River by 1935 soon enticed warriors to visit the strange houses with pitpit frames and canvas roofs built by four white newcomers. The Kumai, Kumge, and members of neighbouring tribes were those most involved; yet, only elderly people were prepared to eat the pork cooked by these strangers (or living dead), because they were already reconciled to the possibility of dying. Other gifts, at least, implied the miraculous powers and insights of the givers rather than foreshadowing doom. The whites purchased food with different types of shell (tun, non and kind). Any warrior who received from the whites a large half-moon kina for a pig brought to them was assumed to have honestly transacted the sale with their own animal, while anyone given a small shell was believed by their fellow blacks to have used stolen pigs, the spirits of the dead thus showing displeasure. Significantly, there were two occasions in 1935 when white officers dived into the river to wash and then came up bringing shells out of their pockets. News then quickly spread as to how these strangers had power to draw out all kinds of valuables or 'goods' (mongi, jemongi) from the river. They were called the 'growers and pickers' of shells, their special achievements being associated with diving, an action quite unfamiliar to a people who only waded into the shallows (Trompf 1989b: 259). During the next two years inhabitants of the Wahgi Valley were to hear more of the dramatic events that presaged the establishment of a new order. The whites were known to die, two missionaries (including Morschheuser) joined four others as victims of 'murders' in the Chimbu area to the east (Dec. 1934-Jan. 1935), isolating Father Ross at Mount Hagen until 1937. In response, a government punitive expedition mounted at the new basecamp post of Kundiawa gunned down a large number of armed warriors (1935) (Gitlow 1947: 8; Brown 1990a: 470, cf. Simpson 1962: 165-75), and during a tribal assault to wrench mongi from the still newer patrol post

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at Kerowagi, James Taylor's bullets brought between twenty and thirty warriors to an astonishingly quick end at Omgar and Barmbugloa (1936). Not long after, patrol officers used rifles to end a tribal conflict at Knambo (Komblo tribal area, Chimbu). Reports of these happenings spread in a variety of versions up the Wahgi Valley. Considering the vastly superior power these patrols had, it became preferable to keep away while patrols passed through the area, and traditional warfare was kept up at each tribe's peril because kiaps (patrol officers) were ready to shoot down combatants to stop it, to use shameful punishment (such as the eating of faeces) on recalcitrants, or to lead lines of troublemakers to detention at Kundiawa (Trompf 1989b: 260). At Kundiawa was to be dug the dreaded 'pit'—a large dungeon in the earth criss-crossed with poles at ground-level above, police being wont to defecate and relieve themselves down the cracks in between (Amean 1973). Between 1935 and 1947 the missionary impact among the Wahgi was negligible. This was the period known as Jim Tela or 'James Taylor's rule', all patrols being taken as expressions of this one famous figure's hegemony (cf., e.g., NGAR 1935-36: 23-25; 1936-37: 33). It was later on in this time, when the Second World War made it inadvisable for little else but military operations, that the first attempts to inject a new, colonial pattern of leadership into Wahgi life were made. Tribes acquiescing to the kiaps1 terms burnt their weapons and accepted nambering (numbering). The patrol officers tied bands around the heads of chosen 'bosses' (bosip) or ring man, the bands holding rounded porcelain badges (sometimes pennies) to their foreheads. By the 1940s any recognized bigman would be found wearing such badges as a luluai (or namba wan), and with select assistants as tultuls. These people had immense power; they could do and have anything they wanted, including free access to women of their choice; and their part in resolving disputes, especially concerning land, gave them the right to recommend imprisonment (Trompf 1989b: 260-61, cf. Rowley 1958: 16-17, 37, 200-32 for background). All these developments form the backcloth to the scenario at Mur, and one cannot hope to understand the appeal of the 1949 cult (sadly called the 'Mur Madness') without appreciating the character of imposed pacification, and the eventual opening of the valley to the Catholic and Lutheran missions in 1947, and also the first alienation of land to start a livestock and agricultural station at Nondugl in 1948 under the Hallstrom Trust (Luzbetak 1958b; NGAR 1948-49: 15, cf. plate 6). More needs to be said about cargo, however, and about its (relative) distinction from traditional forms of wealth, before considering the cult as a reaction to the new protectorate. Steel axes and knives were first available for inspection at the Newman's River camp; but, apart from the odd successful theft, when warriors slipped past the ropes cordoning off the earliest outposts and made

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Wahgi shepherds with Romney Marsh sheep at the Hallstrom Trust Livestock Station, Nondugl, Wahgi Valley, 1948. (photo: NGAR)

off with some prize, there was hardly any access to such things nor to spades, tinned food, and bottles until the settling down of the Mingende Catholic Mission Station near Kundiawa (especially from 1936 on). Chimbu labourers employed at the station ate tinned food and used novel tools. Wahgi visitors managed to take some of the empty tins home (after exchanges), cooked sweet potato in them, wore them as armbands and treated them as valuables to be secured against theft. Parts of broken spades were smuggled out and used not very successfully as axes. Those Wahgi who gained employment at the mission returned home with new tools only to find the whole tribe wanting to use them, with gifts of food 'piled to the ceiling' in their houses by each prospective user, and with the guarantee of a large compensatory pig if an axe or spade were damaged. Other items connected with the whites were bottles, matches, cigarettes, and salt. The origins of the whites' 'personal possessions' (bonokon) remained uncertain, but the strongest body of opinion presupposed that the yi-bang had contact with other ancestors who passed on these gifts. A common and persisting belief, moreover, was that the whites' mongi shell-money, along with the various metal objects in the kiaps boxes actually derived from some source quite near at hand to the Wahgi. Tradition had it that the kipembang and other spirits were the ones ultimately responsible for gifts coming to particular persons or groups; there was, thus, no conception

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of the new items hailing from a vast distance away. Even shells, the smaller pieces used customarily, and the larger ones associated with the whites, were never connected with a long linkage of trade transactions stretching to the sea (cf. Spinks 1934: 416; Hughes 1977: 55) and some people held that shells actually grew on trees (cf. Strauss 1920: 144; Steinbauer 1979: 98-100, 116 for comparable materials). As for money, it was at first quite unknown and unusable, and seems to have been effectively introduced into Wahgi country only as late as 1947 by Lutheran missionary Herbert Hannermann at Kerowagi and by workers from the coast (cf. Flierl 1962: 288). The Highlands Labour Scheme (from 1951) propelled an ever-increasing number of lineages within the ambience of the cash economy, and labourers could expect to earn money on the first Wahgi Valley plantations, initiated in 1954, when various large tracts of river-border land began to be alienated to European settlers (Gissua 1982: 10-11). But it was not until the late 1960s that mission education and a greater circulation of modern currency undermined popular beliefs about the 'supernatural' origins of white wealth and cargo, and weakened the quite logical conclusions that the strangers could not have had wealth except through the kinds of reciprocal relationships that religious activity made possible. Over generations the Wahgi had acted out their great Kongar ceremonies for the recurrent splendid growth of their herds, harvests, and families. They connected material results, or Life and Vitality as expressed in the wealth and health of the tribe, with the quality of their relationship to the spirit order, particularly to the ancestors (cf. Mantovani 1986: 202-03). It was natural for them to attempt to accommodate the new valuables to their traditional outlook. By 1949, however, the traditional balances previously pertaining to the bases of Wahgi reciprocity patterns were beginning to come apart at the seams. The first stress-point was the undue influx of large kina shell-pieces, which produced a kind of 'gold fever' for the new valuables. Tor the Gold Lip Shell I could have bought the world,' reported kiap (patrol officer) Corrigan. 'One old man, overcome at the sight of so much wealth, fainted. He explained to me afterwards that the glimpse of it all in quantity unlimited was too much for his feelings' (PNA 1949-50a: 2). Tribal fighting had been known to erupt over the possession of shells; able-bodied men showed their disgust at being paid for labour in ten-shilling notes, instead of shells or cargo items, by throwing the money into the fire. But there was simply not enough of the shells and new valuables to satisfy rampant demand, and reduced access to them during the war was followed by a much greater concern afterwards (PNA 1941-42: 3; OT: Seifert 1977). The second point of strain was felt by the traditional leadership; some threat was presented to it simply by the new shell-possessors, but especially by upstart ring-wearers, who had grasped for authority from the new administration. In fact, 1949 turned out to be a crisis year for the ring system in the valley,

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with 'literally hundreds of "Boss Boys" existing in the area, powerful simply 'by virtue of white porcelain rings' (PNA 1949-50b: [2]). Under such circumstances, pretensions to claim a more decisive, less questionable sanction for local (religio-) political leadership was almost bound to arise. And one should remember other developments accompanying the growing crisis over exchange and social control; above all, unsatisfactoriness surrounding white overlordship and its largely withdrawn presence during the war. Despite the forging of a Hagen to Minj road by the ANGAU (Allied) forces, a severe influenza epidemic took its toll among the Wahgi in 1944 (Burton 1983). Sorcery and witchcraft accusations issuing from this trauma hardly helped inter-tribal relations. Government postings at Minj station changed all too frequently between 1945 and 1949, and the missionaries were not permitted to get back a good toe-hold in the valley until 1947. Thus, not only was a general crisis in local affairs becoming more serious—quarrelling, brawling, and heightened tension barely being caulked by the little patrolling that was done—but there was no sign that the newcomers perceived or sought to solve the problems, and they even appeared to be the very reason for these problems or an obstacle to desired solutions (Trompf 1989b: 264-66). On the one hand, the foreigners were objects of awe, while on the other they threatened age-old norms. On the one hand, they appeared as the pathway to prized items of a new technology; on the other, these goods still presented problems for traditional patterns of reciprocity, were of unknown origin, and fell unevenly within the people's grasp in limited quantities. It is all very profoundly symbolized by accounts of two young women who died after wearing tight-fitting, at first glittering, tins for armbands. The blame for these two deaths was initially put on the things themselves, strange and numinous as they were; but the strengthening association between the newcomers and these objects did not take long to produce a 'general blame' against the bearers of the colonial order. With such an unresolved, confusing mix of promise and danger, then, it is perhaps not surprising that a precipitating factor of the so-called 'Mur Madness' was a native coastal policeman's attempt (in 1949) to stop Kumai warriors from killing a suspected witch. In the new order there was the possibility of new-found freedoms, opportunities and knowledge, yet there also came a blockage of old roads to security and status. Quarrels over property led to witchcraft accusations, as inter-tribal fighting went 'underground' and continued in the forms of 'spiritual revenge' and of punishing its alleged agents. Local leadership, with competition for it more intense, now depended more for its credence on decisions or rulings of the judicial, arbitrating kind tried by the policeman; yet the Wahgi preferred acts of punishment that would maintain tribal tit-for-tat killing, and young women were often vulnerable for having 'married in' from other tribes and

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becoming 'the enemy within' (cf. chapter 1). Although the Kumai and western Chimbu tribes next to them had been earlier reported to be 'always friendly to [white-led] patrols' (PNA 1941-42: 3), now Kumai leaders found themselves far from happy about the decision of a stranger, a Rabaul-trained police officer, who appeared to be giving directives in the interests of their enemies. Out of this immediate pretext and altercation, intriguingly, a 'cult' was born. Its initiator was one Goitaiye Dolpa of Mur, a man with some exposure to the whites at a time when Father M. Bodnar was setting up the Catholic Mission station at Kup in 1948, but who was propelled by a vision at a traditional 'spirit-place' on the edges of the mountain lake early in 1949. In his vision he saw recognizable dead relatives rising from the waters, taking out stone axes and other valuables from its depths. Goitaiye exclaimed: 'They are giving mongi from the lake!' (an expression of subsequent influence), drawing the conclusion that the valuables were for his people. The connotations of mongi, we reiterate, were not confined to traditional Wahgi valuables, because such items as kina shells (in their recently introduced proliferation) and Western-style goods (even metal ones) were not precluded by its usage. The vision squares with the popular view that the real source of valuables was actually near-at-hand, as earlier stated, and was readily linked to the episodes involving white divers (OT: Aim 1976; Trompf 1989b: 267-68). Goitaiye's experience was not without precedent. In other Wahgi quarters the mysterious appearance of 'artifacts' from beneath such 'round waters' had even sometimes been taken as heralding victory over enemies (OTs: Kolip, O'Hanlon 1976, cf. Parake 1983; Gaire 1983). In Goitaiye's openly proclaimed view, the ancestors had opened a special and free access to wealth that the known whites seemed to foreclose. He and his three assistants styled themselves kiaps (administrators/patrol officers), announcing that, whereas the white kiaps had previously been recipients of ancestral favours and had kept local people from possessing them, the time for proper transactions had arrived. That the special disclosure occurred at a mountain lake, moreover, if we can cautiously extrapolate from other traditions (Trompf 1989b: 268-69), suggested the prospect of some victory. Significantly, nothing was expected to happen without rituals, and preparations for the coming of mongi moved step by step in the direction of a special Kongar, yet one that was set in motion without seeking a consensus from the contesting bigmen of the clans, and without concern for the state of tubers and pig-herds (cf. chapter 2). Goitaiye and his leading assistant Nangeb instructed the people to build a large house, its round shape recalling the sacrosanct, smaller mingar (into which head-dresses, feathers, and other precious items are placed to mark the intention to perform a pig-festival). This was located at Domne, a mile from Mur and

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closer to the lake, and erected inside a large, palisaded singsing ground. The special circumstances evidently called for a speeding-up of ritual activity (which was usually spanned out over months or years), as well as for some novel departures from tradition. A huge feast of yams, pigs, and fowl was to be organized outside the cult house, with large pieces of pork being hooked up inside this construction for consumption by the spirits. Invitations brought contributors and visitors from at least twelve—and, thus, an exceptionally large number of proximate—tribes. During the food preparations, which lasted over several days, Goitaiye and Nangeb disclosed the lake's secrets, and although only being aspirants to power with no prior clout of bigmen, they managed to lead some one hundred people in a trek to the water (called Kubangnol). Men, women, and children gathered round mariptambans leaves on the way, which they presented to Goitaiye, and stood in a long line a short distance from the lakeside. The two leaders debarred them from approaching too close to the edge. The two leaders prepared a series of parcels with the leaves as their wrappings, dipped these below the surface and returned them dripping to the line of followers. The parcels were carried in procession to the cult house, which together with other, smaller structures, was surrounded by a stockade and guarded from critics and outsiders. Once the packages were heaped into the cult house, nearly reaching the ceiling and stacked around the food offerings, Goitaiye opened the feast with the words: 'Your spirits have eaten, now you can!' On his command twenty or so pigs were slaughtered in succession, as if at a Kongar, and despite some complaints he convinced people to be patient and insisted that mongi was really inside the 'temple' (OT: Aim, cf. Trompf 1989b: 268-71). Expectations concerning the magical transformation of the parcels provide crucial indications of the leaders' expanding hopes and goals. Smaller packets were for the acquisitions of mongi, such as the three kinds of valuable shell (see above) and either stone or steel axes; longer wrappings were for the bird-of-paradise feathers left in the mingar and worn at Kongar; a third category again was still longer and very special in that the packages were made with banana plant leaves or fibres and for the production of gan (guns). Notions of imitative magic governed the choice of the contents: a non-edible tree fungus (nondopi), which looked like a kina shell, was mainly used for the first type of parcel, tree leaves that looked like feathers (tolkin or mariptambans) for the second, while for third the leaders chose varying lengths of wood that had been lying in the lake waters for a long time. In this last case the connection with the Kongar is again obvious, since the central pole of the ceremony's fertility house (bolimgar) was always kept damp in the muddy banks of a river from one great pig-killing ceremony to another (chapter 2). The concern for superior weapons links

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with the self-appointed kiaps' effort to act as a new 'government', especially since they selected willing youths to drill backwards and forwards across the singsing ground, branches for guns across their shoulders, as if at the police inspections. The banana-leaf wrappings were supposed to turn into paper, furthermore, a material smacking strongly of the whites' know-how and official control, and with the speedy means by which they harnessed fire (OT: Manije 1976). Check-ups inside the cult house revealed that the moment of transformation had not arrived, and Goitaiye soon made it clear that a tremendous effort was going to be required to bring it about. The effort made at Domne, significantly, emerged as an exaggerated, frantic, and highly abnormal Kongar. Dancing went on day after day, and the dancing compound was also the scene of guria—of ecstatic behaviour sometimes derogatively called 'shaking fits'. As 'emcees' Goitaiye and Nangeb would fall into a state their critics outside the picket-fence described as komugl tai (literally 'ear madness') (cf. Reay 1977), and those gathered before them would follow suit en masse. Still more significantly, there were times (as there are on the second 'great day' of the Kongar) when displays of mock attacking occurred. The dancing itself was very often frenzied and appeared more like a battle dance, but with the feigned attacks there came much greater belligerency, and men 'possessed' or extremely 'stirred up' often charged to the fence with their spears, viciously poking them through, and would have killed any onlooker who stood too close. These recurrent outbursts, however, did not lead to a withdrawal so much as a growth and intensification of support. Observers from other tribal areas who responded to the rumours decided that these people were achieving something, and joined in. Pigs were brought in by newcomers and slaughtered in larger and larger numbers between the vigorous rounds of dancing, thus facilitating the entry of extra participants and giving the whole affair the flavour of a prolonged multi-tribal pig-festival. Even Chimbu tribesmen came, including some Endugla, traditional enemies to the Kumai. The potential success of the movement resulted in its spread among other Wahgi groups towards the Minj River and the new Minj patrol post and airstrip. It was here that Kauig and Kaivig, clearly representing the cult and their own special interests at the same time, had their impact. Kaivig of Kugiga the 'rubbish man' set up his own kiap system, as a 'king', even appointing another man 'king' over the Minj River region, and yet another a 'bishop'. As Reay's account of him runs: Kaivig was staying with his daughter at Mur when the cult began. He obtained there a bayonet, and returning to the Minj River, announced that he was the 'Government' of the entire Wahgi Valley. He spoke slightingly of the hatchets and shells the Europeans had brought and said that the natives would have

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better ones later. He declared that he intended to get rid of the Europeans; he and his followers would have rifles (he showed the bayonet as proof that this was possible) and would shoot the patrol officers if they tried to interfere with the cult. (Reay 1959a: 196-97)

The essential flavour of the Domne episode is there, but Kaivig was pressing for some special prestige of his own, while Kauig the golmolk (medium), who operated farther down the Minj River, also established a hierarchy of officers. Both showed concern for the building and attending of cult houses, with periodic excursions being made back to the lake to obtain the correct packages; and both of them organized the building of dams because they realized 'the spirits bringing the wealth chose to live in water' (Reay 1959a: 198). These fringe developments only go to confirm the main point of the Domne cult: the attempt to establish an entirely new 'government' that would not compromise with, but rather eliminate, the whites. The whites might have provided some clue to the presence of new and special power, but they posed a serious threat to tradition, which on Goitaiye's account contained within itself the secret means by which this power could be appropriated. Superficially, perhaps, the Domne affair seems to be more of a political action or 'rebellion' with two tricksters playing on popular superstitions to generate it! Although Kaivig may have inducted his 'bishop' and Kauig claimed in seances that the ancestors had designated her 'Maria', there was no talk of God or of mission teaching at Domne; and these latter two messengers evidently brought in Christian motifs to the western part of the movement because the Catholic mission had been more permanently set up at Minj (under the Austrian P. H. Aufenanger) and at Banz on the more stable northern side of the valley (under the Dutchman Gerard Bus, SVD) in 1947, while barely affecting Kup (in the cult's 'zone') to the east (OT: Welling 1980). On the other hand, the leaders back at Domne clearly wished to contact and appropriate a higher power than their own. They even experimented with writing in the hope of receiving orders from the ancestors; and using scraps of (stolen?) paper and blue j uice from the kanump plant, they brought back messages they claimed to have received at the lake (OT: Aim 1976). Quite apart from the question of their sincerity, however, or whether their ecstatic experiences and their own deviousness were thoroughly enmeshed, the whole scenario cannot but be accepted as an expression of highland religion. The Kongar is at the very heart of traditional Wahgi religion, and the purpose of its performance was group wealth, welfare, power, and effective survival against enemies. In the events of Domne, during 1949, we surely find a Kongar tres extraordinaire, the central cultus of a prosperity religion, if you like, being intensified and relied upon for emergency purposes and for an act of reprisal (Trompf 1989b: 274-75).

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The cultists were punished for their trouble. Reinforced by police, the patrol officer G. Lindsay at Minj organized and encouraged the burning of cult houses, while the leaders and most active participants were led to the dreaded 'pit' at Kundiawa late in 1949. The most notable exception was Kaivig, whose dramatic rise in status was matched by the rapid fall of the movement, and who committed suicide (Reay 1959a: 198; Amean 1973). It is not the relative seriousness with which the colonials treated the whole affair, however, that suffices to convince one about the retaliatory character of this cult, so much as the obvious appeal to traditional sources of group strength, in a frenzied and significantly cross-tribal burst of energy, to ward off the new threat. The Mur episode combines an attitude of protectiveness we have already noted in the Bilalaf cult, or at least a reforging of links with spiritual power when these seemed to have been eroded, with a more decidedly aggressive stance already suggested by the 'apodeictic displays' of mock violence in the great ceremonies. The paradox remained, however, that although the whites were not wanted, their apparently untrammelled access to impressive possessions—whether it was those that were neo-traditional or marvellously new—certainly was. That may not look such an untraditional stance, in that the payback raids of the past (right throughout Melanesia) had included looting. The long and complex networks of trade that brought shell-money up from the coast to the highlands, moreover, was so organized at each point of contact that the exchange system did not threaten the balance of tribal power (Hughes 1977: 53-56, 91), and there is room for viewing the activity at Mur as an effort to remove the dangerous element of 'non-reciprocity' out of the new situation (cf. chapter 5). At this point, therefore, we note that the cult was at one and the same time an act of reprisal bolstered by hopes that the spiritworld would show its hand to establish the correct pattern of giving as well as to take revenge. As usual for Melanesia, to give and to take are ultimately inseparable issues. 'Classic' cargo cultism: assessing the degrees of its innovations and its alternative force The foregoing examples illustrate the development of cult responses in two areas where contact with the whites was still limited; thus, traditional rather than introduced values and practices are more pronounced in them. These two movements also reveal that resources were present within Melanesian religions themselves to cope with radical change, and they warn us against the folly of ascribing too much attraction to outside ideas or a Melanesian desire to be influenced by foreigners. On first contact or interaction, perhaps, there was often acceptance, and

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excited hope for potential blessing from the spirits, yet problems, deprivations and frustrations associated with the outsiders were bound to bring resentment in various quarters. The social consequences of these problems, however, took varying amounts of time to be felt in different contexts, and to be felt hard enough for expressions of bitterness to erupt. Sometimes cults began by simply seeming to be the organized anticipation of the new-style goods, and were only subsequently turned into protests. Gottfried Oosterwal (1963) describes a case in point among the Kaowerabedj people (Mamberamo River, north Irian Jaya) from the 1950s, in an area with about three decades of very limited contact. At first the father of a dead child understood himself to be confronted by Djewme, goddess of the afterworld, and the spirits of the dead (warria), and they promised 'to return forever with a cargo of axes, machetes, and outboard motors'. If the group singing and dancing in anticipation of this fulfilled promise looked as if it could resolve traditional enmities, however, and came to involve other tribes in its activities, the cult took an outer-directed, unfriendly approach to the Europeans when one Banni, who took news of the affair to the neighbouring Airmati, insisted on knowing why it was that the whites were keeping the cargo and the 'factories' to themselves (cf. also Wilson 1973: 315-16). Talk of cargo, then, is very easily turned into subversive language. Without pretending to make an exhaustive coverage of cargo cults in the region, however, it suffices to say that the more extensive interaction between Melanesians and colonists along the coasts and throughout most island groups has resulted in cults of a more synthetist (or syncretic) character than those of the Fuyughe, Wahgi or Kaowerabedj. All the survey works on cargo cultism (e.g. Worsley 1970; Strelan 1977: 13-50; Steinbauer, 1979; Wilson 1973: 309-47) are concentrated mainly on such 'classic' responses as blend indigenous 'pull' with outside 'push'. Here I shall limit myself to a pertinent selection of materials which best reflect the ongoing, adapted role of retributive logics in the contact situation, and to show how the courses and thrusts of other movements may be reassessed along lines not normally pursued. Some of the key issues and dimensions of our subject are nicely exemplified by the many episodes and movements connected with Koreri (or the belief in 'the eternal order') in the Biak Island region, from 1854 to the present. The Koreri movements confirm our prior point that one cannot hope to understand cargo cults without apprising the nature and adaptive potentiality of the relevant tradition. The power of 'the myth of the Old Man' is still felt today throughout Geelfink Bay: the myth concerns the aged Yawi Nushado, who spears a pig which calls out in a human voice

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(note the similarity to the Seragi serpent-warrior), and the blood-trail of which leads the old hunter into a cave. In the cavern he sees the world of the dead, a beautiful village full of people whom he knows have already died, yet a voice tells him: Your time has not yet come, you cannot come here yet. Therefore you may return home now, for you are still part of the old world (and with your old skin). What you see here is Koreri. (Thimme 1977:25) Now take your spear and go home. He obeys, and in his continual and aloof pondering on his experience of the other world—a kind of 'clinical death experience' (cf. Moody 1981)— he neglects his personal hygiene and becomes scabious (or manarmakeri). The rest of Manarmakeri's story is one of a journeying, rejected culturehero who performs all sorts of extraordinary feats, including the capture of the Morning Star in a coconut tree on Wundi Island. Earnestly requesting Koreri sheben (the 'Resurrection of the Dead and the Coming of Koreri') before he would let the star go, Manarmakeri was instructed to throw a coconut upon the breast of the girl he desired, and thus make her pregnant without her facing his repulsive body. Once more he obeys, except that when it is established that such an awful man is father to the woman's child, all three are exiled, an event leading to journeys through the whole Biak region. While versions of the myth vary, Manarmakeri is said to have created special features of both sea and land, given directives about custom and always borne the precious secret of wealth, while being one who was constantly chased away and despised. The versions usually end with his voyage west beyond the Reja Ampet Islands, but some accounts also mention his return, even to the point of saying it will occur seven generations after his going (or in other words, 'soon') (Kamma 1972: 17-63; cf. Kamma 1947-49; 303-04; Thimme 1977: 27; Pratomo 1983: 99; Lacey 1990: 187, 191). Affected by trade with Islam's easternmost sultan (at Tidor) (Galis and Kamma, 1958, cf. de Clerq 1893), and more especially by European missionaries (German Evangelicals from 1855, and then Dutch Reformed personnel, whose coming foreshadowed the formal Dutch acquisition of west New Guinea in 1898) (Kamma 1977: vol. 1, 64, 120-26, 143-50), the Biakese, Yapen Islanders and surrounding cultures recurrently returned to this myth for sustenance. It was appealed to as a way of explaining the differences between local peoples and outsiders (Manarmakeri later being held to have visited Holland, Britain, etc.), or as a reason for great expectation (that Manarmakeri would return to usher in Koreri). As the source of either explanation or hope, moreover, the myth became a vehicle of protest, of a grasping after 'dignity, status and true participation' (Moritzen

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1978: 141, cf. Kobben 1964: 94-101). Resistance was often expressed in 'advent nights' (Adventnachten) as missionaries termed them, or consecutive nocturnal bouts of strenuous dancing. With these there usually came the rebuilding of clan spirit-houses, the slaughter of many pigs and the destruction of gardens (Kamma 1972: 97-101, cf. 162-66). It is not inappropriate to compare the advent nights to Goitaiye's emergency Kongar, even if their forms and accompanying beliefs have varied over the last hundred years. Certainly, the outbreak of dancing and the acclamation of a leader as Manarmakeri's precursor (konoor) most often amounted to acts of retaliation. If the konoors were not precursors to an armed rebellion, they were means to create tension; although the expressions and intensities of this tension, remain admittedly difficult to plot along a spectrum of minimalistmaximalist 'strategies', these prime-movers nonetheless show themselves to be palpably non-cooperative and against the outsiders' interferences. Thus, consider the attempt to set up an alternative government (to that of the Tidorese Sultan) on Numfor Island in 1855; the hatred directed against the Dutch for causing the earthquake and smallpox epidemic of 1864; the utterly frenzied 'advent nights' on Mansinam Island to open Koreri and rectify the imbalances of the colonial order (in 1882); and then the cultic activity pitched against both the mission (on Waar in 1897 and on Yapen in 1925) and the colonial administration (on Numfor in 1910). In all these stirrings, as has been shown by Freerk Kamma's monumental studies (1972: 106-07, 111-12; 125-27, 133-34, 138-39, 143-44; 1977: vol. 2, 121-31), one finds the symptoms of the much greater disruption of 1938-43, when thousands turned their backs on the Dutch throughout the same region and later welcomed the invading Japanese. Each of these outbreaks, admittedly, can be approached from differing angles, and it is not being pretended that any of them were exclusively anti-white or for that matter recriminatory. Any opponents to the cults or konoors (and thus including indigenous critics) could be rejected, and there are hopes concerning an unsurpassed order of reciprocity, as well as concerted efforts to explain the nature of the local people's situations, which are relevant to our analysis (chapters 5-6). The great Biak-Numfor movement of the war years is perhaps the most 'classic' among Melanesian protest movements with a 'cargo cult' flavour. It centred around the remarkable prophetess Angganita Menufeur— between 1941 and her alleged death in mid-1942—and, although making fair use of Christian belief and ritual, arose out of the spirit of independence which swelled into armed defiance. Angganita herself, to be sure, was hardly an advocate of open retaliation, but rather a prophetess and healer on the small island of Insumbabi (near Biak), where hundreds came to bring their sick, to listen to her songs and acclaim her as a konoor. She bestowed upon her followers some laws, which are comparable in their

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mix of a Christian and traditional flavour to those of Ona Asi. 'Do not shed blood' ran one, 'for blood is a bar to Koreri (or the new order or renewal).' 'Do not eat pork', went others, 'or bathe in the sea'; and Angganita called for creatures which sloughed their skins to be respected as symbols of Koreri, and for fires to be extinguished at night, since 'that is when the Manseren [i.e. Manarmakeri] ship will come' (Kamma 1972: 158-59). Such an effort at reordering others' lives, however, was enough to produce a reaction from the outside authorities, the missionary and Adjunct-Assistant District Officer on nearby Korido warning her to stop the movement. This was pressure, however, before which Angganita refused to yield. Temporarily detained by the colonial officials at the main station of Bosnik on Biak, she returned at the end of 1941 unscathed and in an atmosphere of victory, so that her stance steadily moved from mere altercation to confrontation and to an organization alternative to both foreign hegemonies and local custom. By the 1940s, understandably, Christian teaching and ideas had extensively permeated the Geelfink Bay area, and there were villagers made uncomfortable by the new cultism who 'clung to the Gospel proper' (thus Kamma 1972: 161). Yet Angganita and her supporters were ready to 'take some leaves out' of the Christians' books. As some konoors had done before, she identified Jesus with Manggundi (= Manarmakeri), the bearer of Koreri. She received to herself the title Mary, while the Morning Star became Gabriel, and local topographical points changed to 'Bethlehem', 'Judaea', 'Gadara', and so forth. Acclaimed miraculous cures, as well as 'advent night' phenomena (with dancing to drums, singing, shaking, fainting and xenophobic or glossolalic ejaculations) further increased the movement's popularity and bestowed upon Angganita the stature of a goddess-like figure (Kamma 1972: 160-64). Whatever the widened appeal of Christianity, the resilient power of the central myth was manifest; whatever thought had already been invested in the rapprochement between mission teaching and tradition, the main hope was not diverted from the long-honoured goal named Koreri. Once Angganita was arrested by the local Dutch administration on a more permanent basis (May 1942), the movement took on a more defiant, eventually belligerent colour. The change, astoundingly, coincides with the arrival of the invading Japanese naval force off Bosnik. A small fleet-load of local canoes pressed these newcomers for Angganita's release, only to find to their dismay, that they also took her away—a turn of events which brought matters to a 'boiling point'. In the prophetess's absence, Stephen Simopyaref, from the important southern Biak village of Manswam, led discussions wThich brought about the organization of an army (from July onwards). The propaganda accompanying this organization is significantly retributive: not only must Angganita be liberated (and returned to 'Judaea' = Insumbabi Island), but all those hostile towards the movement had to

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be destroyed, and certain categories of people—all foreigners, all government officials, native Christian preachers not joining the movement, teachers who insulted it, and so on—were to be put in prison. The black army itself was principally aimed at challenging the Japanese, to release the heroine. It was paradoxically entitled A.B. (America Blanda = New America), thereby being pro-Allied and thus pro-Dutch into the bargain, although its ranks were open to all peoples of New Guinea who wanted their freedom under the banner of the red, white and blue Koreri flag. With some measure of realism, however, the army's leaders first intended that the Japanese be persuaded to recognize the new movement, even establish Angganita as queen of an independent New Guinea, because an open physical confrontation portended to be disastrous (Kamma 1972: 168-72). Disaster came anyway. In the events which followed, both Angganita and Stephen disappeared as captives of the Japanese, and were presumably killed; it is important, though, that their deaths cannot be firmly verified because, according to a widespread local belief (one usually neglected by the commentators) a true konoor cannot die (OT: Rumakiek 1982). As for the dispersed branches of the A.B. army, their struggles with the Japanese were bound to bring bloodshed, and it eventually came excessively at Stephen's village of Manswam in October 1943. While much hand-to-hand fighting ensued, Japanese fire-power and steel bayonets easily matched hatchets, spears, 'clubs and small bottles of magic oil', so that the A.B. army was forced to retreat with loss of between 600 and 2,000 lives (Marjen 1967: 64; Kamma 1972: 187-201). Extraordinarily enough, however, the same twelve months held still more drama than this physical tragedy. There was indeed a Koreri-like transformation 'out of the blue' to come!—albeit one smacking of so much tragicomedy. For in June 1944 the Americans actually chose Meokwundi—an island southeast of Biak sacred to the memory of Manarmakeri, and the wide lagoon of which was said to be created by his very hand—as a naval base to consolidate their campaign against the Japanese. The whole island 'became one big warehouse', with the Americans drowning the islanders 'in a downpour of goods', ships coming 'in hundreds and men in thousands' (Kamma 1972: 204). Amazingly, then, Koreri had (apparently) arrived! Poignantly, its manifestations lasted but a few months. By the following year, what was visible reality became a dream again, and various coteries were back at the job of stirring up hopes of an 'Ideal State' all over again. More might be written of postwar Koreri activities; but the reason for examining this material at all is to illustrate the varieties of circumstance in which cargo cult or related activities emerged, the differing objects of cultist opposition and, above all, the changes in both the tools and sanctions of retaliation. Although the one central myth remained the source of hope for a new order, the Geelfink Bay peoples increasingly appealed

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to Christian teachings to substantiate the truth of their sacred lore. Moreover, although this myth provided the basis for episodic efforts to bring on supernatural intervention, the Koreri or Manseren tradition of protest eventually produced organized, albeit unrealistic-looking military activity. It was the heart of the traditional religion which was still providing fuel for fire, but the precise nature of the conflagration was affected by various contingencies: the nature of external domination, the consciousness and message of any given konoor (or pretender to such a role), as well as the degree of influence exerted by non-traditional beliefs and strategies. Put schematically, one can speak here of a spectrum of cult-type reactions, or a range of options by which tones of reprisal or negative retribution manifest beyond the state of mutual acceptance. Table 5 Schematized spectrum of cargo cult reactions [0] Mutual coexistence 1 Resentment repressed, yet 'seething under the surface' of local and colonial affairs 2 The creation of an altercation 3 The contentious refusal to cooperate with the masters/setting up of an alternative way 4 Open confrontation with limited violence 5 Violent conflict The states so delineated do not necessarily present themselves in a fixed chronological order, of course; and thus, it will already be apparent that shifts between the extremes can be in either direction or in leaps and bounds. But it is presented in this form to show how cargo cult activities usually fall into the middle states (2-4) between coexistence and violence, and are symptomatic of both an unsatisfactory coexistence and the unacceptability of violence (either as unrealistic or morally wrong). The peoples of the Biak-Numfor region, if we now apply this scheme, could have accepted white overlordship as supernaturally ordained. After all, the seemingly unassailable whites had potential as a class of mythical heroes, as bearers of Koreri. But coexistence would have been hopelessly superficial without testing these possible redeemers. Especially since the newcomers, in the splendour of their affluent independence and ostensibly unlimited power, made traditional existence unbearable through the very chasm yawning between lifestyles, through the workaday subservience of blacks to white officials and planters, and through the mental confusion which followed pacification, mission instruction and other social changes (Kouwentrouven 1956: 81-96; Held 1957: 229-35; Kobben 1964: 90-96; Kamma 1972: 214-21; 1977: vol. 2, 758-68, cf. de Bruijn 1951; van Baal 1967:

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67; Kamma 1982). The very first Koreri movements under Dutch rule, appropriately, were not against the whites, but 'nativist' expressions putting the Dutch in their place in terms of the central myth (cf. Linton 1943 for background), thus placing the newcomers and new phenomena in the indigenous realm of meaning. It was precisely in this process that the Dutch were being tested; a 'scene was created', an altercation. And it was precisely because the Reformed Mission reacted adversely to this nativism as a threat to its success that patterns of non-cooperation and open confrontation developed, with the invasion of the Japanese eventually resuscitating the old option of warfare (or of entering into violent conflict). After the imposition of taxes and an indentured labour programme by the Dutch administration (1912 on), moreover, all the so-called Manseren or Koreri movements repeated the same promise of 'no more taxes and obligatory labour' (Kamma 1972: 219); thus, their consistent abhorrence of spiritless submission should hardly make us surprised at the eventual organization of an 'army' in 1942. A fundamental point remains: notes of anti-colonial reprisal are sounded with different intensities when Melanesians organize independent movements for themselves. Even traditional-looking 'prosperity cults', as 'passageways' toward cargo cultism one might say, contain a capacity to threaten the new overlords, especially through select innovative features designed 'to call the whites' bluff. Cults more palpably cargoist for focusing hopes on Western-style goods, moreover, even picking up on some long-inured hope for a 'time of abundance . . . within everyone's grasp' or a new equivalence (Kamma 1972: 102), usually have still more retaliatory stings in their tails. They direct blame on those who block the realization of their dream-myth of plenty; they project the dramatic removal of those who stand in the way so that blamers may be blessed with what is rightfully theirs; and these cults are capable of turning the fire of Judaeo-Christian eschatology back on the very people who bore it to Melanesia, appropriating it both as justification (or of knowing one is 'on the right side') and criticism (against inconsistency and hypocrisy) (Trompf 1990d: 7, 15). It is of course a characteristic of all negative payback that the catharsis of 'lashing out'— even in a verbal tirade—has its own rewards: and this is as true of cargo cultism as of any other accusative act. 'If only they had let us have as many cargo cults as we'd wanted, then we would have got the whole thing out of our system' (OT: Garuai 1973). There is always the possibility, admittedly, that the mere and undefined expression of resentment will end in moral failure, that one's anger will only produce a reputation for hotheadedness or illusion, let us say, or that a failure to control and direct one's retaliatory energies could bring disaster on one's own people. The point about so-called cargo cults, however, is that if they prove to fail as a political form they can almost always claim to succeed in terms of a

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certain moral indignation, as justifiable appeals to the reality of conditions which are not as they should be among humans. As we shall see in chapter 5, cult participants often give something to the spirit-world, and show that they expect from life reciprocity, not its breakdown in the very adversities they struggle to dissolve. But the resolution they want, and await, is retributive nonetheless, and subversive to the colonial order. A hardened pragmatist is more likely than not to see cargo cults as 'pathetic' exercises in futility, as instances of a tragic muddleheadedness among natives who are ignorant about the operations of the real world. Apart from the fact that the reasoning of Melanesians will only become intelligible by referring to indigenous presuppositions, however, and not to some absolute 'Oxbridge' standard of logic (see chapter 3), we may affirm that the apparently naive, seemingly childlike features of the cults are in fact strong reclamations of independence. The Elema may have experimented with the tables, knives and forks (1917-23), for example, and waited on the beach for a ship of cargo just as the wives of missionaries had habitually done for hours, when on the look-out for mail and the trade goods they had ordered (Brown 1956:177-79). Like the highland Taiora after them, further, they made a 'radio pole' to communicate with the spirits (Williams 1923: 23-24; Berndt 1954: 230-31). Yet, observers have overlooked the boldness of such experimentation and imitation ('Look you, I can do it, too!'), and have mistaken genuine attempts to create an altercation for confusion and even madness. Without for one moment subscribing to a one-line theory of cargo cults, it remains worth observing that one mild ejaculation of the retaliatory spirit always carries the potential for the wildest rush towards liberty. That in some cases impressive popular movements of non-cooperation emerge—that the Tannese, to illustrate, could turn their backs en masse against the Presbyterians (in 1940) and devise an alternative syncretic set of rituals (to Jonfrum instead of Christ) (Guiart 1956: 223-33); that many people from different Solomon Islands, under both Christian and pagan leaders, could present such a bold, well-organized 'alternative government' as Maasina Rule, against British domination (1944-52) (Laracy 1983: 12-34); that the great Yali Singina, bitterly disillusioned by the missions and the Australian government alike, could construct a highly effective organization to reinforce Madang traditional religions against the inroads of white influence (1946-75) (Lawrence 1964a: 116-221)—all this only bespeaks the ground-swelling of local dissatisfactions or regional anticolonial sentiments ready to thwart the most resourceful ambassadors of Western civilization. If in most cases broadly based movements did not emerge, this may tell us something about the quality of the leadership, the resilience of traditional cultural boundaries, and—considering the drawn-out, complex history of interaction between governors and governed—about the pace at

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which cargo cultists learnt to play at the whites' games of money-making, anti-tax demonstrations, electioneering, and even missionization. If in various cases the changes anticipated were dramatic in the extreme, such that returning ancestors would be joined by Jesus in his Second Coming, and natural catastrophes take on the flavour of the Apocalypse, that indicates the extent to which introduced beliefs have been assimilated to strengthen the hope and to invoke a divine, seemingly final judgement to wipe out all sources of the present trouble (cf. chapter 6). That some of the 'classic' cargo cults take on a. persona of Christian forms, mind you, can often belie the essentially traditional goals of their members; and then again, ostensibly Christian activity or else naive, open experimentation to blend custom and Christian practice, can be used by committed traditionalists for traditionalist ends. In this latter connection, it is worth considering the internal history of cargo cults, uncovering the jostling for power to determine their direction, and assessing how such struggles also reflect general power shifts in a given locality which are consequent upon government policy and missionization. Most cargo cult histories, actually, are fairly begging to be re-analysed along these lines. En passant it is well worth our examining the fascinating Inawai'a episode, and the unexpected rise to fame of the young Mekeo woman Filo, if only to dispel the common misconception that cargo cults operate as strongly unified forces. In virtually every case, we concede, cargo cults have an identifiable 'main thrust', or set of obvious priorities, yet such transitional movements will always breed factionalisms and disagreements as to how the general goal is to be understood or pursued. Now, the Inawai'a episode saw the emergence of more than one set of strategies or cultic activity; Filo provided a catalyst for a variety of responses and there were sly schemers lurking in the wings seeking to manipulate the changing situation for ulterior motives. The young Filo, the recipient of two numinous experiences concerning Mary the Mother of Jesus, apparently saw herself as an inspirer of intense devotion to the Virgin. She started off by encouraging children in processions and grotto-building at her own village, the western precincts of which were overshadowed by the church and mission house set up by the Sacred Heart Fathers (Trompf 1974: 3). It is undeniable, perhaps, that the fast-growing interest in her activities among the villagers of Inawai'a, Eboa, Inawabui and Jesubaibua gave her an increasing sense of isapu (spirit-power and the capacity to use it), so that she became aware how her relationship with the newly available spiritagencies could strengthen the Mekeo (or at least the lineages participating in her 'play'). As she put it herself, she was favoured with four 'descents' of impressive gifts from the divine, which came down before her on an altar. The first three amounted to the coming of a large sum of money, clothing, and then Jesus himself, but the last, we should stress, saw the

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depositing of a gun (Fergie 1981: 98-100). Filo's premonitions that 'things would come', however, hardly have that sting of vindictiveness about them that could be found instead among a selection of sorcerers exploiting her in the background. These men, by surreptitiously capitalizing on her highly unusual popularity as a young prophetess in a male-dominated society, sought to regain the traditional isapu lost to the 'new men' supporting the mission. In a post-pacification context, furthermore, these sorcerers were bent on magnifying their own power, which was increasing proportionately as the authority and authentic sanctions of the chiefs were waning (Stephen 1977: 4-8; Trompf 1989a: 43). Owing to their influence on four villages, there was actually a public disclosure of a special type of traditional weaponry at Inawai'a, as the activities surrounding Filo gathered momentum early in 1941. The type was gilis (which is a Papuan highland term for an astoundingly hard clay ball of the kind formerly acquired by trade from Fuyughe country) (OT: Esef 1974), and an object treated by the Mekeo as having destructive magical properties and not merely usage as a bullet-like projectile hurled at the enemy (Fergie 1977:43-57). It appears that the possibility of re-acquiring military power by supernatural means, or by the isapu which conventionally adhered to the artifices of war in any case, led Filo's manipulators to transform her popular processions, unnerving as they already were to the missionaries, into a genuine threat of violence. Although an attack on the mission station on 14 February 1941 can hardly be called 'the culmination of the dreams of a Mekeo Schoolgirl', who had announced 'the imminent destruction of all sinners, in particular of the missionaries and government representatives who had deceived and cheated the Mekeo people' (Stephen 1977:2), it is nonetheless clear that she was acclaimed to be espousing such a retaliatory message by those standing closest behind her in the turmoil of the day. Word was circulated that 'the Fathers and Sisters were telling lies', and that 'the Europeans were stealing their things' (their selfdetermination, their land, the cargo, which were all really meant for the Mekeo), so the missionaries would have to be 'chased away', or else the whites would die anyway, because 'all this world would turn into water; all the Europeans would die for stealing' (Gnu'u in Belshaw 1951b: 5). The cultic activity surrounding Filo, interestingly, enables us to reconstruct the lines by which one can connect the more palpably 'religious phenomena' of a movement and the potential convulsions of violent reprisal; it also reflects how the pull of tradition, in this case cautiously and covertly deployed, retains its capacity to foster the opportunity for revenge. In the Mekeo case, the spears of past warfare had been thrown into the fires of peace long ago in the 1890s (Dupeyrat 1935: 190-91), and for the great majority (who belonged to villages not involved in the Filo affair anyway) a successful rebellion against the colonial order did not present itself as possible, or was for many even undesirable. But a rampantly spawning hope

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at Inawai'a by early 1941 was that an act of independence could actually be 'brought off'. As the unsympathetic Resident Magistrate W. H. H. Thompson put it: The villagers then went quite crazy. They danced by day and night around the altars they had set up all over the village, at first using prayers taught to them by the priests, but these soon degenerated into wild yells and supplications to their own gods . . . (PAR 1940-41:21, cf. PNA 1941) The scenario reflects a split-level reaction, not so different from either the 'Mur Madness' or the 'classically cargoist' Adventnachten for containing both traditionalist and Christian-looking approaches to the colonial problem. The physical body itself expresses the desire for empowerment. The basic collective aim, though, is that of tapping occult forces through a tremendous burst of energy in a recognizably ritual context, and the same applies for both custom-keeper and innovator. Whether one describes the physical agitations as 'frenzied' or 'ecstatic' is a question for further debate, but at least we can deduce that the states of consciousness or effervescence at the flash- (often dance-)points of these movements were symptomatic of the general growth or prevalence of recriminatory feelings. The collective strenuousness at Inawai'a eventually subsided into a moment of real testing: an isolated incident of violence and the issuing of threats before a possible storm. Several hundred villagers gathered quietly outside the mission compound . . . After one man assaulted the priest in charge of the station, who prevented him from breaking into the church where the nuns had barricaded themselves with their school children (Father Coltre was actually wounded on the head with a conch-shell) the crowd began to mill around the compound shouting jeers (Stephen 1977:21) and threats.6 Some of the very children whom Filo had first invited to process were now placed in danger; but, despite the hideous promise that all the missionaries would be killed in the morning, and the buildings burnt to the ground, the act of revenge was never taken beyond a point of no return. When Thompson and the police arrived in trucks the next day (having been tipped off by an escaping mission Brother), their coming was first taken as ancestors returning with the Cargo necessary for the movement's support. The demonstrators and dancers were quickly humiliated into submission, however, with the magistrate walking among them, striking them on their backs with his waddy, and repeating a sardonic Motuan query 'oi kavakavaY (are you mad?) in a proof of unassailability over each one (OT: Filo 1974). 6

The school at Inawai'a was famous in Papua for its accomplishments. Schoolchildren put on a successful Shakespearean play, for instance, in 1931 (see Aerts and Trompf 1991: 173).

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In this, as in the prior cases, a cargo cult once more proves itself to be a 'payback mechanism': its participants' quest being for a maximal infusion of the same power (in pidgin paua)—or an analogous one—as that which once gave them victory over enemies, or confirmed them, as they displayed themselves with pomp and plumage, to be a formidable people (cf. Ahrens 1977). The Inawai'a 'fiasco', we note, as well as instructing us about power pretensions within cult dynamics, also reveals how a range of options is always open to cultists and the question will always be bursting as to how close they will come to physical acts of reprisal. In 'classic' cargo cults—to define and typologize them better at this p o i n t motifs of 'weaponry' or 'politics' rarely produce violence. They offer rather the prospect of appropriating the power of physical domination when the Cargo7 and the great reversal arrive together, and cultists organize themselves accordingly. A few more examples will illustrate this last point. On the north coast of Buka Island in 1935, for one, we find the Halia prophet-leader Sanop announcing the coming, not only of motor cars and aeroplanes, but rifles. In preparation for the latter, 'squads from each village were to commence drilling with dummy wooden rifles forthwith, so as to be ready for the real ones' (NGAR 1935-36: 21-22). Four years later, well to the east, we find a Malaitan 'cult prophet' proclaiming that American warships and troops were shortly to arrive, to 'bring about the destruction' of the British Protectorate of the Solomons (Keesing 1978b: 259, cf. Mitchell 1975; King 1978: 18-19 for other cases). During the same decade, by comparison, one Mambu was acclaimed King long ol Kanaka (King of the natives) among the Tangu and related groups. If Mambu was not so much bent on a militarist stance as on setting up an alternative church—with temples, baptismal rites, and so forth—this new institution betokened the kingship into which he would come completely on the arrival of Cargo, and was thus palpably an anti-government, anti-mission structure (Holtker 1975a; Burridge 1960: 132-49, 176-209). In the sense that classic cargo cults hold out extraordinary hopes, they are capable of mobilizing large numbers of people into action—into making airstrips, wharves and the like—which in itself creates a spirit of independence, or collective secrecy, or hostility towards doubting critics, or an altercation with officials. Yet, future-oriented, these new sub-cultures are 'adjustive' and almost inevitably transitional because, unless dissipating altogether, they have to move on to a phase of 'stabilization' once the intense expectations held at earlier 'flashpoints' of their existence are not fulfilled 7

At this point we must distinguish cargo as Western-style goods, from Cargo as a whole symbolic package evoking the coming of a general salvation.

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(Trompf 1990d: 5-10). The passageways from 'classic' to more modern guises of cargo cultism are worth some reflection. Alternative religions as opposition From the classic cases to the modern faces of 'cargo cultism' Of undeniable importance in the passageways toward relatively more realistic-looking and politically effective forms of adjustment or dissent was the Second World War, the horrors and marvels of which were known mainly to Melanesians on the northern shores and islands of New Guinea (as a whole) and as far east as Guadalcanal. One signal of the shift from so-called 'classic' to 'modern' cargoism, in fact, is to be found in greater cultist imitations and appropriations of military terminology or organization from the time of the war on. As our analysis of Manseren affairs already intimates, the 'advent' dancing was eventually replaced by the 'army' and at no more significant time than during the Japanese invasion. In Madang, in place of Tagarab's pre-war apocalypticism, with his visions of a great cataclysm overtaking the whites, we find the postwar concentration on morning drills, the day-to-day disciplines and the hierarchy of lieutenants and lo-bos (law enforcers) which marked the more efficient, long-lasting Wok bilong Yali (Yali's organization, 1948-75) (Lawrence 1964a: 194-201, cf. 207; Ahrens 1974). On Manus, the group physical exercise and bellringing for action which Paliau Maloat had become accustomed to while in charge of indigenous police at Rabaul (and while carrying on a similar task under the Japanese) became the expression of the solidarity of his 'new fashion' in opposition to tradition, the missions and colonial impositions (Schwartz 1962; esp. pi. 20). On Malaita, among the activities comparable to the above in Maasina Rule, was the building of 'shadow villages' in the bush (sometimes with underground 'bunker' houses) by which to evade the British, as the foes of the new order (1944-52) (Laracy 1983: 32, 187, cf. Hogbin 1970b: plate 22A for background). On Tanna Island, far to the east, when the Jonfrumists witnessed the equality and effectiveness of black Americans among the Allied servicemen, there began the first furtive efforts to work for comparable achievements, until, in 1974, the doughtiest supporters drew up in the serried ranks of the 'Four Corners Movement', the letters 'GF drawn in blood red upon their chests and wooden staves for rifles over their shoulders (Lindstrom 1981, cf. Muller 1974). The events of the Second World War obviously had an important bearing on Melanesian interpretations of social change. What the war strikingly confirmed was that the white colonial mastas could actually be ousted by force (as was evident in the albeit transient repercussions of the Japanese

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takeover); that they could be brought down to utter humiliation and despair (as the 'fuzzy-wuzzy angels' found in dragging wounded 'Aussie Diggers' out of the Papuan front to safety along the Kokoda trail); that they could even be replaced by a preferable, more caring controlling power (more particularly that of the Americans, whose forces had blacks and whites labouring together in apparent equality, and who had left the indelible impression on many local people, from New Hanover to Tanna and beyond, that they were the true saviours and benefactors of the whole world). With the war, the great idol of the old colonialism seemed to crack apart, and for sheer survival whites, who had hitherto avoided hard labour, had to work shoulder to shoulder with 'the natives'. When Hollandia fell to the new conquerors, then, when the colonials could be found fleeing in terror from strafing, when Japanese bombs laid waste the wondrous concrete wharf at Rabaul, when the whites could stoop so low as to loot goods from the bombed-out remains of Steamships trade-store in Port Moresby, the Achilles heel of stayput imperialists was at least temporarily exposed (Robinson 1979; Nelson et al. 1982; cf. Inglis 1971: 510-13; Stuart 1970: 134-35). Not that cooperating with the Japanese brought a lasting satisfaction over the downing of the old overlords, since the new visitors usually turned out to be relatively more demanding and brutal than their predecessors. Once the war was over, however, both a new confidence and a sense of fresh opportunities to undermine outside rule presented themselves. The openings were not there to overthrow by military means, admittedly, for (apart from the Fijian Indians) Melanesian lands had yielded only a small crop of soldiery, whether Allied or pro-Japanese; but possibilities were certainly there to outface, outwit and embarrass authorities insensitive to local needs. Insofar as the bigger and better organized 'cargo movements' sought to disencumber themselves of the colonial yoke, moreover, and were intent to 'get their own back' on its unfairness, they were clearly activities of reprisal. Usually crucial for such (re-)assertions were 'daring innovators' (cf. Allen 1981), almost always men, though occasionally women, who had had some special access to the whites' realm, whether in travel or task, and most among them with outstanding leadership qualities, having seen significant wartime or serviceman's experience. Their capacity to mobilize followers, significantly, lay as much in their capacity to channel resentment and organized subversive action against 'the colonials' as it did in capitalizing on dreams of a vastly improved material culture. A new preparedness to voice grievances—and in a pidgin with increasingly more rhetorical punch—was characteristic. Slogans, such as Paliau's rather crude 'fakim misin, fakim gavmanY ('fuck off missions and colonial government!') make their appearance (cf. Tawali 1977: 4), and even new ideologies germinated. The older cargoism had not altogether lost its retributive force, moreover, since the earlier dreams of transformation which the whites had put down

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as native suggestibility and the 'Vailala Madness' were shown by wartime events to be realizable. The American base at Meokwundi has already been mentioned. On the Rai Coast at Saidor (and thus near Yali's home village), to fill out other details, one can still make out the remains of coal-tar roads and the encampment used by over 100 000 soldiers; on Los Negros (east Manus), Momote airport still stands as a reminder that one million Allied servicemen passed over its tarmac in 1944-45 (plus a great host of jeeps, tanks, DUKWs and so on, disgorged by warships in its vicinity) (PIM Jan. 1975:45-46; Kolowan 1977). Off Bougainville, near Kiriaka country, to draw another striking image, the Allies dumped a giant 'mountain' of unwanted canned foodstuffs, the local people coming and going for hours to share its extraordinary blessings, which turned out to be very mixed when rust overcame the containers and sickness followed (Roberts 1985). In scenarios such as these there was some vindication of dreams, and prospects of reoccurring miracles. During and after the war, too, decidedly more money was in circulation in the general region than ever before, and it became as much a focus of attention in various island and coastal contexts as the goods it could purchase. The economics, politics and religion of biting back I shall examine in greater detail the role of money in the postwar cults under the heading of reciprocity, since hopes for a stepping-up of exchange with the new goods, as well as sacrificial elements, belong more to the sphere of positive giving than negative detraction. However, it suffices here to notice how, with independence, bitterness and contentious reaction have nourished, and been nourished by group desire to acquire, keep and manage money. Vital in this regard is the device of the fund. Money is collected from cult subscribers: in fact, membership usually entails a downpayment and a most significant, if surprising, religious datum is the sense of pride the followers feel in just being able to say the collected finances are theirs. Indeed, one should not overlook the gloating here, or perhaps the satisfying of a prior jealousy, either of which issues in a new social statement. The fund is proof that its generators are just as good as, if not better than, the expatriates who laid claim to dominate all monetary affairs, let alone the local people who declined to contribute. And all this despite the common tendency for cult leaders to siphon off large sums for their own ends. Quite apart from whether the rank-and-file become involved in a dispute over the control of the money, in fact—and a movement's attrition rate is often commensurate with the disillusionment felt about material returns to its subscribers—a most important group comfort is that the money is ostensibly not being drained away from the villages. For, in previous situations no sooner had money been obtained than it was given

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back—for a few goods and burdensome taxes—to the power group whence it came: the non-blacks. To have and to hold money, then, creates the possibility of the blacks' being comparable power-brokers, and of turning powerlessness into a justified rebuff. The presence of organized fund-raising provides the readiest means of identifying special developments beyond 'classic' cargo cultism by the postwar period.8 The stress on money collection and financial subscription is a mark of such well-known phenomena as the Paliau movement, Wok bilong Yali, the Hahalis Welfare Society (Buka), the Peli Association (hinterland Sepik), the Pitenamu Society (Morobe), the Pomio Kivung (East New Britain) in Papua New Guinea, and especially Maasina Rule (Solomons) and NaGriamel (Espiritu Santo and outliers) elsewhere. The relative success and comparative durability of these 'more developed' movements has much to do with ongoing, steadier, week-by-week and distinctly less millennial interests in a financial base, no matter how inequitable its management or how many pipe-dreams were had about its potential. If such efforts to build up cash implied antagonism as their 'sub-texts' they also constituted forms of political opposition. They have been political (why demean them as pre-political?) fronts, hostile to other power-blocs and nascent parties, and of course most obviously from those times when electoral systems allowed for indigenous candidatures—as with of the coming of Papua New Guinea's inaugural parliament in 1964. Paliau's case is clearly crucial here. As well as representing the Admiralties in that parliament, he successfully lobbied for and dominated the first Local Government Council in New Guinea's history (from 1951 until 1967) (Paliau 1970: 151, cf. Worsley 1970: 200-04, 262-64).9 The pursuit of financial independence and the rise of the spirit of political challenge accompany the still more important development of cargo 8

9

Considering our earlier highland examples, admittedly, no one could deny that some postwar movements fail to show the glimmerings of such developments, and in some regions to this day—I think especially of Irian Jaya—'classic forms' predominate because access to the moneyed economy has been minimal. The movements to be considered below called 'Jonfrumist', too, might fairly be deemed 'classical', at least until the 1970s, because of the relative absence in them of a concern to save, what little money there was available to the Tannese, and for their comparatively greater emphasis on the 'cult of miracle' to bring about a flush of new wealth. Paliau, incidentally, was eventually knighted (in 1991) for his achievements, not long before his death. One can hardly forget, though, the special head-start in political rights afforded to the Fijians, a contrasting datum reminding us of Melanesia's divergent histories. In Fiji the British reinforced the pre-existent chieftainships just as they and other colonial powers did in Polynesia (cf. Scarr 1967: 1-22), and there was black participation in the new institutional life by the early 1930s, when at least four of the islands' provinces enjoyed 'full control of Fijian affairs in Fijian hands', and when Ratu Sukuna began meticulously recording land rights as head of the Native Lands Commission (Macnaught 1982: 114-20). Note also the consequences of local native councils in the Solomons under the British, 1935-45 (see immediately below), and also that the Dutch in West Irian were ahead of the Australians in setting up parliamentary institutions for the blacks (van Baal 1980: 23-26 on the years 1960-62).

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movements into more viable religious alternatives—'religion' being the term used here to denote the impress each of these movements has as a 'total set of concerns' and 'way of life' rather than as a more goal-specific faction, lobby-group or campaign. Once one reaches the point of analysing these cargo activities as 'new religious movements', however, a characterization of them as antagonistic or protesting is only of limited value unless one can identify the 'bones of contention' in each case. This I shall try to do for the better-known movements in turn, and in chronological order. Of the movements not long since listed above, the earliest on stage was the Maasina Rule (for many years less appropriately dubbed 'Marching Rule'), which began as the 'native Council Movement' on Malaita toward the end of the war in 1944, and which in one way or another affected the affairs of all major Solomon island groups until it dissipated in 1952. From the recorded statements of Maasina leaders brought to court, and from their various letters and proclamations, we can recapture the intense dissatisfaction, disgruntledness, and esprit de defi against a British administration which preferred to ignore, rather than foster, the rights and aspirations of 'the natives'. The vitriolic side to things is deftly netted in a 1947 proclamation by John Plant Hoka, a Guadalcanal schoolmaster who left his job to become an active 'messenger' for the Rule: This is the third world war. This war is to free every country, island and everybody has to follow his own rules. From now on, do not think so much on English money that has an image of a king on it, but look toward American money which has on it, 'In God we Trust'. The British have owned these islands for 99 years [sic], but as far as the natives are concerned, nothing has changed for the better. We natives are just like slaves under the British—we work for a whole day and we only receive a twelve pence. The British are like unto the False Prophets for we give that money to the government as taxes ... so, ... take hold of the Marching rule. By this rule you will get a jolly good living in the future, (in Laracy 1983:124) This short statement encapsulates so many themes in Maasina's platform^). Pitched against colonial dictatorialism is an appeal to moral rightness. Far from advocating anarchy or libertinism, Hoka has grasped the idea of the individual's interiorization of brotherliness (maasina) under God, as against mere subjection to human authority. The reference to American money is far less a cargoist motif than a neat distinction between subservience under His Majesty and freedom with dignity. This distinction, to be sure, reflects Christian influences, most of the movement's 'preachers' hailing from the South Sea Evangelical Mission, with the first impetus for Maasina lying in the advocacy of a pan-Solomons 'native parliament' by Anglican missionary Richard Fallowes, who was deported for his trouble in 1939 (Laracy 1983: 13-23, 43-52, cf. Hilliard 1969; Laracy 1976: 121-38). And the servitude/liberty dichotomy in Hoka's phrases had its

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reinforcement in fraternization with American black and white servicemen at the end of the war. In Maasina's later years, the impressive protagonist for Malaitan independence, Ariel Sisili, was to show still more forceably how the Americans provided the catalyst for a 'religio-democratic' infusion. As his 1949 statement puts it: We never known nor ever did we realized [sic] before they came here the true love and friendship mentioned in the Bible and ignorant peoples to become better as one should say, that all men were created equal and that man is a trinity consisting of both spirit soul and body and that from common sense man can distinguish without being educated what was true right and not right, fair and not fair. (Laracy 1983:169) Fair and just as against unfair and unjust; that is precisely what Hoka was distinguishing in economic terms when he depicted the vicious cycle of receiving low wages and paying high taxes, and implicitly contrasted false with right (and prosperity-bearing) rule. In Sisili these insights are deployed to make a courageous claim for political independence. Grasping the truth that all humans are endowed with the capacity to make moral judgements, Sisili remains like his Maasina predecessors a steady advocate of participative government, not uncontrolled individualism. If Timothy George, one of the movement's early leaders, had always insisted that Maasina was not against government as such—as though the term maasina may also be a play on the name of W. S. Marchant, who had introduced a welcomed system of local justice in the immediate pre-war period (to deal with such offences as quarrelling, seduction, stealing, trespass)—Sisili was also ready to recommend political control over the islands. In fact, he framed the Solomons' earliest Declaration of Independence (based on the American one) in pursuit of free speech and religion, and freedoms from want and fear (Parsonson 1974: 1, 5, cf. Laracy 1983: 164, 172-76). In these blandishments the movement reflects a total vision, its spiritual and material goals remaining inextricable as in traditional religion. On resenting colonialism: Paliau and Yali What of other movements from this general context, and their avowed or underlying antagonism? The organizations under the renowned New Guineans Paliau and Yali surely beg for reflection along similar lines. The Paliau movement, which was inaugurated on Baluan Island and its tiny outlier Mouk in the south Admiralties (1946), was and continues to be as much a protest against outside control as Maasina. Its catchcry, however, was nupela pasin (new 'fashion' not rule), and one of its two bones of contention was actually the traditional belief-system. On the one hand, Paliau's view that the old Baluan (or Matangkor) religion neither brought social prosperity nor forestalled (epidemic)

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sicknesses led him to look outside his own culture for solutions to his people's problems. He could not even go through with initiation as a youth, and while still a teenager ventured away from his place of origin, to work for Chinese trade-store managers (ca. 1924). He subsequently travelled through other parts of New Guinea as a police assistant to patrol officers (including Jim Taylor), until he was eventually appointed Sergeant Major to the New Guinea Police Force at Rabaul just before the war. Continuation of this latter role was forced upon him by the Japanese. All these experiences gave him a broader outlook on the world than he knew was in evidence among his fellow Baluans and, on experiencing a vision of Jesus during the occupation of Rabaul, he was ready to return to his people as the inspired campaigner against olpela pasin (the old fashions) in favour of a quite new way of life (Schwartz 1962: 240-49; Trompf 1975c). On the other hand, however much Paliau was to pressure his fellows into accepting a change of orientation (and on return to Baluan in 1946 his prestige and influence were immense for his having played such an outstanding part in the whites' sphere), he remained protective of his people's interests against colonialism. While rejecting tradition to institute a church—called the Baluan (Native) United Christian Church, the first independent church in Melanesian history—he nonetheless upheld kastam (custom, tradition) as a preconceived complex of local practices under threat of extinction by foreigners, especially by Australian officials. The Australians had detained Paliau in Rabaul for twelve months for 'collaborating'. They even deployed war-planes to fly threateningly low over Mouk on his return there in October 1946, a counterproductive action which only made the scattering villagers more expectant of Cargo (OT: Matthew 1976). Before awe-struck audiences Paliau wilfully flouted the administration's interferences. 'What belongs to the King of the Earth', he proclaimed in 1946, must go straight to the King of the Earth. He it is that gives us our being. If you do what I say—I am but a teacher—the government, the [secular] power in this country of Papua [and] New Guinea, will follow me. (Paliau 1970:149)

Small wonder that in versions of the 'Long Story of God' the (mythological macro-)history which Paliau presented to the early Baluan meetings, and the story which traced cosmically crucial events from Adam and Eve to the coming of the Australian administration, Paliau and his lieutenants identified Judah, or the one who killed Jesus (man bilong kilim Jisas) as the Australian government (or foreign gavmari). In an account of Paliau's teaching by one Tjamilo, the Germans are pictured as having 'taught us nothing' and as having 'used men as if they were trucks', and the Australians as unsatisfactory replacements who 'didn't teach the natives [kanakas] anything' and 'treated [them] like oxen' (Schwartz 1962:255-56). Alternative government was, thus, being organized in protest.

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As with Maasina, the Americans were given a salvific role in God's plan for the downtrodden islanders. Local experience and rumours about masses of American servicemen and munitions at Momote chimed in with Paliau's 'dream-vision' on Rabaul, in which Jesus arrived ahead of the Americans 'as lightning and as an aeroplane marked with a cross' and came straight to Paliau. Yet, the Australians were blocking whatever prosperity and new order Jesus intended the Americans to bring to Manus. Thus, the concluding passage in Paliau's Stori is resoundingly retaliatory, even though it is left to a divine intervention to pull off the coup de revanche. If [the Australians] do not help us or continue to keep us down, then there will be another country that will come. Why? because God has not forgotten the Territory of New Guinea. Soon he will get rid of them all. (Schwartz 1962:257)

Unlike Maasina, the estrangement of the Paliau group from the preestablished (Catholic and Leibenzell) missions was pronounced. Two huge bush-material churches were erected on Mouk and Mbunai, the latter being the model 'capital' village on Manus island's south coast to which Baluans and inland Usiai migrated (1947-49). Paliau and his closest associates, in creating an independent church, conducted their own services, using a pidgin Catholic liturgy with the centre pages removed* There were few or no Bible readings—for the missionaries were alleged to bring a false Bible— and neither bread nor wine were distributed (Trompf 1983b: 60, cf. Anon. 1946; Schwartz 1962: 256). To the one side, Paliau urged secession from the foreign missions; while, on the other side, pre-contact rituals, leadership patterns, exchange networks, and so forth, were under Paliau's constant assault, to the extent that many Manus have come to pinpoint 'Lo bilong 1946' ('the 1946 Law') as the instrument which destroyed their link with the traditional past (Sawai 1977: 10). That kastam was still invoked (that is, reinterpreted to refer to Paliau's understanding of nupela pasin), does little to alter the impression that he sought to undermine the pre-Christian order, including initiations and the old privileges of the elders (lapans) (Mead 1961: 211-67, cf. 1964: 192-201; Paliau 1983). He paid back the unacceptable past. As an anti-traditionalist, Paliau contrasts markedly with his contemporary Yali Singina, leader of the great Rai Coast movement of Madang (New Guinea mainland). Yali's quarrel, we recall, was as a more belligerent defender of age-old customs, yet his is a complex story of a slower embitterment, because it was not until 1948 that he resolved to break with the missions and Australian government. His Rai Coast Rehabilitation Scheme (1946-47), for a start, which was partly sponsored by the Australian Department of Native Affairs, was intended to facilitate Australia's work of postwar reconstruction and a radical improvement to local material conditions. Yali understood ANGAU (Australian military) officers to have

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promised such changes as a reward for his faithful service to the Allies. By 1947, however, he had become so much the (unwitting) focus of Madang cargo expectations that he himself was suspect, and both government officials and missionaries set about clipping his wings. By 1949 the Madang officials refused to entrust him with any government responsibilities, and a year later the Lutheran Mission won a court case against him for imposing unlawful prison sentences and for incitement to rape. If Yali had once been a tultul (local official), abettor of the Catholic mission, and then war hero (who had earned such widespread eclat for his escape from the clutches of the Japanese near Hollandia and his return epic journey to the Sepik), he now began preaching a return to tradition. This was a return— albeit specially supplemented—as the proper recourse to secure total wellbeing for his betrayed people (and person). Acquiescing to the cargoist doctrines of such ideologues as Kasan, Yali came to concur that it was pasin bilong tumbuna (the ancestral ways), and neither Christianity nor expatriate political programmes, which would bring in the Kago, or the money necessary to acquire it (esp. Lawrence 1964a: 116-221). In reviving tradition, including the great Ngaing harvest festival (Kabu), the Madangs would realize a prosperity comparable to the whites', and involve the ancestors— who were alleged to be ready for a visible return—in the work of exposing or removing white falsehood (OTs: esp. Wen; Luko 1975). The careers of both Yali and Paliau show how leaders' personal resentments can have remarkable potency in setting group orientations into a mature form. The articulation of grievances by 'charismatic personalities' has been the most powerful catalyst for unifying grassroots (and previously festering) opposition to undesirable states of affairs. Both men, we note, were idolized to the point that they generated 'millennial' or 'miraculously transformative' hopes beyond their control or wishes. The Manus village of Nolap, for instance, turned Paliau into a god to be worshipped in his own right; while rank and file cultists who shook the hand of Yali would fall unconscious as if before some superhuman figure, as occurred after his return from imprisonment in Lae in 1955. Of the two leaders, though, Paliau was better able to stave off millenarist excesses—in treating such flushes of over-expectant 'classic cultism' as The Noise (on the Johnston Islands), for instance, and the Muli affair (on Rambutyon) at arm's length (Schwartz 1962: 227-390, esp. 249, 270-74; Worsley 1970: 198-203; Dietsch 1977)—and for that reason he created a more durable, malleable organization (see below). Others and their bones of contention Later postwar movements reflect greater financial astuteness, organizational know-how and 'relative realism'. The Hahalis Welfare Society of Buka Island, north of Bougainville, for instance, which arose on the heels of East

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Coast Buka Society, was in its moments of hottest protest against the colonial order (in 1961) implacably opposed to the Australians' head tax. That opposition had some of its background in the refusal of twenty Halia villages to pay up the required 5s tax per adult in 1958, as well as in the East Coast Buka Society's policy to refuse cooperation with the administration until higher prices for local copra growers were fixed, badly needed roads built, and alternative market facilities provided to get around Chinese middlemen (Bunting 1966: 5-8; Griffin 1975: 6-7). The Hahalis Welfare Society gained so much support for this anti-tax cause in 1961 that 2,000 of its supporters—mainly from the Halia culture— were prepared to face seventy police in a non-violent confrontation: 467 people were subsequently taken to court for their trouble. Of these, 349 people were arrested for alleged 'rioting'(!), even if their leader, John Teosin, had deliberately voiced a policy of non-retaliation, reminding his followers that Jesus was 'spat upon . . . and hit' while 'he was carrying his cross', and that it made for better tactics if the tax evaders gave themselves up to the authorities (Rimoldi 1971: 164-71). In comparison to Paliau, Yali, and the Maasina front-men, Hahalis leader John Teosin (b. 1938) was better educated, by Western standards. At first a church catechist, he was then sponsored by the Catholics—strong as they are in the Halia area—to attend Kerevat High School near Rabaul (1955). If Teosin did not cope, attendance at expatriate-led meetings at Rabaul put him in touch with the philosophic (including Marxist) principles of international radicalism (OT: Barr 1978). Pondering 'naturalism' Teosin concluded that people like his own were closer to a 'natural' way of life than societies trammelled by law enforcements and religio-moral rules (Rimoldi 1971: 280-97). Such views took on a special importance when the events of 1961 very quickly put him at odds with the authorities. He fostered in Hahalis a blatantly alternative political order, with a family payment of A£5 being collected for the Society (rather than taxes for the government), and with personal powers of law enforcement (see below). Teosin's 'totalism', however, not only brought colonial harassment and Catholic excommunication (from 1961), but impelled him to reject the chieftainship or tsunono system in its time-insured form (cf. chapter 1), an approach that cut him off from a crucial power group (which, in turn, doubled its support for local government council arrangements introduced by the Australians) (Tohiana 1982). Paradoxically, and without traditional entitlement, Teosin had himself installed as a tsunono (in 1961) under the auspices of his uncle (an amunuhil tsunono, or chief of the highest grade), and thus pretended to supreme power. It was as part of this installation ceremony that an outlandish ritual was enacted, in which a small coterie of related persons mimed sexual intercourse (to symbolize both the new chief's abasement and social unity); and excommunication was the outcome (Rimoldi 1971: 219-26). That was

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a consequence Teosin and former catechist Francis Hagai had already foreseen, and was soon countered by their efforts to set up alternative places of worship. Most of these worship centres were not church buildings, though, but rather open ground located beside cemeteries, where prayer and ritual invoked the dead to return and usher in a new world of laplaps, tinned food, motorbikes and cars (Lyons 1976: 6). As with the Paliau movement, then, an independent church (called sori lotu) was founded, children were withdrawn from mission schools (eventually to be instructed in Hahalis's own), while church-taught morality was openly flouted through the institution of a 'Baby Garden'. In this Garden sexual intercourse was freely permitted between young mutually disposed men and women, to enhance group fertility and recover a threatened kanaka 'naturalism' (Trompf 1983b: 54, cf. Ryan, 1969: 290-303). The institution undermined tradition as much as mission influence, and harks back to an earlier relaxation of traditional puritanism by the famed Bougainvillean cultist Stephen Pako (1930s). Along with the abolition of ceremonial currency, the refusal to build any more men's clubhouses (or tsuhana), and other new rituals designed to bury old customs, the Baby Garden removed control of tsunono over marriage arrangements (Griffin 1975: 8; Rimoldi 1984). Hahalis's neo-traditionalism bears comparison with Paliau's, as well as with concerns about local fertility in a famous movement starting a decade later. This was the Peli Association, centred around the Negrie-Yangoru cultural complexes of the east Sepik (1971 on). Once again it is important to focus on the grudges of the leadership, which in turn magnetized illfeelings welling up through several related locales into a collective protest. The beginning of the Peli (or 'Hawk') Association, as has been well publicized, lay in the enormous demonstration of the seventh day of the seventh month, nineteen seventy-one, when thousands of villagers were attracted to Malimbunja, some from as far west as Vanimo, all coming to support or participate in the impressive chain-gang to remove American geodesic concrete markers from the summit of Mount Hurun (Hwekarim et al. 1971; May 1975: 8; Gesch 1985: 27-36). The rationale for this paradigmatic exercise (let alone the intriguing numerology) derived from the mysterious Melanesian apocalypticist Matias Yaliwan (b. ca. 1929), a man who coupled brooding over the eschatological promises of the Bible with despair over the social and environmental degeneration of his region. The assault on the foreign objects of the sacred mountain, indeed, a mountain which in various pre-contact traditions was honoured as the mountain high god Huru(n) or T(s)uru(n) (cf., esp., Aufenanger 1972: 172-77), was above all an act of retaliation against the foreign forces of disruption (Allen 1976a: 267-83, cf. SDF 1969a). These forces, in contrast to their limited effects on the Rai Coast or Buka, were significant. By 1970 the prototype of the present East Sepik Highway had been laid through the Princess Alexandra mountains; trucks bore trade-store goods from Wewak, and crops to the

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coast in the opposite direction were not uncommon; and money was in wider and steadier circulation there than in any of the areas so far considered. At this apparently later stage in the processes of colonial advance, then, Peli was as much a protest because of substantial (but allegedly unsatisfactory) change as it was the expression of a dream-vision that much better eventualities were on the way. This ambivalence was nowhere more decidedly unified into a rebellious millenarism—into a position of both blatant dissent and high expectation—than in the symbolcharged and unusual mind of Yaliwan. Yaliwan worked away from his home and local context for most of his later youth. He was employed as a government labourer in Madang after the war, and then trained and served in the police force at Goroka, until returning to Madang in 1955. Affected by cargoist talk about Yali's work as the 'road' or 'key' to European-style goods in abundance, he returned to the Sepik in 1960 with high hopes, only to find himself a grass-cutter earning A£4 per month at Wilaru Catholic mission and cathedral, Wewak. Two episodes at Wilaru led him to reject the church. The first was his discovery, in the grass near the cathedral (1962), of a cross-shaped key, an object he took to be the key of Heaven. For him it was a discovery replete with mystery and the numinous. On his presenting the key to Father Godfrey Morman at the mission, however, it was never returned; thus, any hopes in some miraculous reciprocation from the spirit-world for the finding of it were utterly dashed. Yaliwan may have remained active in Catholic circles at Wewak, even prominent in the Legion of Mary and a locally grown political organization called the Christian Democratic Party (by 1966), yet a priestly scolding in front of others for non-attendance at Mass added insult to the earlier injury. In this second episode, he literally stormed out of the church and never looked back. Returning home to the Yangoru area, he acquired esteem at Malimbunja as a man of extensive 'outside experiences' (OT: Yaliwan 1981). While 'keeping up his Christian belief outside the Catholic fold as he put it, and pondering the prospect of recovering 'St Peter's Keys' as he came to call them, he made a second spiritual discovery in the endless grasses of the Sepik. This time he stumbled on a so-called satifiket ('certificate'), a small Seventh Day Adventist pamphlet in pidgin entitled Promis bolong Jesus, which announced that Jesus would return from the sky with his angels, and that the evil would be destroyed by fire and the good taken to Jesus. Yaliwan took this discovery to be as crucial as his first, but shied clear of presenting it to any missionary. After campaigning for the 1968 Papua New Guinea elections, however, and losing out rather badly with his appeals for a better 'relationship with God', Yaliwan decided to present his special satifiket to the District Commissioner E. G. Hicks, another man purportedly with access to great paua. It was when Hicks failed to return the pamphlet that Yaliwan first tried his hand at retaliatory political tactics,

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with his in-law Daniel Hawina (b. 1943). The local administration was informed that unless the 'certificate' was returned (bekim), there would be a collective refusal to pay taxes (bekim, of a negative kind). The ruse worked, and he got more than what he wanted—added popular support—despite his loss at the elections. During 1969 Yaliwan and Hawina became convinced that the markers on Mount Hurun were adversely affecting the fertility of their area, and on publically stripping them of their metal bracings, they were gaoled—Yaliwan for nine months, and Hawina for six—as troublemakers (OTs: Yaliwan and Hawina 1981). The emergence of the Peli Association, therefore, has a great deal to do with the mounting bitterness of its leaders, who were in turn able to persuade their potential supporters that their particular grievances, their claims of justified civil disobedience, as Gesch puts it (1990:225), were those of the kanakas in general. They managed to create paradigms for protest— the return of Yaliwan's property, the removal of the 'sacrilegious' markers— which broadened the base of their following. The local sociology was such that, with the unevenness of development, and the frustration of some in not obtaining material improvements available to others, these paradigms resonated strongly with the groundswell of discontent (cf. Allen 1976a: 96-104) and popular hopes for startlingly better things. Yaliwan voiced Peli's aim in 1971 as the independence of Papua New Guinea—not in 'purely political' terms, as we can guess, but as a total, and in that sense religious, unity. Since the Book of Revelation required people 'to be of one mind', it was only necessary for 'one man' to be elected to 'the House of Assembly for the whole of New Guinea'. If he were to be elected, ran the claim, such a unity 'would be clearly demonstrated' (Allen 1976b: 146): 200 000-300 000 people agreed. In a complex Papua New Guinea about to secure self-government, however, Peli could not possibly constitute any kind of effective opposition party, although it was an immense embarrassment to Australia (see Gesch 1985: 73-80 and the press references cited there). Apart from Maasina, only one so-called cargo movement, in fact, can be said to have played the role of a (pre-national) Opposition against external rule, and this was an organization far to the Melanesian east, called NaGriamel, active within the narrower parameters of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu). At the time of the great Yangoru demonstration, NaGriamel had a claimed membership of 30 000, which was at that stage far larger than any other (religio-)political front in the New Hebrides, so memorializing it in Vanuatu's history as the country's first kanak 'political party'. As with Peli, its recriminatory rationale is patent. NaGriamel, which took for its symbols the croton plant and (a much older emblem of anti-colonial protest) the cycad palm (cf. Guiart 1958: 216), originated in 1965. An association between Buluk—among other chiefs of southwest Espiritu Santo—and Jimmy Stevens, an islander of mixed, including Tongan, background led

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to a campaign for land reappropriation for the islanders, in opposition to the alleged 80 per cent expatriate ownership of arable land (Camden 1979; van Trease 1984; 1987). As usual, though, behind these specific politico-economic goals lay a total, newly formulated Weltanschauung, with the role of the key leader paramount. Stevens's charismatic qualities were the focus of heightened expectations—of a transformative, miraculous kind. He himself claimed the role of Moses, in leading his people to the Promised Land, and was wont to retreat into the Santo mountains to communicate by (make-believe radio with the great world powers—the United States, Russia, Britain and France—to engineer the removal of domination by the last two (Hours 1976a). These cargoistic motifs were only slightly offset by the work of ideological offsiders, two pastors of the Church of Christ tradition, who legitimated NaGriamel from the Bible. Often preaching from Proverbs 22:28, Job 24:2 and kindred passages—to castigate the foreign sinners for overthrowing traditional boundarymarkers—it was these men who propelled the movement toward an ecclesiastical separatism. As a church NaGriamel even severed itself from the Church of Christ (earlier sympathetic to the land-reform cause), and was 'a\\-kanak' not 'multi-racial'. The better known of its pastors, Abel Bani, was responsible for baptizing Stevens as Moses (in June 1967), and chief Buluk as Paul (Trompf 1983b: 64, cf. Allen 1976: 35). In an exhaustive history of postwar cargo cultism, the same sorts of recriminatory stances would show up time and again: in the anti-tax agitation of the Pitenamu Society of Morobe (Adams 1982, cf. LA 1974), for instance; in Irakau's well-known push to make both business and worship independent, and to undermine the tanepoa aristocracy, among the Manam (Maburau 1985); in the cry for America or Germany as saviours to replace the Australian colonials on New Hanover (the 'Johnson cult'); and among the Tolai (the kivung lavurua) (Miskamen 1985; Tirpaia 1975; Kohnke 1973: 14, cf. Lindstrom 1981 for Tannese Jonfrumism); as well as in the more classic cargo cults of Irian Jaya (cf., e.g., Flannery 1983a: 25-77). The most effective expressions of anti-colonial opposition have been those movements which accrued funds from a broad, village base, and possessed a leadership which cultivated mystery or 'religious aura' along with a compelling identification of problems and solutions (see chapter 6 on the Pomio Kivung). Cults or movements which did not pretend in any sense to 'get back' at the authorities were rare, or, if in evidence at all, were without appeal. Alternative religions as respectable competitors What, however, has happened to cargo cults in our own time? This is a question I answered once before (Trompf 1984b), yet one which can be

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answered again with the issues of (negative) payback in full view. The persistence of classic cargoist outbreaks notwithstanding (e.g. NN 14 May 1983; PC 17 Aug. 1983:3), and the same old punishment of their perpetrators by neo-colonial authorities rightfully acknowledged (Indonesia using the military [Mitton 1983], for example, and the Provincial Government arresting kivung lavurua leaders for spreading 'false rumours' [OTs: Landi, Enos, ToKivai 1981]), local appeals to the coming of cargo have faltered. Most of the larger, well-known and more highly organized postwar movements have recently tended to cultivate new images which deliberately play down cargoism, so as to become less susceptible to lampooning critics, and more respectable in the face of steady 'Christianization' and emergent provincial or national consciousness. While still maintaining a spirit of altercation, they have pursued special religious interests more within the arena of competing Christian denominations, while at the same time the eagerly developing political clout on a regional basis. A propos religious interest, most of the famous movements have by now transmuted into independent churches, or into innovative, alternative religions claiming rights to 'compete' with expatriate-originated church bodies. No mystery surrounds the institution 'independent church' as a type; any would-be church generated by indigenous leaders reacting to preexisting and imported denominations in a colonial context can bear this title (see Sundkler 1948; 1976, cf. Turner 1967a-b; Barrett 1968 on the rich African material). In recent work I have argued that up to eighteen local Melanesian organizations could be classified as independent churches. At least half of them have cargo cult origins, and they join separatisms which have more distinctly 'breakaway Christian' beginnings in cultivating a new 'churchiness'—with an interest in appropriating white liturgies, ecclesiastical forms and Biblical sanctions—in special ways (1983b; 1991: 212-40). The breakaway groups are already 'schismatic' vis-a-vis orthodoxies, and we are not to forget those annoyances, disagreements and disgruntled expressions which are comparable to the negative energies of cargo cultism (and to which, incidentally, nebulous typologies of all such movements as 'revitalizing' or 'reformist' simply do not do justice, cf. Wallace 1956; Newman 1961). The schismatic motif is perhaps no better illustrated than from the Melanesian independent church which most closely parallels the African prototypes, the famous Christian Fellowship Church (CFC) of New Georgia (Solomons), and from the characteristic, oft-repeated expressions of resentment by its founder—Silas Eto, or the 'Holy Mama' (Bennett 1987: 299-301. cf. plate 7). The (Methodist) mission church he left behind, Eto consistently maintained, had simply failed to recognize the work of God in new, locally cohesive developments and had denigrated them as false, exaggerated and 'of the Devil'. What was most controversial about activities surrounding the

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white-robed Eto was the so-called taturu in village church services. Taturu, which mostly manifested itself after enthusiastic hymn singing: often involved the climbing of interior church walls by members of the congregation, crying aloud, fainting into unconsciousness, and the falling of people on each other without care to avoid exposing the private parts. (Tuza 1981:85)

Framed photograph of Silas Eto in full regalia as the 'Holy Mama' of the Christian Fellowship Church, Christmas 1964. (photo: Trompf)

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—and it left the expatriate Methodist missionaries in a quandary as to whether it was a sign of the Holy Spirit, or of demonic powers, or some psychological disorder (Tuza 1974: 68-91; Carter n.d., cf. Sargant 1959: 79-107). A split of opinion resulted, one exacerbated by local glorification of Eto as a special vessel of the divine, if not God himself (Trompf 1983b: 52). Silas himself rejected extremist claims but at least accepted the appellation 'Holy Mama' (= holy father), and took taturu as an expression of the Holy Spirit's outpouring on his people. Although, taturu is less observable today, strong enough expatriate rejection of it in the late 1950s remained an unexpungeable point of embitterment in his consciousness to the end. Despite the positivities of Silas as charismatic leader, healer, liturgical innovator, architect and man of unstinting service, the identity of the CFC is heavily dependent on a need to justify separateness (especially since there have been sporadic efforts to woo Silas's independents back toward the mainstream, that is, toward the United Church, which absorbed the Methodist mission in 1968). As Silas put it in a letter to United Church Bishop David Pratt in July 1979 (after being invited to participate personally in the Solomons Independence celebrations at the Western Provincial centre of Munda), 'sorry hola\ He was simply not prepared to join any other church in the dedication, because 'the CFC is a devil church, as the people say' (Sa Linota CFC sina lotu tomate, gunia tu soku tie), so smuggling in a piece of sarcasm to remind his reader of those past prejudices which still provide the rationale for CFC's splendid isolation (cf. UCA 1979; UCN Dec. 1979: 4). This principle of justified and necessary 'divorce' can be documented from the other more obvious Melanesian schismatics. Malaita's Remnant Church against the Seventh Day Adventist and the South Sea Evangelical Mission, Fiji's Congregation of the Poor against Methodism; Papua's 3oda Kwato against the United Church, and so on (Trompf 1983b: 57-66)—all reflect the common problem of denominational splintering in modern Christian history since the Reformation. The model has also proved eminently usable by groups with cargo cult origins. From cargo cults to independent churches This transition can be readily exemplified from most of the major organizations considered in the previous sections. The Paliau movement, for a start, was already pretending to the status of ecclesial independency by 1946, but it is even more insistently doing so at the present time. During the 1970s, admittedly, Paliau's popularity dropped sharply, because he neglected distinctly religious matters, inflicted too many burdensome tax collections during his unsuccessful 1977 national election campaign, and acquired too many 'wives' so that he was actually exiled from Mbunai in 1971, and faced a six-month gaol sentence in 1976 for the attempted rape of a woman

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refusing his attentions. Despite both a temporary secession by Pita Tapo's faction and attrition to the major denominations, Paliau made a 'religious comeback' in 1978. And it was through projecting an improved, stronger 'church image' that he re-secured some of his old mandate—especially at the crucial south Manus village of Mbunai (Trompf 1983b: 59-60). Two recent readjustments of a religious nature stand out. First, much more energy is concentrated on Lorengau, the provincial capital of Manus. The old Saarhut (town council building) there has been used as a house of worship until a large church is built on a piece of land purchased in 1983, on a prominent hillside overlooking the township. Paliau Lukas, Paliau's closest collaborator and the well-educated son of one of Paliau's former 'Lieutenants' has opened up a whole floor of his large trade-store for church offices and political planning. Second, Paliau and his closest affiliates have been working from this new Lorengau power-house to reformulate teaching. The year 1982 saw that fascinating little example of indigenous theology called Kalopeu, a small white booklet in which there is expounded the doctrine of Wing/Wang/Wong (= me/God the Son/God the Holy Spirit), Chinese sounding neologisms being adopted to express a special understanding of the divine plan that competes with and challenges Christian orthodoxy. The new teaching, which traces God's actions as relevant to Manus from Creation to the Day of Jesus's final victory over all governments and missions, is expanded in a catechetical atmosphere in meetings called the Makasol Study Group (Paliau 1982; 1983, cf. Pokawin 1983a; Jumogot 1984). In chronological order, Hahalis's cultivation of 'an opposition church' comes next. To establish sori lotu (see above), Francis Hagai, a Maristtrained teacher who became the Society's first vice-president, produced a set of liturgies in the Halia language in the mid-1960s, and introduced group sharing of sliced banana as a parallel to the priestly dispensing of the host (Trompf 1983b: 54-55, cf. Fahey 1970: 3; Bili 1977: 4). The services became known as hats, a word translated as 'sacrifices' but virtually homophonic with the term hets (= orchestra, a term once used of immediate postwar gatherings organized by the chiefs for meditation, singing and the discussion of possible changes for Buka). Some Hahalis sacrifices were rather more peculiar than others. When infants were thrown into the flames in the great church on Tabut Island earlier in that decade, for example, there were Halia prayers for island fertility and, thus, a link between these actions and the Baby Garden. Most of the ceremonies, were outside, however; and open-air, evening gatherings have been characteristic of Hahalis services ever since. The hats ceremonies entailed a feast, although a small portion of every type of food laid out was to be fully consumed by fire, it being the crucial symbol of Sunahan ('the One who pinned the world'), who is the God of Buka (and north Bougainville) and lord of volcanic power (OT: Teosin 1979, cf. OT: Toroken 1977; Lyons 1976: 3-4).

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Disassociating himself from his followers' former expectations of Cargo, by the late 1970s Teosin spoke only of an alternative church, or Hehela (Halia: 'praying together'). He was forced to offset attrition. Former supporters were returning to the Catholic Church and United Church (as the two older denominations) or connecting to the newer Seventh Day Adventist and Jehovah's Witnesses groupings. The credibility of his leadership had dissipated—considering his alleged instigation of ritual murder against defectors, the permission for black and white Bougainville Copper Limited workers to use the Baby Garden as a brothel, and his misappropriation of Society funds. Yet, if by 1970 his following had sunk below 4000, he could claim the strong involvement of coteries in thirty-two villages by 1980. Under Hehela's rules, members were discouraged from attending services in other churches, and were to attend the Society's own school (or else state schools) but certainly not Catholic educational centres (OT: Teosin and Harets 1979). If Teosin flaunted introduced Christianity institutionally, he did this all the more so theologically—by formulating a neo-traditional alternative to white-originated doctrines. While not disallowing the truth of Christianity, he has set forth new teachings so that Buka can escape the interferences of the other churches, which did not speak to the blacks' condition. Christ may indeed be God and the saviour of the whites, but the Buka have their own traditional equivalents to God and Jesus, these being Sunahan and Mattanachil. Teosin paralleled tales of the latter's exploits with stories about Jesus: Mattanachil he depicted as a lawbringer, a peace-maker, and a miracle-worker; one who took Buka men safely across the sea to show them Cartaret Island; one who initiated the ritual meal of hats; and one who knew he must die by going up to the heights of the (north Bougainvillean) volcano Mount Tehesi, whence he shall return on some unknown day (Trompf 1983b: 56). Mattanachil stories are deliberately evoked to compete with the Gospel narratives, and the recent attempt to live down accusations of being cargo cultist is intended to make outside lampooning against Teosin's new ideological ploys more difficult. Like Eto, Teosin has flaunted his separatism with sarcasm. Those who dub his movement 'the work of the Devil', he claimed, or visualize his followers 'on the road to hell', are in a sense right, because for Hehela all-consuming fire contains the paua so vital for Buka's future (Fahey 1970: 4). Such a cunning thinker will always get his own back; and in the light of his unrepentant spirit of independence, Teosin remained a living symbol of secessionism, especially during the year of independence (1975) (Griffin et al. 1979: 216), even if less so during the recent Bougainville rebellion, until his death in 1992. His idea that the souls of the dead rise to the mountainous heights and their bodies enrich the ground of 'sacred Buka', (OT: Teosin 1979), is of background importance to the present rebel defenders of Bougainville as a 'sacred island' (chapter 7).

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By 1980 comparable shifts to those undergone by Hahalis could be found in other 'cargo cult quarters'. Following Yali's death in 1975, for instance, former itinerant secretary Beig Wen, a former Lutheran councillor who has consolidated support around Madang and to the north, pressed for the renunciation of cargoism (cf., also, Hermann 1987) and the cultivation of a denominational facade. Today one can actually meet one of the ministas of Wok bilong Yali (the Yali movement), even in a house on Modilon Road (in Madang township's main and busy street). Today one can be shown the movement's 'Old Testament' (which turns out to be none other than Peter Lawrence's book Road belong Cargo, with its accounts of such prophets as Tagarab, preceding Yali), as well as learn about its equivalent the 'New Testament' (an exercise book at Sor village in which Yali's sayings are carefully collected together). If the objects of worship remain the traditional spirits, the table altars (with croton leaves stuck into two beer stubbies) are reminiscent of simple village churches, and Beig Wen's new theology compares well with Teosin's for salvaging the whites' Bible and the local Weltanschauungen at one and the same time. As I have argued on several occasions (1976: 168-71; 1983b: 67-68; 1989c: 650-51; 1991: 231), Beig has modelled a neo-traditional Melanesian 'salvation history' that parallels a conventional Christian Heilsplan. Comparable to Adam and Eve's paradise was taim bilong tumbuna (the ancestral time), when old custom was as it should have been. Parallel to Old Testament times, when God sent such prophets as Moses and Isaiah to castigate the Jews for straying from the right path, was the time of European and mission influence on Madang, when the great threat to traditions was only just forestalled by the cargo cult prophets. With the analogies taken further, Christ and Yali turn out to be archetypally equivalent as those who truly put their respective peoples on the right rot (path). And both these two will return: although, whereas the churches look to a special and individual role for Christ at the last time, it is sufficient for the Madangs to hope for all the ancestors to return en bloc, Yali being but one among them in a re-established taim bilong tumbuna. Significantly, this is a future retributive time; the ancestors will destroy Madang township and drive out those who oppose their right way (Trompf 1976: 169). As for Peli, east of Madang, it was in danger of losing ground after the activities of 1971 failed to bring expected results. A 'shot in the arm' came, however, with the arrival of Canadian New Apostolic Church missionaries in 1977, who intentionally 'trespassed' on Catholic (and, to a lesser extent, Pentecostalist) ground to fill the vacuum left after Peli's heyday (Camp 1983, cf. Klotsche 1929: 327-31). As Yaliwan's confidant, Hawina saw immediate advantages in their coming. Not only were they generous (handing out radios and wristwatches), and not only did they place an attractive emphasis on the importance of the ancestors for Christianity, but Hawina saw the

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perfect opportunity to legitimate Peli's prior rebelliousness through an alternative denomination. The two men had already made moves in that direction, with separatist-looking church-building, services and baptisms going on earlier in the 1970s, but the Canadians provided them with the perfect opportunity to re-secure power—along more ecclesial lines (Gesch 1985: 94-119; 1990: 231-33). The unsustainability of an effective Canadian presence clearly suited Hawina, as the more adept organizer of the two. The missionaries usually flew to New Guinea one at a time on short-term (tourist) visas, but by 1981 such a wasteful and ail-too conspicuous ploy could not hope to succeed, and the recently created Provincial Assembly of the East Sepik passed two motions debarring their presence in the area (OT: Manarip 1981). The upshot? Hawina found himself with a free hand as leading minista or pris (priest) of forty-three Niu Apostolic congregations (mostly in the Yangoru and Maprik districts). Over twenty of these had their own church buildings, and their supportive villages yielded as many as 30 000 members, virtually duplicating the pattern of involvement by the former Peli following. What is more, Hawina inherited a large truck-load of curious paraphernalia from the sect: a black suit and (false, pin-on) tie, white shirt, a liturgy (Sirbis buk 1980), a wooden offa box to serve as the model for other congregations, polished silver canisters for bread (no wine being distributed), and a series of photographs and books (e.g. Kraus 1978; 1981), illustrating the Chief Apostles in America. Some of the photographs now adorn the back walls of each house of worship. Over all these Hawina now has independent control; he can develop his own liturgical modifications and his one version of New Apostolic theology. The other churches in the area, he put it seriously, were simply going to have to recognize that another denomination, 'as good as them', was in their midst. While Yaliwan plays recluse at his hideout in Abukanja (see plate 8), still quoting favourite Bible passages from the pidgin Nupela Testamen about obeying the government (Rom. 13:1-7, presumably meaning his 'true' government), and about the coming of the Kingdom of God (Rev. 21:1-8), Hawina has been skilfully consolidating a widespread institution (OT: Hawina 1981, cf. Trompf 1989a: 51). Hawina's new theology is too complex to unravel here. In a nutshell, however, cargo cult associations are disowned. He sees Niu Apostolic and Yaliwan's eschatologies flowing together into the one important recognition of Christ's near return. The return will occur when the new Apostles have done their work of missionization, and Hawina now feels part of this divine plan. Far less tense, if not rather more pensive, than in earlier days, he did not like to project who was going to be punished in hell once Jesus reappeared, the ancestors arose and everyone received Judgement. It sufficed to distinguish the good from the evil, to avow Trinitarianism like members of other denominations, and to claim that 'all churches worship the same

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Yaliwan (standing at rear) reads his favourite passages from the Nupela Testamen, at his Abukanja hideout in 1981. Daniel Hawina is sitting at the table (in white shirt, with his back to the camera), (photo: Trompf) God'. With the Canadians in the background he could hardly be resolutely anti-expatriate. This concessiveness acknowledged, however, Hawina's old capacity to sting remains; for, his more assured-looking legitimation of separatism is naturally more difficult for the longer-established missions to handle. To be a competitor on a putatively parity basis is to 'come of age', and no longer risk the criticism of being a misguided dreamer about Cargo (OT: Hawina 1981, cf. Anon. 1985). Papua New Guinea is not alone in witnessing such developments; for, well to the east, in Vanuatu NaGriamel, for example, underwent a comparable shift. This organization is better known for igniting a revolt on the eve of Vanuatu's independence, and thus providing a pretext for the so-called 'Coconut War' of 1980, when Jimmy Stevens's headquarters at Fanafo, Espiritu Santo, were stormed by Papua New Guinea Defence Force troops (Shears 1980; Beasant 1985). Stevens was arrested during that action, together with his two ideologues, Bani and James Karai. Their movement, however, put down at the behest of the newly independent ni-Vanuatu government, was more an independent church than anything else (Trompf 1980c: 51 cf. SH Jan 1980: 1, July 1980: 1-2), albeit one vocally opposed to the political influence of the Anglicans, Presbyterians and Catholics.

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The church, with the long title 'NaGriamel Federation Independent United Royal Church' has stabilized on Santo even after the military assault, and is well entrenched on adjacent islands. Michael Allen has seen at least twelve 'Royal' churches made of bush materials on Aoba, for example, and observed, how, although most outward liturgical forms resemble Church of Christ practice, the two types of leaves emblematic of NaGriamel (ngrie and mel) are prominently displayed in these buildings, and some other innovations apply (church elders feasting below the communion table after service, for instance, in a position equivalent to that reserved for bigmen in the traditional clubhouse) (OT: Allen 1980, cf. his 1976: 28-38). To some extent the resilience of these congregations can be attributed to the opprobrium heaped upon Stevens's admirers by the then national government (Vanuaaku) supporters. The same may be said of Jonfrumist factions on Tanna, to the south, where the 'Lenakel' group, for one, appears to be a small independent church with a cargo cult background slowly edging itself back towards Presbyterianism 'by degree' (Parsonson 1975: 4-5; Wilkinson 1979; OT: Lindstrom, pers. comm. 1983). Both NaGriamel and Jonfrumism became symbols of political disintegration to the ni-Vanuatu majority, a point played on by Father Walter Lini (1980: 44-50; 1987: 184), as prime minister during independence; but, by producing reactions, they have preserved their identity. The fact that these last movements were connected with outbreaks of violence (Trompf 1981d: 20-21), and that Jimmy Stevens was locked up in a Port Vila gaol as a rebel until 1991, only goes to remind us that all the movements we have been documented are inextricably bound up with politics. From cargo cults to modern political fronts In view of their characteristically 'total perspective', both the leadership and rank and file of Melanesia's new religious movements have always sought political clout. Once stigmatized as cultist, however, their influence rarely makes more than a district or provincial impression (Trompf 1984b: 39); even with the more straightforward independent churches this is the case. The presence of the Christian Fellowship Church (CFC) on New Georgia, admittedly, has given the Western Province its special flavour within the Solomons complex. Yet, although the Holy Mama's son, law graduate Job Dudley, became its first premier, he had to decline religious successorship to his father's prophetic role and strike a compromise position between the United Church and his own special inheritance (OTs: Dudley 1981; Tuza 1986). The CFC has also found itself relatively isolated when demonstrating in defence of the rainforest against Levers Pacific Timbers. The CFC 'payback' for decimation of their natural (or sacred)

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heritage reached its pitch with an extraordinary neo-Luddite action, when damage amounting to more than one million Solomonese dollars was inflicted against bulldozers and other machinery at a logging camp in 1982 (Rence 1979; Seed, 1984: 7, cf. OT: Taylor 1981; TP 27 Sept, 1984: 5); but other New Georgians have since chosen compromise and employment with Taiwanese timber companies (OT: Whitmore 1990). As for movements with a cargo cult background, which are of more concern to us in this work, their political careers have been rather chequered, although nonetheless interesting in their 'anti-establishment' stances. In Papua New Guinea one such movement still possessing representation at both the national and provincial levels at the time of writing is the Pomio Kivung (see chapter 6), although one may also include Niu Apostolic, with its very able pastor, Michael Taminja, being national member for Maprik (an east Sepik electorate). Others exert only regional pressure, but even then with spotty results. A resurgent Paliau movement, with its political wing Makasol, has probably been the most systematic in framing its platform, pressing for a Manus provincial government that conforms to Paliau's principles. According to his alternative 'Constitution' (Papa Kastam Tubuna Rul), the Manus people should subscribe to a sixpoint programme through which human cooperation brings general improvements, 'social, human and spiritual development' takes precedence over 'economic development', land rights and resources are protected, and unemployed 'rascals' are found jobs. A Makasol government office is meant to steer the whole programme administratively, and coordinate member villages into a Lapan (or Elders) Assembly. Makasol flies its own flag, which brandishes a kalopeau (nautilus shell) as a symbol of well-being ([Paliau] 1982). Although the movement has gained at least three seats in the official provincial assembly, however, most assembly members view Makasol with suspicion, as a strategy for 'third level government' (Pokawin 1983). That best explains why police were deployed to disperse pro-Paliau, antiprovincial government marchers in Lorengau, 1983, and to put down another Makasol demonstration the following year which was aimed at gaining special audience with Charles, Prince of Wales (Jumogot 1984:4-8; PG 1982; Makasol Proclamation 1984). By contrast, on the Rai Coast, no Yali supporter has attained either to a national or provincial assembly seat in recent elections. Mafuk Gainda, admittedly, national Rai Coast candidate and Deputy Speaker in the House in the mid-1980s, has been sympathetic, but Wok bilong Yali south of Madang is largely confined to the core villages of Sor and Amun, and even these have received two new Catholic Church buildings since 1976. Further north and west, Beig Wen's clientele are rather too dispersed and less participative in politics, and Beig himself lacks the kind of traditional basis for the potentially successful candidacy Yali possessed among the Ngaing (and Gira) cultures (Silata [forthcoming], cf. Hermann 1992). As for Peli or Niu

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Apostolic political pressure, although Yaliwan was elected to the East Sepik Provincial Government in 1979, he said nothing in debate and eventually resigned to be replaced by a candidate of quite different persuasions. At least the presence of Taminja in the national parliament still allows the older Peli generation a small window on the world of post-independence national affairs and the newly educated elite (cf. Trompf 1984b: 40-41). Only on the islands to the region's east have there been signs of politics with a cargo cult background spilling over into violence or rebellion. It is perhaps still too difficult at this point in time to see how lines of influence from Hahalis have inspired the recent Bougainville rebellion, and to place the old Hahalis leadership in the context of sporadic actions by rebels on Buka early in 1990 (cf. chapter 7). Looking still further east, and to an earlier flashpoint, one is not to forget signs of violent reprisal among the supporters of NaGriamel and Jonfrumism at Vanuatu's independence in 1980. The pro-Stevens 'rebels' who made two raids on Luganville (Espiritu Santo) apparently bore no weapons, yet they went away with ammunition and dynamite, while on Tanna, Francophile Jonfrumists kidnapped a Vanuaaku party candidate, and bound and blindfolded his supporters (Trompf 1981d: 20, cf. Calvert 1976; Molisa et al. 1982; van Trease in PIM Aug. 1982). As leader of the would-be independent republic of Vemarana, Stevens set up an alternative government from the seclusion of Fanafo, operated a pirate radio for political broadcasts (a gift from the Phoenix Foundation in the United States) and built up a limited arsenal of guns, ammunition and explosives (Lamour 1982, cf. Hours 1976b for background). As for Tanna, Jonfrumists made their own Declaration of Independence—for the Republic of Tafea—at a time which coincided with the Santo dissidence (15 February, 1980) (Lindstrom 1981: 109). Despite these excesses, however, the general tendency of persisting movements with a cargo cult background has been to pursue 'special religious interests' (cf. Hempenstall 1981: 4) more than political or military goals. Certainly, old cargo cult activity is capable of lending inspiration to later rebellions: members of the Organisasi Papua Merdeka ([West] Papuan Liberation Army), for instance, often heroicize the 'martyrs' of the A.B. Army (see, e.g., Anon. 1978; TP 15 July, 1984: 7). Yet, the general pattern for 'third level experiments' has been one of marginal effects on electoral politics (for some of the better studies, Isana 1977; 1983 on northern New Ireland politics; Jupp and Sawyer 1980: 242, 266 on Vanuatu), but with highly vocal denigration of 'the government "road" as failing to offer desirable goals' (Allen 1981: 28) because 'establishment' politics fails to incorporate a total (including religious) vision. On review, Melanesian 'small oppositions' of various kinds, whether the avowed bases of their separate existences have been relatively more 'religious' or 'political', are social statements of dissatisfaction. In this sense

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cargo cults or independent churches, or the former tending toward the latter, join a host of local initiatives appealing for better conditions. Among the most numerous of these are spiritist or revivalist (and thus distinctly religious) groups, which reject old formalisms in worship for charismatic or pentecostalist styles (Barr and Trompf 1983; Barr 1983a; 1983b; Schwarz 1984). In cultures where interaction with the outside world has been less, these styles have strong continuity with traditional ecstatic activity, and may stand as a covert or unconscious indigenous criticism of unadapted, introduced practices (cf., e.g., Kale 1985; Maeliau 1987: 125-26; Arndell 1991, cf. Clark 1992).10 They are different, then, from blatant traditionalist revivals, as with the Moro movement on Guadalcanal (Davenport and (^oker 1976, cf. also Keesing 1982b), or with sects and denominations justifying a toe-hold in a given area because prior ecstatic phenomena were taken to herald their coming, as in the case of the Seventh Day Adventists moving into the two villages of Vailala seven years after the so-called 'Vailala madness' (Koivi 1977: 7-10, cf. Williams 1934). It is these charismatically or pentecostally charged activities which will present problems for the mainstream churches in the future—either simply being hard to incorporate into the larger body (e.g. Calvert 1976-77 on Kikori United Church congregations) or splitting completely, as with the Namba Wan Brekawe bilong Gutnius Sios, which left the Wabag Lutherans in 1981 yet has since allied with Pentecostalist churches (OT: Kopyoto 1990, cf. Trompf 1991: 233). As cargo cultism declines and Christianity continues to expand, these spiritualistic phenomena will generate a new generation of religious conflict in Melanesian pockets, although with far less reasons to produce the degree of splintering found in black Africa (Barrett 1968; 1982; Hollenweger 1972). Paradoxically, in terms of Christian ideals, yet in keeping with human cultures, new personal and collective religious discoveries will provide reasons for keeping disaffection and negative payback alive. Cargo cult lo as punishment; and as totalistic re-ordering of society That cargo cults depend for their survival on regulations is beyond doubt, and their sets of /o, to use the neo-Melanesian term, are always ostensibly stringent. Whether leading cultists have been in a position to frame, impose and execute a whole range of laws and punishments, on the other hand, 10

Both Clark and Strathern (1977a) apparently treat the 'mass hysteria' of the Wiru upon contact like Berndt treats the 'zona wind' in the eastern highlands (1953-54: 57), as an entirely new phenomenon for the people. My oldest and best Wiru informant was eager to tell me, however, that he and his warrior fellows were given over to collective guria ('shaking fits') in ritual contexts, usually via dance, to bolster group strength (OT: Wer 1977, cf. Trompf 1991: 127, 135; and also Meggitt 1974: 5ff).

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has depended on the context, and especially on the extent to which the movements have held sway over a given locale and the compunction leaders have had to become 'law-enforcers'. Obviously, a small coterie of cargoists confronted by a hostile majority or unsympathetic elders—perhaps a band of young cargo enthusiasts returning to the village from a town experience— will be forced back on rules of loyalty, secrecy, meeting procedure, and so forth, too specialized for the governing of a society at large (OT: Pouwer 1984, cf. his 1955 on Mimika). Some movements' rules are more substantially influenced by outside sources (the Bible, canon law, colonial ordinance), yet most combine new formulations with long-inured tabus. Various cases of local, partly innovative law-making have already been noticed: Ona Asi's basic prohibitions reminiscent of both the Ten Commandments and (Orokaivan) traditional initiation instructions; Angganita's precepts for a new order of peace delivered on Insumbabi Island, again somewhat negatively and syncretistically framed—to name but two. If an area is relatively unpoliced, the room for legal experimentation can be greater (cf. p.237 on the Kopani 'cargo religion'); if an organization is threatened with armed force, even extinction, it may take on features of military discipline (thus, the Koreri movements above), or make a solid use of 'constables' and hit-men. As for the formulation of rules in 'primal legislation', they need some detailing, especially those in evidence after the war. The focus of this section, however, will be limited to the punitive element of lo, with some attention on the way the stringencies of traditional law have been affected or muted by introduced values. The framing of penalties we shall see, is a filament of the retributive theme so prominent in new religious experiments. A few pertinent examples from the histories of better-known movements will highlight the central issues. Among the fascinating 'archives' of Maasina Rule on the Solomons, there lie documents impressive for their preoccupation with good order. Since, however, 'it isn't allowed for any man to live in the same way as before', a new punishment system has to be framed. The listings of law and penalties are remarkably systematic. Some of these reflect custom (though spelt out n^o-traditionally) while others are more plainly Christian. A list of twenty-six penalties by one John Apui is especially worth citing, not only because it reveals how a Melanesian interpreted 'the Teaching of the Catholic Church' as a law code (which he wanted to tighten all the more in the name of Maasina), but also because it fixes appropriate monetary fines to misdemeanours. For such miscellaneous offences as 'keeping a child from school', for example, 'criticizing the Catholic Church', 'swearing, cursing, etc.', 'lying, jealousy, false witnessing', the fee was 5 shillings, while reverting to traditional ceremonies, or 'worshipping other gods', or 'pretending to be in church while abandoning ones [sic] faith', merited a hefty £1 (Laracy 1983:140,145,

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cf. 138-39). The details, however, are less important than the requirement of a code of behaviour, which has been suitably tailored to extricate the unwanted order of things on the one hand, and made strict in preventing dissidence on the other. With larger movements, better equipped to enforce the leader's will, we hear of 'surrogate' police—the lieutenants of the Paliau movement, lo-bos of Wok bilong Yali, the 'sentries' monitoring people's movements to and from Peli Association activities, and so on—and can appreciate that defections or members' delicts were penalized, if not normally by a fine system as systematic as Apui's, at least by threats, shaming, a temporary withdrawal of privileges, or even 'loose imprisonments' (Schwartz 1962: 362-90; Lawrence 1964a: 201, 210, 215, 218-20, 264; Ahrens 1974; Gesch 1985: 100). In the significant case of Hahalis, indeed, we find the use of faceless, nocturnal 'hit-men', special killers from among the Society's range of 'police, guards, spies and office-bearers', who dispensed with the movement's 'unwantables' and vocal opponents by ritual murders (Lyons 1976: 7). Their victims (one of whom, Mathias Meksi, was actually the Society's first secretary in 1976) usually had their heads removed; some were dragged from meetings as a public exercise of terror, bound to coconut stump-cuts of shoulder height, and then beheaded from behind (OTs: Dash, Toroken 1977; cf. Dixon 1976; Trompf 1983b: 55). Hahalis's brutal punitive methods, though, were not typical cargoist lo. The absence of such extremes in other larger, better-organized postwar concerns has to be reckoned with and, thus, cannot be explained simply in terms of any group's ineffectualness or feelings of vulnerability as a 'minority pressure group'. Besides, along with other movements with strong n^o-traditionalist orientations, such as Wok bilong Yali and the Moro movement, Hahalis has never openly or 'publicly' appealed to kastam as a sanction for the pre-pacification right to kill enemies and execute community offenders (cf. also Keesing 1982b: 39-43). Most cargo cults, in fact, have been influenced enough by Christian visions of a better society to use the message of peaceful existence as a psychological weapon against colonial brutalities, for it was inconsistent to impose such draconian, physically oriented systems of punishment as bespoke colonial (or Japanese military) ruthlessness. Cult law-makers were typically strict and punitive in their legal impositions, then, but usually only after fashions acculturated to post-traditional Sitze im Leben. To that extent (though at the risk of condescension), their laws may be described as 'experiments in civilization' (thus Hogbin 1970b). They went some way toward breaking what carne to be seen as weaknesses in the pre-Christian order, which made blood avengement a just (and 'virtuous') requirement, and which often allowed 'inhuman' punishment on malefactors within the group as a highly vengeful act. At the same time their experiments were meant to outface, if not outwit the colonial masters (at least psychologically and by non-

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violent means), and often to create a cohesive, rigorously ordered and rulebound situation full of miraculous potential, on the understanding that greater-than-ordinary-human forces were about to intervene to tip the balance of power, and remove both oppression and oppressor. The more cargo movements have been mutating into 'church guises', of course, the more they have had to shed any claim to create a 'total social order' in which their leaders could think of imposing penalties like a substitute government. Their special penalties are cut down to suit their special religious interests, as in the case of any 'competing' denomination; and are reduced to bans or exclusions, or verbal corrections and castigations (rather than fines), possessing no other sanction against withdrawal of membership than the use of social pressure to remain loyal within the special company of like-minded believers. Sometimes cargo cults even compete against each other for the same market as in Madang (Morauta 1974: 39-49). This social pressure can be intense; in cargo movements during all their phases and multiform expressions the claim of a total allegiance is characteristic. A veritable 'pressure-cooking' often results, with a sharp rank-ordering of the group, scaled dictatorially by the leadership according to the degree of access allowed to the centre of cultic power as well as to recognized degrees of commitment to the cause. At those moments of very heightened anticipations, in particular, we find the prehensile qualities of group pressure most accentuated. It is nicely exemplified for many other movements in a flurry of excitement on the Lutheran and northern sector of the Wahgi culture area in mid-1969, even though this particular outburst was more plainly millenarian than cargoist. When half-a-dozen like-minded, self-acclaimed visionaries announced that Jesus was about to return and the present world to end, the news spread like wildfire. A palisade of pitpit called a golgul was built—the recourse is reminiscent of both the traditional Kongar dance-grounds and the 'Mur Madness' eleven years earlier (chapters 2, 4). This structure was paradigmatic enough in itself in separating off the special ones from the unlucky, and in pressuring the as-yet-uncommitted to identify with a closed, somewhat 'manically attractive' circle. The visionaries insisted that the imminent end would occur in such a localized way that only those within the palisade would receive blessing, whereas giant floods and fires would overtake those found outside. Those left out would cry for help (like those drowning around Noah's ark) but the golgul would be shut tight. As for the atmosphere of meetings in preparation for this event, the ready seizure of authority and of vocal power to put others in their place was remarkable (if natural) on the part of those possessing kin connections with the visionaries, or alleging special associations with them. Traditional claims to power had to be set aside for this emergency, and those who had no expertise in these extraordinary matters, even if traditionally prestigious,

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found themselves doing what they were told; while the leaders' every word was hung upon and an excuse for immediate group silence (OT: Wandel 1973; 1975). This Wahgi case reveals how the futuristic orientation of cargo (or millenarian) activities naturally lends itself to a quest more for new principles of legal sanction than for old ones. In situations of limited contact, as has been shown of the Tombema Enga in the 1940s, cult leaders insisted that the promised 'millennial' transformation would not come unless drastic decrees were kept—all food except sweet potatoes being forbidden, the Te exchanges stopped and all pigs killed, and even sexual intercourse debarred (Feil 1983: 95-99). The more typical cargoist message is of a new order of lo—of peace and cooperation which tends to build on 'pacification conditions' rather than turn back the clock. On the other hand, collective expectations of the return of 'ancestral time', as in Wok bilong Yali, imply the longing for a rehabilitated legal autonomy independent of 'establishment hegemony'. Traditional methods of negative payback or penalization can also be resuscitated in a cult's inner power struggles: Yaliwan, for instance, when representing his electorate in Port Moresby, decided to return home and on the pretext that Hawina was directing sorcery against him (Gesch 1985: 85), a tool of reprisal with a newer and greater capacity to produce community divisiveness. It is just as hard for cargo cults as it is for conventional Christian affiliations to prevent the resort to intra-directed sorcery when rapid social change generates so many reasons for grievances. Sorcery consequently reappears in these movements, and quite often as power play by leaders. Fear of it helps secure a following, as seen with the Bilalaf and Filo cults (chapter 4), and it is probably significant that only a few of the Melanesian cargo movements have involved anti-sorcery 'hunts'. The 'sorcerer/witch-drive' mentality known from African new religious movements, including independent churches (Lanternari 1963: 22-26; Wilson 1971) is only now just beginning to loom as one possible future theme of Melanesian Christian and sub-Christian activity (e.g. Plutta 1980a; Flannery 1983b, yet cf. Lawrence 1964a: 172). While sorcery remains a factor, the deployment of witchcraft is virtually unknown in Melanesia's new religious movements, with the absence of precontact military tensions and missionary encouragement of family life already undercutting old fears about females as a potential 'enemy within'. Cargoist eagerness to find quick answers to social frustrations was sometimes even intense enough for women to be acclaimed as key spiritual guides—as in the instances of Angganita and Filo, and more recently with 'Mamma Dokta' Josephine Bahu, twenty-eight years old when beginning the Utu cargo cult in the Simbai area of the Madang hinterland (Plutta 1980b, Plutta and Flannery 1983). It was not uncommon, further, for new

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rules to be applied to male-female relations. There were experiments in 'sexual licence' pitched against traditional puritanism (and old orders more generally, cf. Christiansen 1969: 17, 69), coupling twin possibilities of greater personal freedom and male exploitation. The Janus-faced qualities of most such experiments are no better illustrated than by John Teosin's instructions for men to take spiritual (or 'Maria') partners as well as their own wives (Lyons 1976:8), a principle more recently adopted (but modified) by an independent church called 'Friday Religion' among the Nasioi of eastern Bougainville. 'Friday' partners normally exchanged spouses, were supposed to be able to face one another naked (and alone) without having desire, and rewards (especially the gaining of respect as a 'true' adherent) came to those who passed this test. But there is a fine line between remaining rigidly ascetic before a great temptation and lapsing into bodily ecstasy. Naturally, many partners gave into each other, and children came to be born out of the traditionally sanctioned rules of wedlock. Self- and group-esteem decreased upon failing the test, yet no one lost life or limb for committing adultery or breaking tabus, even if women were the ones who were paying through their bodies for the ritualists' lack of foresight (Sipari 1985b: 31-33). Bearing children is hardly negative payback if shame can be avoided, nor strictly an example of sexual violence, yet it is one example of the perpetuation of (age?-)old inequalities under newer, if remarkably innovative, arrangements (cf. also p.244 on Hawina's Peli rituals). Leaders were commonly able to take advantage of social transformation by procuring women of their choice (cf. Trompf 1990e: 73), displaying more the exploitation of a new paua than applying old principles of polygyny. With each step we take in this part of the analysis, however, the closer we edge toward the recognition that these cargo movements were meant to open up a brand-new realm of positive reciprocity for their subscribers. The lo of these cargo movements was never only a system of penalties, nor the social pressures within them mere repression. They were 'totalistic' in their drive for support, fired by fervent desires for the coming of new, group wealth (the achievement of which demanded unwavering faith and loyalty, frequently toward a 'charismatic leadership'). All this is rather understandable as the confident embracing of a dramatically transformed and perfected order of things. The 'totalism' is as much positive discipline as negative elimination of blemishes and backsliding. Whatever their negative retributive stance toward external oppressors and surrounding critics, furthermore, cargoist visions of the world are only half comprehended if they are not also grasped as the welcoming of that other dimension so close to the heartbeat of Melanesian religions: the celebration of abundance, the excitement of exchange, the preparedness for generosity and sacrifice—in other words, positive reciprocity.

CHAPTER 5

Redemption

Cargo cults are attempts to involve the spirit order in the future of human reciprocities. The intervention of the ancestors, deities, God, and sometimes the whites (as representatives of new sources of spiritual power) is almost always taken to be necessary because the traditional patterns of reciprocation have either broken down, owing to the newer, unstable conditions borne by colonization, or simply proved unsatisfactory for ongoing needs. Repair and despair necessitate some supra-human redemption. Redemption, it turns out, serves as a very useful interpretative category, when treated typologically, to cover the satisfying of a simple longing for an untarnished, more certain, prosperous and less physically burdensome life-order (Burridge 1969b: 6-16). Cultists have a problem with present conditions because the cultural past—however capable of evoking nostalgias—has been thrown into doubt. It did not take long for 'traditional ways' to present themselves as technologically far inferior to expatriate accomplishments; as politically powerless before colonial control; as spiritually faulty and vulgar beside a religion with book and chalices, which favoured scrubbed bodies and clean clothes to charcoal-faced, white-eyed ferocity.1 As a result, there is a strong element of dependence in cargo movements. Their members depend on a dramatic occurrence—some breakthrough, some rectification of a cosmic imbalance—and this is not precluding the possibility that the cultists could become dependent on the very body of people they first identified as the source of their difficulties: the whites. 1

Movements which project the complete recovery of tradition, then, without the Cargo, are traditionalist, not cargoist, whereas 'cargo cult' remains viable in describing movements which revert to traditionalist means or techniques to bring on the Cargo.

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We have already mused over the Melanesian ambivalence toward the bearers of the colonial order. On the one hand, in wanting to remove them, Melanesians expressed their reprisals in new 'religions of the oppressed'. On the other hand, the blacks' deliverance was to be accompanied by the very sort of abundance one associated with the whites. Thus, implicit in the longing for a total, spirito-material redemption was the desire either to participate satisfactorily in, or benefit fully from, the very order that had created or imposed unacceptable burdens. Do cargo cults, then, which are arguably the reflection, if not outcome of this dialectic between rejection and welcome, constitute a logical adjustment of reason and action which is as much open to positive reciprocity as to the business of getting one's own back? The openness to positive reciprocation is so directed to the spirit realm as to appear a recourse of sheer helplessness. Prima facie many cargo movements look like 'last resorts', both to save the situation and dispense once and for all with the troublemaker. It is misguided to call people helpless and utterly desperate, however, for putting to the test what they very seriously hold to be true already—that agents of the spiritual world can easily alter the state of affairs to bring about a 'salvation'. Besides, cargo cultists are not yearning to be transported off into angel-laden clouds or in some Venusbound spacecraft abandoning a doomed earth (cf., e.g., Festinger et al. 1964). On the contrary, they are only too ready for this-wor\d\y exchange and riches, yet in a stupendously transformed situation (cf. Talmon 1966: 159). That there were many Melanesian community cultures not giving themselves over to such oneiric tendencies, let along acting upon them, must (as usual) be granted; but that others did is the reality with which we now wrestle. Through such 'dreaming and daring' the yawning gap between 'downcast savage' and 'arrogant masta' was being earnestly bridged. The typical goal, as we shall see, was some kind of new reciprocity. The material of relevance falls under at least three major heads: acquisition and relinquishment (together); cooperation; and participation. As in part I, space shall be left for a useful case study through which threads may be drawn together. Acquiring and relinquishing—in grand style There are two apparently contrarious features for which cargo cults are renowned: the desire to acquire material riches and the readiness to put them to ruins. This seeming contradiction can in most cases be resolved, when one sets the new sort of goods (the Cargo which is in such great demand) beside the old bases of wealth (gardens and pigs) which can be left unattended or even dramatically destroyed for standing as opposites to the great anticipation (cf. Worsley 1970: 62, 108-13, 120, 160-65, 178;

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Steinbauer 1971: chart; 1979: 33, 45, 58, 67, 89, 133; Christiansen 1969: 14-15). There are admittedly exceptions to this polarization; for, pig wealth or pork can be longed for, and in a few movements supporters have actually been told to destroy what few Western-originated items they possessed (as one wartime cult among the Taiora required) in order that an entirely new range of goods could come (SDF 1944-45: 14; Berndt 1954: 230-31). But the apparent inversion between hoped-for gain and surprising destruction still remains as a common cult phenomenon. This well-documented inversion, however, has not been interpreted under the rubric of retributive logic. Understandably, most existing studies (by outsiders) cannot reveal the mental 'correlations' or 'calculations' of cultists when indulging in these two divergent-looking extravagances, or when adopting other tactics. Sometimes accounts of episodes simply leave out one side of the picture in favour of another—lacking crucial information as much as anything. F. E. Williams, for example, lamented the 'Vailala Madness' because of its members' destruction of ceremonial objects (actually a rather apt Elema way of symbolically breaking with the past, cf. p. 119), but he does not seem to have known that the Vailala villagers opened their activities by presenting large money gifts to the London Missionary Society representative at Orokolo, Pryce Jones (Williams 1923: 38-44, yet cf. LMS 1917: [6-7]; Trompf [forthcoming]). For the antinomies here square logically as a deflection from the old to a concentration on the transformative, spirit-borne intrusion of the new. It is not from the whites, one must remember, that the Cargo is usually expected to come, but from a spiritsource behind both blacks and whites, with the whites sometimes conceived to stand somewhere in the middle blocking villagers' access to it. The neglect or destruction of traditional wealth, then, whether we conclude it to be an act of supreme trust, or as a sacrifice in some stricter sense (perhaps 'gifts-to-god' which are destructive, cf. chapter 2), accords with the immense store set by the 'supernaturals'; for, these spirits have it within their power both to restore what has been undone by those going to such extremes and to bear in their train the astounding array of new goods themselves (or the secret of their acquisition). That something is given away or relinquished in advance of the hope of receiving something in return, is plainly in keeping with the 'give and take' principles so endemic to traditional Melanesian Lebenswelten. The 1949 'Mur Madness' among the Wahgi puts us in contact with the characteristic mixture of traditionalism and adaptation we seek to isolate. The highlanders wanted the new wealth (note: it was not only Westernstyle objects in the strict sense, although the half-moon kina shells were thought to derive from the whites, nonetheless), and the exaggerated Kongar was a desperate attempt to secure the power necessary for independence or a 'free-hand'—especially through generating guns. The Kongar, however,

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was a traditional act of reciprocity. It was one in which the combination of generosity, sacrifice and the apodeictic display of warrior potential was especially intended to woo group ancestors and the recent dead, perhaps even more than allies. The dead were conceived to be watching and were expected to respond. Thus, in the Mur outburst it was they, not some impersonal force of magic, who would turn stones into axe-heads, banana leaves into paper, and so on. The special rite is at once intensely religious in its reliance on the spirits and a paradigmatic engagement in reciprocity to entice the involvement of both deceased and living supporters together. The traditional inseparability of religion and the pursuit of prosperity still pertains, if in re-tailored garb. The destruction of pigs, too, was hardly unnatural under the circumstances, since in the logic of retribution no great salvation can transpire without great sacrifice, and no grand acquisition without remarkable generosity. Sacrifices in cargo cults are both less and more than some might expect. On the one hand, they were almost never made to the whites—as the Cargo bearers or intruders. If an exceptional case occurred on 'contact' among the Ke'efu (fringing south Fore country in the eastern highlands), when several pigs were sacrificed before the first whites ever seen, all thirteen of them, this was because these 'new beings' all came down in an air-crash in 1946 and all died, being buried by the local people and thus placated as 'dead ones' (OT: Agnanta 1985). On the other hand, sacrifices in cargo movements cannot be confined to animal-slaying or plant-uprooting; we are not to forget the drawn-out expending of physical energies—the frenzied rushing of the Wahgi at Mur, the prolonged dancing in the Koreri movements, and so on. In most postwar movements, which reflect little of the 'classic' sacrificial forms, the giving and eager collection of money became the substitutes. In areas of less interaction with outsiders, there can be combinations of sacrificial rites and a preoccupation with ('whiteman's') money. Neatly illustrating the older 'sacrificial' and newer 'monetary' motifs in combination is a cult erupting among the Bena(bena) as late as 1969. At Liorofa in 1969, within a cluster of hamlets some 15 miles (24 kilometres) from the emergent Goroka township but without access to its excitements, one Neuliafo Brugue believed he had suddenly discovered the secret to bridge the gulfs which put his people at a disadvantage. In a nocturnal encounter with afre (ghost or, significantly, whiteman) (chapter 1) on the steep banks of the upper Bena River, he was given an A£10 note, the living dead man promising Neuliafo he would receive more from subsequent meetings (OT: Neuliafo 1973, 1975, cf. SDF 1969-70). Being in his late twenties, and ready to replace his deceased father as a bigman, Neuliafo took the isolated seance to be an initiative from an agent of supreme power. It gave him confidence to predict that an abundance of new wealth was about to flow to his people. Since the spirits of the dead were understood

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in this pocket of Bena culture to reside under the river, the point of arrival for this great benison became the river itself (which at Liarofa also seems to run from Goroka), and Neuliafo foretold how the river would yield up many cattle and sheep (animals brought to Westerners), along with pigs and £10 notes floating to its surface. With fellow-hamleters, who were quickly attracted by the urgencies of a man more noted for his gentleness and quiet-spokenness (and thus for qualities more associated with mission ways), he constructed a huge net of local fibres to span the powerful stream and so catch the anticipated wealth. The dreams of transformation were partly associated with Christmas, then being celebrated at the local Lutheran Station, and it was to be on 28 December (three days after Christmas) that the curious 'resurrection' out of the world of the dead would occur (OTs: Neuliafo 1973; Seman 1983, cf. SDF 1969c; Blumenthal 1974: 15; Strelan 1977: 42). As a way of expressing eagerness to reciprocate with the dead, significantly, came Neuliafo's new set of laws. There was to be no stealing or swearing, no borrowing of money or buying of food with it, and (interestingly) no wearing of dirty clothes among ordinary members (OT: Neuliafo 1975, cf. SDF 1969b: 3). Cargo cult /o, then, can be viewed under this rubric of exchange and negotiation as well; the new tabus are not to be broken if the longed-for grand transaction is to be pulled off successfully. But in the Liorofa case the most impressive actions reflecting village assumptions about reciprocity were preparations for a great sacrifice and the generous relinquishment of money. A huge quantity of fire-wood was amassed, earth ovens constructed and timbers laid out for a large pyre (as an altar), and it was in Neuliafo's mind that the first outcome of the grand miracle was to be a sacrifice and feast. The entry into the passage from one time to another had to be marked by rite. The money collection was connected to this prospective transformation, yet carried an extra dimension. The prohibitions against stealing or borrowing money, let alone buying food with it, chime in with hopes about sudden riches; for, to receive what was dearly wanted, the new rules had to be adhered to sacrificially and without deviance. The money, however, was to go to Neuliafo, who, before the events of late December, let it be known to his supporters that he was making financial transactions with the fre on a regular basis, and that, in being instructed to return the same money allegedly given him by the spirit on each encounter, was being put through a test for his future role as a businessman (SDF 1969-70). At Liorofa, then, the new time did not imply a cessation of exchange activities among humans, as if all wealth flows from the 'non-empiricals' and is then distributed 'each according to his need' among lucky mortals. Procedures of life not already learnt by Melanesians, admittedly, and apparently locked in the hands of the white mastas, will be disclosed by

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the ultimate owners of power. Neuliafo collected money to become a businessman—a quite new kind of bigman—but such a possibility required access to the ancestors, and in fact he counted on the likelihood that the dead would return collectively and that with a mere wish they could satisfy his people's wants. Meanwhile, Neuliafo built up his resources for bigmanship. Select associates bought trade goods in Goroka to stow in his house (an action disallowed to others by his own rules), a build-up of wealth being indicative of traditional leadership. As a sign both of his authority and of what was to be forthcoming from the river, he draped his meeting-table with a dried-out cow's skin, apparently obtained near the town. As the moment of real suspense approached, the Goroka administration calculated how to outwit this new pretender for power, and Neuliafo was 'caught on the hop'. When nothing came out of the river, he had to admit that 'the spirits had tricked him', and apart from bowing to a verbal disciplining from patrol officer Foran, annual head taxes were collected, with most of the money given for Neuliafo's scheme being absorbed to cover the colonial burden (OT: Neuliafo 1975; SDF 1969c). Much in this Liarofa case smacks of 'classic cargo cultism', yet much too recalls the larger-scale postwar developments. Neuliafo, on personal reflection, put down his approach to a mixture of confusion and envy. Envy we have already touched on, and here it served as an impetus for reprisal. As Neuliafo put it: We learnt about more and more stores going up on Goroka, and we wanted the things in them more and more. Yet the prices also went up at the same time more things were appearing there. As for the confusion, it was over the origins of Western goods and money, and the extraordinary freedom the whites possessed with both. 'Your money', Neuliafo opined, 'is like our garden', almost as if for the whites it grew on trees, and 'the freedom of you whites is like the freedom of our ancestors', because of the magical powers of appropriation. Thus, in order to secure the same grand acquisitions accessible to the whites, it was logical to enter into reciprocity with the tumbuna, who apparently wanted Neuliafo to pass 'a test' (of personal sacrifice), and who demanded the group's prior generosity (the money collection) before being willing to intervene. Do ut des, as typical. In their elementary form, the principles underlying the collection of money in this Bena case can be paralleled from the bigger postwar movements. Money became increasingly emblematic of the Cargo during and right after the war in areas where interactions with outside influences were strongest, and if there were only a few pre-war cultist attempts to produce money by magico-ritual techniques, there were various and well-known attempts to acquire it by such means in the postwar period (Trompf

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1980b: 6). The Tuesday 'table ritual' performed by Yali supporters, for example, was all about the supernatural multiplication of what little money was collected in member villages and kept in boxes by the lo bos before it was sent on to Yali's 'capital' at Sor. During the 1960s Yali's concubine flower girls (plaua meri) actually bottled Yali's semen after intercourse, the precious liquid being carried to the communities of the faithful, and then transferred to enamel mugs for the desired multiplication through table ritual (Morauta 1974: 37-43). One Yakob of Sek (north of Madang) developed this ritual in his own way. As he supervised, selected boys were required to dance around ancestral stones in the village before being sent into the bush to find coins. The currency they returned with, presumably secreted to the prearranged area, was subsequently deposited in the cult house's wooden coffer (Morauta 1973). In the Sepik the Peli nocturnal ritual of paitim dis (shaking the dishes) was comparable. At Hawina's bidding, in 1972 bare-breasted flower girls were required to stand in line, stooping over dishes with coins in them, slipping the coins from one dish to another to make a larger amount. Associated with fertility, this ritual was only to be conducted by virgins, although young men were instructed to stand clasping the girl's breasts from behind, and sexual intercourse often resulted. In a nearby artificial cemetery—the 'memorial gardens'—so-called 'workers' and their female associates would roam around naked at night watching for spirits of the dead, happy to seize one so that money would fall from its pockets (Gesch 1990: 221, cf. Trompf 1980b: 7). These rituals, however, appear idiosyncratic beside a more typical phenomenon already discussed: the fund—or money-collection. Paliau's fund is the most famous, floated as it was before the war, when he insisted that any earnings he sent back from his employment with expatriates should not be squandered by his kin, but saved to cover such an inconvenience as the head tax. The principle he enunciated was clearly diffused and became important for other movements (cf. chapter 6). By 1973, twenty years after his key role in founding New Guinea's first local government council, Paliau had 400-500 safes distributed among the villages of his followers. The fund had stabilized at K20000 at the time of currency nationalization, and the money was divided to be deposited into these safes. The financial holdings were described as the Tenk (tank), which was also the title of a party by which to contest the national elections. Such a pooling of resources was designed to show that money was indeed being acquired; but acquisition was always a slow business. Village leaders did not have the keys to the safes but had to put collections aside until Paliau or his appointee visited, and Paliau himself always found excuses to spend the money for his own purposes (Kuluah 1977). By the 1980s, however, Paliau Lukas (a holder of BA and BEc degrees from UPNG, and the son of one

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of Paliau's former lieutenants') had helped revitalize the movement along the lines of more 'scientific' economics. With his purchase of the largest trade-store in the Manus capital, the traditional Melanesian concern for prosperity and the management of an independent church were blended with 'modern' bisnis. And as a fillip to the cause of a great experimenter, Paliau himself was knighted in 1991. Money-making in the larger cargo movements we have already seen was a reason for group pride, let alone a mark of membership and identity. Apart from Jonfrumism, all the major organizations emphasized fund collection. Even for a Yali 'missionary' in the highlands, as was Lagitamo Luka at Sigomi (Bena Bena) in 1965, the first duty was to collect money from the villagers to send it back to Madang, and on at least one occasion he walked alone from Goroka to the coast with over £50 cash to confirm his loyalty. (The second duty, for which he was arrested, was the cultivation of local [in this case Bena] flower-girls—for effective table ritual) (OT: Luka, cf. SDF 1965: 5-6). As far as cult fund-raising goes, the Peli Association collected the most substantial sum of any cargo movement, over 200 000 people donating up to A$200 000 in 1971, with payment of contribution confirming membership. This generosity derived less from trust in Hawina or Yaliwan than hope in a 'promised millennial blessing, . . . the main destiny claimed for this money' being: That it should go to the War Memorial in Canberra [the Australian capital] to invoke the spirits of the American and New Guinean war dead, so that they should send things freely from Australia. (Gesch 1990:219, cf. 214) Money acquisition in these movements turns out to be understood (at least among the rank and file) as an investment in a special, spirit-originated abundance to come, not in the returns of 'economic realism'. There may be talk of bisnis (Peli backers tried rice-growing and coffee-planting, and the Association even purchased a A$10000 trade-store) (Gesch 1990: 228); or a cooperative society formed (as with the Pitenamu Society, Adams 1982); or else expectation focused on the cult leader's shop (as with Dakoa of Unea on the Bali Witu Islands, north of New Britain) (Laupu 1977; Mataio 1977; OT: Blythe), or on a ship as with Toaripi, and Tommy Kabu of the Purari area much earlier (Brown 1956: 200-14; cf. Maher 1961). Very distinctive of cargoism, however, is the pursuit of interests which are quite 'total', and an acting on hopes generally too high for purely entrepreneurial, secular procedures to meet. Thus, to illustrate from two of the above cases, Pitenamu was steadily formed from a small-scale development corporation into 'a road to the ancestors' cargo', especially among Hube cargoists (LA 1974: 2), while Dakoa founded an independent church on Unea Island, declaring himself 'Pope' and his wife 'Maria' to rule over 'bishops', 'prophets', 'priests' and 'people' (Laupu 1977: 22; Trompf 1991: 233).

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The extraordinary confidence in the reception of great (significantly unbeatable) power eventually overrode mundane and limited goals, this tendency sometimes also producing an (over-)reliance on outsiders, such as Americans, as linked mysteriously to the spirit-sources of the Cargo. Are the high hopes of acquisition also commensurate with local economic difficulties? After all, neo-Marxists rightly keep one on the lookout for connections between Melanesian 'millennial outbursts' and the worldwide fluctuations in the copra market (especially during the Depression), with the failure of labourers to get substantial returns from colonial enterprises or cooperatives producing the frustrations upon which utopianlike dreams and charismatic leadership could build (e.g. Worsley 1970: 42-58). Sociologist Morauta, moreover, has meticulously counted coconut stands and measured the relative availability of economic resources in cargoist and or part-cargoist villages of the Madang hinterland to show how it can be that the high aspirations of cultists (in this case mainly Yali supporters, who are generally more deprived than other Madangs) square with their marginalization vis-a-vis 'development' (1974: 66-127). Still more pertinent is Ronald Brunton's argument that a common local problem for all documented cargo cults in his ken is the breakdown of traditional exchange systems. Whether there was an undermining of social mechanisms which once bolstered traditional exchange competitiveness, or serious local inflation (artificial dogs' teeth being used by the Germans on Manus, for example, sharply reducing the purchasing power of traditional currency),2 the point is that the unsatisfactoriness of traditional economic transactions became so patent, in Brunton's view, as to call for dramatic replacement. Earlier more secular attempts at adjustment, he maintains (yet without needed documentation), lacked 'sufficient inducement to abandon the old system', and thus something more radical and far-reaching was called for to make the break (Bruntonl971: 121). All of these approaches are helpful, although hardly justifying the conclusion that cultic concerns for reciprocity can be limited to the 'economic sphere'. Reductionism is well worth eschewing here, since many novel, latter-day expressions of cargoism simply arrive too late—after many economic vagaries and with traditional exchanges long adulterated—to be explained with reference to crises in traditional exchange. It is also too facile to conclude that it is more the internal problem of exchange than external interference which represents 'the problem' for villagers (cf. Brunton 1971: 126). Among the Tolai, to illustrate, coastal bigmen believed as early as 1878 that their monopoly over the flow of goods to inland groups was being threatened by Methodist mission teachers, who seemed bent on 'taking the 2

Such inflation has also hastened institutional disintegration (e.g. Dubbledan 1964 on the Kapauka).

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trade out of their hands' and this may have been a key reason for the 'Six Day War' against George Brown and his mission in the same year (Purvis in Whittaker et al. 1975: 427; Schutte 1983: 4-5). After so many decades of substantial change in the Gazelle peninsula, furthermore, with the kivung lavurua and other still persisting shorter-lived forays among the Baining in the 1960s (Landi 1975), more recent expressions of dissatisfaction and cargoism cannot be accounted for in terms of an impaired exchange system. Worsley's and Morauta's approaches are more useful for taking in the altercative element of cargo cultism—against the whites, or against more successful, deprecatory villages—but in the rich Tolai-Baining area one can only justify writing of a perceived relative economic insecurity and marginalization. Interpretations will not work unless the 'total' including distinctively religious perspective, is written into the account. Some patently religious preoccupations can overrule what are normally taken to be economic concerns. One movement coming to mind as a kind of test case occurred among the Asaro, in the eastern highlands, and was initiated by Namaviro of Kofene hamlet in 1962. Namaviro's rapid, startling success (with the help of two young 'missionaries') can hardly be said to have resulted from threatened exchange arrangements—which were still reasonably robust—so much as from belief that a sinless life would bring Cargo to those with faith in its coming. 'Cargo houses' were erected in some ten hamlets, often by baptized Christians. They contained altars for offerings to be received by the ancestors, and also beds, on which 'worshippers' could 'sleep at night in expectation of the goods'. If cargo did not come, this was not because followers had not donated enough in any straightforwardly economic sense, but because they had sinned and had need of confessing their sins (to the cult-ambassadors), albeit at the cost of a 20-30 shilling payment at a time. Money was collected by the organizers— for advice as to how one built cult houses, and by way of the above offerings and confession fees—but this was not in this instance taken to be any kind of fund (even though colonials accused Namaviro of wanting the money for himself). For the subscribers, in any case, reciprocity devolved much more around the ethical dimension (future acquisition coming from being morally 'true' and the money sacrifice being more pro forma), and this was an orientation probably affected by what happened in churches. Lo, or the avoidance of sins or tabus, constituted a great pressure on the rank and file, and had little relevance to traditional exchange. Members felt under a terrible threat, like 'a death sentence', if their names were written on a sheet of paper as a serious sinner, or defector. The note of reprisal against whites or outsiders was not strong, perhaps, but it was there nevertheless, consisting only in the 'creation of an altercation', because the leaders wanted to work out a dialectic of transactions with the spirit order without being under the thumb of expatriates, and their high standards put the moral

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standing of all non-members very seriously in doubt. Significantly, and this is as much of economic as of political interest, gardening had lapsed before a Lutheran missionary persuaded the cultists to abandon their enthusiasms, and labourers had not worked in nearby plantations, nor tillers taken their goods for sale to expatriate buyers. But the millenarism here entailed an intense period of waiting, which in itself and in its preparations for cosmic drama consumed all activity. Contra Brunton, we note here that a general moral transformation rather than the mere overhaul of existing exchange arrangements is the prerequisite of a new order of reciprocity. As well, the fact that the coming of the goods was 'individualized' for those spiritually deserving to receive them, and thus also thought to be arriving in (relatively) limited quantities, reinforces impressions as to the balance of interest (SDF 1962-63). Even in its exaggerated way, however, this case as much as any confirms our general dictum: that what characterizes cargo cultism is the integration of 'economic motivations' with lo, ethics and a concern to work out obligations with the spirits. This broad conclusion can be sharpened by viewing these movements as expressions of collective cooperation, and as hopes for a kind of solidarity that would transfigure all previously unsatisfactory socio-economic arrangements. Cooperation Following the effects of pacification, which suppressed warrior corporateness in the old religions, an immediately and apparently more favourable standing by some groups with the intruders (or else a sense of being more cut off) engendered consolidation against other—traditionally enemy—groups. When airstrip-building and airplane landing first occurred at Kainantu, for instance, this gave the Kamano tribes nearest them reason to bolster group power—by disseminating bad news along the trade routes to the south that all pregnant women would be killed because snakes sent by Westerners would enter their vulvae (Berndt 1952-53:52-54). In the course of the colonial period, however, a growing, more general dissatisfaction with blackexpatriate interaction produced a potential for greater cross-tribal cooperation in various regions. Disaffection widened upon the typical failure of the white newcomers to enter into traditional patterns of reciprocations on local terms, but was especially felt upon bearing the humiliations and condescensions from expatriate 'superiors'. Stripped of military pride, it was too easy for adult Melanesians to feel that they possessed nothing worthwhile to match the tools, techniques and truths of the Westerners, and had to be taught about these things like their children who attended the new schools. The wily Matias Yaliwan, for one, realized this lopsidedness could not simply be rectified through an equal access to goods or some economic distribution, but only through a recovery of the sense of identity, a

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re-stimulation of the confidence that 'we are a people of some moment' (Steinbauer 1978: 126-35). Various developments under expatriate control, on Yaliwan's understanding, had made the Sepiks 'nobodies' and thus, by implication, without either integrity or prosperity. While so-called realists might claim a hasty recovery for disillusioned Sepiks through development projects, which would bring available cargo at Wewak township to outlying areas, Yaliwan pinpoints deeper problems and a more embracing 'salvation'. It is a redemption from the apparent absence of worthwhileness, from post-pacification ennui, from the past lack of collective independence, and from confusion over 'white talk' or from the 'non-dialogical' if you like (cf. Habermas 1979: 3). It is a redemption from an unjust disparity between local and expatriate lifestyles, let alone from new village-level inequalities or from anomalies creeping into traditional exchange. Most cargo cult solutions 'for the future' do turn out to form a special species of millenarism, then, in that the new states of affairs they anticipate tend to shed precise limitations, and are usually not trumpeted by highly planned strategies with easily pinpointed pragmatic goals. Cargo is such an 'ambiguous symbol' that it is capable of meaning anything from one stick of tobacco to a brand new society, and the members of those movements which retain lasting momentum, and which make up too large a group to be put down or pressed into submission, often feel themselves to be on the verge of 'a new culture' (time/order). They are, in fact, in the process of 'inventing' this culture; yet, for them it can really only be ushered in by some superhuman force (Wagner 1975: 31-32). Typically crucial for the realization of the more extravagant claims about the future, therefore, is the existence of a committed human collectivity itself, and of the necessity to ensure consolidation, mutual support and cooperation between the expectant members who are often bound by new lo (or supernaturally sanctioned regulative principles for change to the better). One remarkable feature of most so-called cargo cults, especially of the bigger postwar achievements, is that they have been able to secure cooperation between peoples with a prior history of antipathies. The incorporation of a wide following (Wok bilong Yali along the Madang coast3 and into the highlands, for example; the Paliau movement straddling Manus, Usiai and Matangkor interests; Peli throughout the hinterland ranges of the east Sepik; NaGriamel stretching across the ocean from Espiritu Santo in the east), took a leaf out of the Biblical-missionary injunctions to 'sit down easy in fellowship' (pidgin sindaun gut, bung wantaim). The exclusively indigenous spontaneity generating these movements, indeed makes them extremely important as expressions of peaceful cooperation and independence 3

From Bogia and Manam to the Huon peninsula, Lawrence 1964a: 203-15, cf. Burridge 1960: 176-207; Zao 1972; Maburau 1985, on the western fringes, and Wagner 1964: 15-25 on the east.

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at one and the same time. Sinking old differences makes a joint act of defiance more viable, which in turn reinforces the belief that hopes will be truly secured by cooperative concentration. Cargo dreaming has it, moreover, that all cult loyalists or followers be included in the blessings of a divinely consummated fiat, and this very hope is constitutive of 'belongingness', collective excitement, heightened purpose and meaning. Despite the special permissions leaders may have granted to themselves, or the 'bossiness' common to moments of feverish waiting or power struggle, all committed adherents tend to be drawn into a longing for 'a reciprocity to fulfil all reciprocities' and to image a time when 'all is square' (or mngwotngwotiki, to refer back to the highly evocative Tangu phrase (Burridge 1960: 226-27, 260-63). This is certainly a hoped-for time when unbreachable peace, alliance and exchange balance apply among adherents, and not necessarily between these and outsiders (who can be deemed to merit discomfort or destruction). Travelling between member villages of one's own cult, therefore, involved common salutations, hospitality, meetings of welcome, and so on. These were all graces that were fostered by the churches or reflected the mutual protectiveness of small colonial communities, but which now became of cross-cultural import in indigenous causes, and which presaged an entirely new time and order of things. The pressure toward unison, whether it is maximized or not, is the common property of these movements and their most obvious token of positive reciprocity. It is precisely the evidence of such pressure which has led some analysts to the position that cargo cults, at least during postwar years, are cogs of adjustment in Melanesia's dynamic, phase-by-phase progression toward 'real polities', genuine 'development' and the 'modern scientific outlook'. As '(dynamic) community (development) groups' they become 'forerunners of progress' (Walter 1981; 1983, cf. Worsley 1970: 323-29), even groups with 'universalistic objectives seeking cultural regeneration' (Gerritsen et al. 1981, cf. Wilson 1970). They are thereby ranked with 'self-help' or 'economic development' associations, or among 'micronationalist' movements (such as the Tolai Mataungan League, the Trobriand Kabisawali movement, or the pan-Papuan Besena cause), which seek local or regional selfdetermination (May 1982, cf. Gerritsen et al. 1981: 61-80; Raima 1991). While this approach to social change has its value, and has been effectively defended by close work on some of the cults (e.g., May 1975 on Peli, cf. Weinstock 1972; Stent 1977), it probably sets too much store by distinctly political prospects and has not kept up with recent developments in separatist experiments to cultivate special religious (in fact continuing 'totalistic') interests.4 Because concern for kastam or traditional religious 4

See Trompf 1984b: 41, cf. 1983b; Gesch 1990: 218-21, 231-33. This is true of what were some of the more obviously political fronts, which can only survive by appealing to a spiritual solidarity (e.g. Abaijah 1985 on Papua Besena).

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factors are of typically great importance in cargo cults, or more recent movements with a cargoist background, their followers' commitments are intrinsically more parochial and relatively less capable of articulating their positions in terms of familiar 'international categories' of protest (such as 'secessionism', 'regional autonomy') than many (more distinctly) political fronts (cf. chapter 4). Their leaders, mind you, have been quick to imitate modes and techniques of organization which make for the successful mobilization of many peoples. They appoint officials, designate ranks, demarcate spheres of operations, headquarters, and so on, and stipulate that the giving and taking of orders be modelled on the colonials' behaviour patterns, and even 'become churches'. These adjustments are grist to the mill of a new cooperativeness, and they alleviate the shame of starting off as if they had no knowledge of true, non-parochial sources of power (cf. Lindstrom 1990). Thus, cargo cult interest in reciprocity and cooperation is essentially a coupling of religion and economics a la tradition; once this vital connection has been minimalized, as may happen over time, such movements will have become something else: either more 'WesternChristian' or more secular; yet certainly less Melanesian. Participation We have not yet reckoned completely with the reality that—for all the anticolonial and sometimes generally anti-white sentiment in cargo cultism, for all the thirst to acquire goods which are not distributed among majorities by their luckiest, especially expatriate possessors, and for all the desire to consolidate Melanesians in the face of preconceived problems— cargo cultists usually link the presence of the whites with the coming of a total and material salvation. Despite the insufferabilities of Western domination, paradoxically 'the white phenomenon' brought an extraordinarily radical, miraculous-looking break from untold years of stone age existence and of 'worlds set apart' in the depths of the jungle (cf. Hanbury-Tenison 1984: 141-48). The 'white phenomenon', one might fairly exclaim, was already 'eschatological' in implication, or a kind of 'realized eschatology' (pace Dodd 1963), with an Endzeit breaking but awaiting completeness (Trompf 1989a: 46-50). The 'white phenomenon' suggested an immense, cosmic alteration to age-old rhythms, setting the old pasts, as remembered by myth, legend and the customary number of generations, in a far wider ambit. The traditional methods of understanding and managing change, though still with a certain durability, were not equipped to cope by themselves with transformations of knowledge wrought by writing (and records to correct the faultiest memory), or the apparent existence of 'many other pasts' (in Sydney, Berlin, London, and the like), or the differences between stone and steel, palm leaf thatch and

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corrugated iron—let alone plumed warrior 'bird men' and the great shining metal 'birds' that soared off at the whites' will into the sky. The great transformations associated with the so-called expatriates, further, demanded that 'history must begin', whether from the time of the first missionary or explorer, or from some vividly remembered pre-contact event which anticipated, or was connected with the introducers (Trompf 1977b: 70). Whether or not local people saw the newcomers as returning ancestors, tidib or such like, and whether or not their uniqueness could be readily placed in traditional realms of meaning, it is easy to see how the whole spate of marvels could be projected (especially by cargo cultists) into visions of the most consummate miracles of all, waiting just ahead. Thus, with a collectively heightened sense of anticipation, subliminally sustained and always revivable, the 'white phenomenon' had to be welcomed despite the fear, the apprehension, the feelings of inferiority and colonialist 'rubbishing' which often accompanied Melanesian attempts to embrace novel manners and techniques. The long and difficult road toward nationhood and socalled development, in fact, has been all about this preparedness to try out what fell newly available (the proverbial traim tasol of Papua New Guinea pidgin), and cargo cults can hardly be excluded from this history of wouldbe participation. The trouble about most blacks' attempts at more extensive participation in the whites' 'peripheral world' of colonial settlement, however, was that the former found themselves facing characteristic distancing, an unbridgeability created by whites and other expatriates, who almost always refused to identify themselves with indigenous cultures; whereas the blacks wanted more of what was betokened or seemed offered by the new order than could possibly be open to them, even with the wildest feats of European generosity. Complicating this distancing was the palpability that some foreigners were much more concerned than others were with the increased well-being of local people; and the first sermons about conversion and change from the missionaries involved image-building about a better future. It did not take recurrent dilations upon apocalyptic themes to lay bare the rich possibilities of participation (because, despite false impressions, missionaries rarely indulged in arrant millenarism); it was enough to hear word of fairness, sharing, 'brotherly love' and prospects of a much-better-thantraditional world, for dreams of a deeper rapprochement with the whites to be ignited. Hopes for the future there were, and enough wonder in the new situations to persuade primal peoples that 'miracles' could happen, and true participation become possible. However, the social facts made the colonial 'dual system' intractable, and even if missionaries were known to warn against it, even act in defence of 'the indigene', they themselves were susceptible to being identified by the blacks as obstacles (or as inadequately engages with local practice). Very early on in contact history, there were

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those Western commentators who foretold the difficulties of expatriates ever becoming part of the traditional systems of reciprocity and exchange. An early criticism by A. R. Wallace against the Reformed missionaries of Geelfink Bay (north West Papua, now Irian Jaya) (1869: vol. 2, 182-83), for instance, held their commerce with 'the natives' to be dangerous, for they were obliged to carry out the trade principle of buying cheap and selling dear, in order to make a profit, and not conforming enough to native customs (cf. also Kamma 1977: vol. 1, 99-100). Could there ever be a time, however, when white missionaries, especially those married to wives, or protective of Sisters with similar backgrounds, could truly be absorbed into a local, traditional network of obligation? If some may have appeared to succeed more than others, the history of Melanesian missions is filled with details about plantations, cooperatives or church-backed business projects, which inevitably undermined rather than preserved traditionalisms (e.g. Aerts and Trompf 1991: 170-75, 178-84). And as for distinctly religious matters, expatriate missionaries naturally saw themselves in Melanesia teaching their religion, not then being taught by the religious experts of the region. The bearers of the new Evangel came bearing gifts, which were to them far more important than 'mundane' material objects: love, grace, forgiveness, salvation, baptism into new life, sacramental food pointing beyond itself to immortality, and the promise of heaven. In contrast, the vitality of Melanesian religions was expressed more decidedly in actual, tangible things of fertility and exchange rather than in the comforts of spirituality, and what truths or values these traditional religions had to offer was (for most of post-contact history) not very willingly accepted in return. Curiously, too, the Gospel-bringers had their own accoutrements, which were not in any general egalitarian sense shareable among the 'pagans'. It has only been in comparatively recently times that the Catholics, for example, forming the largest Christian mission grouping, have tempered their worship to make it look much more Melanesian— with conch shells blown, tapa altar-cloths, non-Latin liturgies, and so on (following Vatican II Docs 1966: 151). The mission station and its church also normally constituted a world apart, its buildings often beyond Melanesians' architectural dreams and its expatriate inmates living detached from village life (cf. Allen 1927). If grease or pig fat on the shaken hands of neophytes made missionaries' wives rush to the Victorian wash-basin (Oram 1975: 126-28), or if missionaries found it hard to linger in smokefilled huts or allow mud-caked bottoms to sit on their own wicker chairs, small wonder that the (generally outgoing, inquisitive) blacks experienced psychological apartheid from other quarters. Traders, miners, planters and settlers hardly ever avoided the mould of the 'non-reciprocal man'. For virtually every villager who left home, perhaps, who husked coconuts on plantations with metal knives, or hung up the white people's clothes

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in a fenced-off backyard, there were quiet hopes of fostering a confident relationship by which the secret of the Cargo—the books, mattresses, meat safes, and so on—might be learnt. Mixed with the elements of reprisal, then, and affirmations of special identity and exclusiveness, we should not be surprised to discover in cargo cultism a 'quest for partnership' with the 'cargo-creators' who are 'outside the [kanaka] system' (Burridge 1965: 237; van Baal 1981). It is a contradiction more apparent than real that, while the expatriates deserved challenge, accusation, even virtual elimination, there was always the possibility of reciprocation with the foreigner; that possibility was in any case capable of becoming a reality once the Cargo had arrived. Since the new order of give and take to come was to transcend and perfect traditional arrangements, a position of strength and worthwhileness would be given back to its recipients, so that parity exchange negotiations would be feasible with those who were already accessors to the new range of goods (should they still remain part of the cosmic scenery and not be dramatically ejected from it). In the uneven course of colonial histories, the moments of possibility were fairly infrequent. Some periods saw more relaxed black-white relations than others (the great patrol officer Jack McCarthy speaking of prewar New Guinea, for instance, as the halcyon days of friendly barter) (OT: Lawrence 1978). One limited time-span stands out, however, when the possibility of complete partnership and reciprocity with non-Melanesians looked as if it could actually be realized in splendour. I refer (again) to the impact of the American service personnel during the Second World War, especially at its end. Inconceivably vast resources seemed available to the large numbers of military at the bigger base camps of strategic importance— Port Vila, Honiara, Nissan, Rabaul, Saidor, Momote, Wewak, and Meokwundi. Where American troops were excitedly involved in mop-up operations during 1945, local peoples witnessed a mix of military cooperativeness and victory-conscious celebration between blacks and whites from another 'world'. The American (and Allied) forces were not always welcomed, admittedly, because they laid waste villages, even churches, thought to hold Japanese remnants (cf. PIM May 1971: 410-15); but when and where they were supported, opportunities arose at the war's end for fraternization (denied to soldiers in action), including the 'selling of the democratic American way' (OTs: various former military personnel [mainly Santa Cruz], 1974-75; 1982; 1986). What is more, if the chief paradigm of reciprocity—giving—is singled out, the Americans appeared extraordinarily generous. They had dollars to spend, wanted tropical foodstuffs and souvenirs galore and were often at a 'loose-end' to know what to do with their allowances. Under these circumstances, 'surprise and excess' befell the luckiest of the locals, such as my former tutor Caleb Kolowan, who as a child enjoyed seemingly endless joyrides along the double-laned highway

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across Los Negros island from Momote air-base, licking ice-creams in GIs' jeeps before the Americans eventually evacuated in 1948 (Kolowan, 1977, cf. Grattan 1961: 201). Even in not experiencing them, such interactions were the stuff from which fables could be made. The idealization of the Americans as 'true' participants laid the basis of a (further) mythicization of future blessing, with the hoped-for intervention of these new saviours complementing the role of the 'supernatural^. Not unfounded rumour had it during the postwar years, at least in the New Guinea islands, that the United States of America was interested in a territorial foothold in the region (Grattan 1963: 203-05, esp. on Manus), and American missionaries became a common focus of cargoistic expectation (cf., e.g., Miller 1968; Pulsford 1989). The cases of great store set in the Americans by cargo cults are well enough known. Maasina Rule (Laracy 1983: 152, 154, etc.), the 'Johnson Cult' (Longgar 1975) and kivung lavurua (Tirpaia 1975) provide obvious instances from the Solomons or New Guinea islands. To the east, on Lifu Island in the Loyalties (New Caledonia), dreams about America as the paradise of Genesis gave reason for the hope in a Cargo ship from France, to be sent by the (anti-colonial) French Communist Party (Steinbauer 1979: 93-94). Perhaps the most interesting developments in this connection, however, have occurred on the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), on Tanna and Espiritu Santo, where extravagant pro-Americanism took on new significance in Vanuatu's politics of independence. During the turbulent year 1941, within a groundswell of rejection of the Presbyterian Mission, many Tannese expected that the volcano spirit Karaperum, in the person of that elusive being 'John Frum', would bring money, iron houses and new types of food to Green Point in a moment of transformation (Campbell 1974:118, cf. Worsley 1970:162-71). In the following year Tannese clamoured for recruitment to help the American servicemen near Vila, where their eyes were opened to the extraordinary nepwusien (or 'wealth of possessions') (Geslin, 1956: 245-86; Rice 1974: 214). Wartime passed but the sense of suspense still rose sporadically on the island, the Canadian missionaries sometimes capturing imaginations. One year of such intensity was 1957, with Jonfrumist dances, prohibited by the mission, being faithfully attended on Friday nights and acted out—like the Koreri Adventnachten—till dawn (Lindstrom 1981: 105-06). If Jonfrumism settled down as an 'alternative religion' claiming about a third of an otherwise Presbyterian, Catholic and Seventh Day Adventist population, even by the 1970s an underlying belief in America's saviourhood was irrepressible. In 1973 the Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides held its Annual General Assembly on Tanna, and because Presbyterianism was the order against which Jonfrumists had first and most consistently reacted, the church leaders passed a widely publicized resolution calling for the

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political autonomy of the whole New Hebridean group. To counter this move, expatriate French representatives of the newly formed party Union des populations des Nouvelles-Hebrides (UPNH) who were fearful of both the pro-independence National Party and the NaGriamel movement, attempted to organize Jonfrumists against what they considered to be the domination of the anglophone government and missions. All the Union succeeded in doing, however, was to produce a new wave of cargo expectations, which eventually centred around the Italian(!) garage mechanic Antoine Fornelli, the one UPNH supporter who was prepared to stay around while the flood of apparent misunderstanding rolled in! Fornelli, who delivered the occasional speech in bad pidgin (or bislamd), was acclaimed as 'man number 5' who would handle all opposing Europeans with his magnificent collection of firearms, while four Jonfrumist Tannese were recognized as the Four Corners of the four directions who defined the limits of the mysterious Jonfrum's new Kingdom of plenty—of money, cargo, a new hospital, and so on—about to emerge. 'America' remained the key to this extraordinary vision: Jonfrumist males by the score paraded in unison, with the same coloured laplaps, with 'GF vividly painted in red on the marchers' bare chests, and wooden rifles slung over their shoulders (chapter 4). In February 1978 Jonfrumists procured and raised a United States flag for the first time, and in the following year raised and lowered two of them 'with military precision' at 8 am and 4:30 pm each day (Calvert 1976: 214-6, cf. Guiart 1975). Politically, Jonfrumists seem to have let themselves in for French pressure. During pre-independence campaigns of 1975 and 1979, to illustrate, rice-bags, T-shirts, beer, cigarettes, as well as promises of schools and hospitals, were all used to induce Jonfrumists to oppose independence, first by the francophone Union des communautes Neo-Hebrides and secondly by the French Resident Inspector-General on Tanna itself (Calvert 1976: 217-18; Lindstrom 1981: 106-07). This only goes to show that cargoist openness to partnership means vulnerability to manipulation (Trompf 1981d: 20-21). When Jonfrumists proclaimed their own independent Tanna (or Tafea) on 15 February 1980, however, it was evident that they had aspirations for power much higher than just keeping one representative in the Legislative Assembly at Vila. And their concern for an 'ultimate' set of dealings with 'final' sources power has continued to centre on the Americans rather than either on the French or English, despite very recent (though not uniform) Jonfrumist interest in Charles, Prince of Wales, as a saviour figure (Lindstrom 1981: 109). Another ni-Vanuatu case is that of NaGriamel on Espiritu Santo. Whereas Jimmy Stevens's original following was based on 'anti-expatriatism' and opposition to land alienation, by 1975 he was politically entangled with various French colons, with Eugene Peacock (an Hawaii-based

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land-developer), and even with Charles Oliver, an American real-estate tycoon and advocate of free enterprise republics, whose Phoenix Foundation finances coaxed Stevens into rebellious secessionism. With the French not minding in the least, because they had warned Jonfrumist and NaGriamel supporters of an anglophone hegemony at independence, Stevens and Oliver agreed upon the constitution for an entirely separate republic called Vemarana. With its own radio transmission, passports, coinage, flag and a few guns, it was to be a tax haven for Phoenix supporters and the territorial salvaging of Stevens's dissipated cause (SH 11 July 1980: 1-2; Larmour 1982: 142, 144). Stevens, however, had 'betrayed the faith' of those wanting to redeem their land, and by accepting participation with foreign elements only too willing to use him, he became a tragic stooge (Trompf 1980c). This vacillation or apparent contradiction between opposing one kind of outside interference yet welcoming another shows up elsewhere. It has something of the nature of traditional shifting alliances about it when we see that a choice is being made between one source of succour and another, and the endemically Melanesian concern for reciprocity comes into play once the choice is acted upon and both parties seek rapprochement. Back in Papua New Guinea, recent Peli affairs nicely exemplified this. The acceptance of the New Apostolic connection has meant that 'gift-giving with the Canadians has become mutual', as Hawina put it. The Canadian missionaries arrived bearing gifts—mainly watches and transistors—and now all local church service offerings are supposed to be sent to the mother church in Canada, whence greater and larger blessings are expected to flow (OTs: Hawina 1981; Malone 1983). The vulnerability to white exploitation is obvious again in this case. People can be persuaded to be generous if they believe riches are around the bend, as when the barely contacted Daga (in the Milne Bay Papuan highlands) gave much of what little money they had to the T. E. Osborne missionary Foundation in the 1960s. Handing out leaflets writh a coloured cornucopia yielding up cars, radios, houses, money, and so forth, on the cover, the Foundation's message was that God would keep his promises to those generous in giving (OT: Cruttwell 1977). In the 1970s, before adopting Nui Apostolic, many Peli supporters in the Sepik had already paid into an Australian bonanza chain-letter, which was supposed to result in a flood of Australian dollars into their region—though nothing came of it. But 'the testing of the waters' in terms of reciprocities need not be interpreted as a sign of 'native suggestibility', because exchange initiatives, in the Negrie-Yangoru as in other cultural complexes, were integrally related to initiatory rites and gradings (Gesch 1985). Experiments in economic or material-spiritual participation with the whites, just as with the adoption of churchiness, or the new confidence to lapse into a freer,

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spirit-changed worship of the Christian God (as in 'Holy Spirit' movements), can be viewed as rites de passage (cf. Barr 1983a; 1983b). They are attempts at collective 'baptisms' into the new order; but with ambivalence. The welcoming of partners in cargo cultism, to be sure, is selective, and the Cargo is certainly not expected to derive from those who only deserve opprobrium and reprisal. It is time to explore how the recriminatory and concessive aspects of cargo cultism interrelate, at least in a given case, and to analyse the reflective modes of these religious movements in greater depth.

CHAPTER 6

Wishing and Explaining the Extraordinary

As in part I, space is needed to exemplify further how Melanesians have logically integrated and correlated the negative and positive faces of requital, and to do so in this second part by dealing with a so-called cargo cult. I have chosen the Pomio Kivung of New Britain, strong among the Mengen along the coast and hinterland on the north-eastern side of the island. As with the mountain Orokaiva Sangara (chapter 3), the choice is dictated by the availability of enough ethnographic data by which to analyse this integration, and to relate it to the reflective dimension of 'cargo religion'. I have detailed the historical background to 'the Kix/ung' (or 'Movement') in another place (1990b), and it suffices here to state that the Kix/ung emerged in a region experiencing relatively little interaction with the outside world until the Second World War. A Catholic mission was established near the important village of Malmal on Jacquinot Bay (from 1931), but the impact of its personnel—the Sacred Heart appointees being mainly Irish—was superficial. While the Christian God tended to replace the volcano deity, talk about Jesus got mixed in with stories of Nutu Ewalo, the younger brother/hero of Mengen myth, and concern to secure the support of the ancestors remained very intense (cf. Panoff 1968). Reprisal and the search for redemption and partnership interrelated— the case of the Pomio Kivung A cluster of cults preceding the Kix/ung's emergence in 1963 reflect, first, bitterness over sharing so little of the developments experienced on the Gazelle peninsula to the north, and second, a desperate hope that something dramatic would happen to improve the Mengens' lot. In 1959 taxes 259

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were collected for America, in the belief that American forces would return to their wartime base in Jacquinot Bay (SDF 1959). In 1960 a 'classic' outburst occurred. In all-night Koreri-like dancing the performers' 'skin felt very hungry for cargo' and, through a sacrificial destruction of all newstyle goods—'tomahawks, knives, laplaps, bags and boxes, money and [head] tax receipts'—cult participants were confident that the returning ancestors, as 'soldiers of Jesus' would enable them to 'live like whitemen' in a new order and to deprive local detractors of the imminent benefits (SDF 1960). This excitation became known as the 'Thursday Cult' because Thursdays were held to be sacred, and it was centred on the northernmost Mengen villages. It is against this background that we can better understand the emergence of the Kivung at Malmal and other eastern Pomio villages. This movement goes back to 1963, when one Bernard Balitape of Kaiton village attempted to form an organization in advance, and in rumoured anticipation, of the coming of a hero figure from much further to the west. This was Michael Koriam Urekit, in whom Bernard saw the promise of Cargo. Certain principles of Bernard's new grouping were home-grown, admittedly, and preceded Koriam's influence. Bernard looked to the miraculous sudden involvement of the Mengen ancestors, for a start, conceiving them to be the creators of Cargo; and, like the villagers further up the coast, he insisted that Thursday was the sacred day. But for Bernard, Koriam was the teacher of the way by which the secret of the Cargo would be unlocked, and he had already endowed Koriam with semi-divine qualities before his actual arrival in the vicinity of Malmal itself. (SDF 1965[?], yet cf. Tovalele 1977: 126). Who was Koriam? Intriguingly, not a Mengen, but a very prominent figure among the Arawe-Kandrian culture to the south, and an Ablingi islander whose earlier, varied experiences in Rabaul, and acquaintance with Paliau Maloat, make up an interesting and as yet untold story. Very significantly, the influential Koriam campaigned as a blackman worthy to stand beside and against any expatriate candidates in the pre-independence parliament of Papua New Guinea. Contending for the elections in 1964, he was welcomed among most Mengen as the (super-)man who could satisfy their frustrations and open the road to the new wealth and a new order of life (Tovalele 1977: 124, cf. SDF 1964 [?]). Strange rumours went before his campaigning—that he received special power to overcome his own serious sickness in Rabaul, for instance; that he was dropped by police from an aeroplane into the sea with a stone around his neck, yet suddenly arrived ahead at the very airport of the plane's destination itself—and his appearance at virtually all places in the Pomio sub-district was heralded by the slogan Masta San bai i kam ('Lord Son/Sun is coming') (OT: esp. Polekaman 1981). This last phrase implied he was Jesus, or a figure like him. Certainly, many took him for God's special agent.

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The idea of him as Son was linked by some with Vurakit, a veiled Mengen spirit, who (like the Morning Star among the Biak) would grant riches and every wish if one happened to be able to catch him (Maden 1977: 13), but most villagers came to identify him with the young, heroic Nutu. Up to this time the Christian God was conceived to be quite separate from local spirit beings, referred to as He was in sermons and liturgy under the euphonic name Deo (cf. Capell 1969: 44). The incorporation of the term 'Nutu' for God into the service sheets of the Mass, however, altered that local resupposition. Nutu was a name cognate with similar names used for God down the eastern and southern New Britain coasts (and on to the famous Anut of the Madang area), yet since Nutu was in Mengen terms a young hero, and also associated with garden fertility and general prosperity (Patre 1977: 2-3), the new usage facilitated Koriam's apotheosis. For, in being identified as Nutu, he combined the roles of Cargo herald and divine figure. Mounting adulation swamped all traditional tendencies to be cautious. Carried around on a stretcher, both before and after his first successful campaign, he bore a message about the securing of wealth and the ordering of spiritual (or moral) life. On the one hand, he insisted it was necessary to create a regional fund (just as Paliau had argued), an investment to handle future needs and to bring dramatically increased wealth, and a fund through which membership of the Kivung (as he named it) was recorded and confirmed through payments. This was not out of tune with the socalled cooperative movements popular at the time (even if he thought of himself going 'one better' cf. Cranswick and Shevill 1949; Snowden 1983: 128), and was coupled with (Nutu-like) suggestions for the better organization and upkeep of gardens. On the other hand, he taught strict adherence to the Ten Commandments and, although advocating this as a 'straightening of thought and life' (stretim tingting) which was sufficient to indicate one was a Christian (for one was expected to abandon magic, sorcery and betel-nut chewing at least), his statement of the new lo could be squared quite well with the values traditionally taught in the villages. The fact that he was an independent message-bearer made him appear to be someone whose cause superseded that of the missionaries, who had not yet been able to get through to the people in the way this new hero could. In Koriam's initial message, however, there seemed little for missionaries and their loyalists to worry about, for he was extolling the Ten Commandments, and also confirmed Sunday to be a holy day. For all Koriam's apparent ingenuousness, however, as a spokesman for improvement on these very basic terms, he nonetheless filled out his message in pidgin ambiguities which lent themselves to high anticipations of some grand transformation; and he himself was susceptible to being sucked in and made party to the cargoist hopes pinned upon him. There were

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forces within the Mengen culture area, in any case, waiting to radicalize whatever anti-expatriatism and spirit of independence was entailed by the new groundswell. These forces surrounded Bernard Balitape, who was bent on consolidating local fervour and aspiration with an organization. By 1965 there were 'compulsory meetings on every Monday night [to] inform members of all the laws and commandments. No questions raised by members [sic]'. The leadership included Bernard as Headman, and Alois Koki of Malmal as Vice-President (Koki later becoming the regional representative in Papua New Guinea's independent parliament). Apart from the promulgation of Thursday as a 'public holiday', Bernard insisted on each interested village laying out what was termed 'Koriam's Garden', a huge plot of eight different plants (mostly food crops, but including decorative and fertility-associated croton bushes), with the plants being set out in orderly fashion around a spotlessly clean centrum known as the 'Ten Commandments'. Morning prayers were to be said collectively by members in these gardens; and guards were appointed to watch them at night, because, on Bernard's cargoist interpretation of Koriam's talk about better food production, the dead were to convey important messages from these special plots. The first laws of the Kivung were framed: a fine of one (Australian) shilling if members were absent from Kivung gatherings; graded fines to cover wrongdoings of one member against another; a tax for Koriam's travel; a special fund raised 'for Koriam's benefits' (which more or less corresponds to Koriam's own requests); and 'a fund raised for dead people to come back to life again' and to return via a specially cleared pathway out of the gardens (SDF 1965[?], 1967; Naingis 1977, cf. Panoff 1969b: 22-25). Bernard's policies, furthermore, turned out to contain a greater element of reprisal than his hero's. Cooperation with the Catholic Mission was discouraged; the Thursday holiday, just as important as Sunday as a time for expounding the Commandments, flew in the face of assumptions government officers held as to the days local Mengen workers should be found at their employment; and primary teachers saw their schools virtually empty, first on Thursday, then still more frequently on other days, the more Bernard's opposition to the influence of all government institutions increased (cf. Rath 1980: 29). Partly because of Koriam's various comments about the differences between Tolai advantages and the lack of change further south, but especially because of Bernard's training of emissaries to pressure more and more villages to join the Kivung and to subscribe to the policies of his 'central government', Mengen and Sulka labourers in northern (Tolai) and southern (Hoskins) plantations were asked to return home, and hundreds of would-be members left their former (often isolated mountain) villages to join Kivung centres on or nearer the coast. These developments naturally stirred the administration (SDF 1966-67; Panoff 1969b: 2224), but government pressure only brought Koriam closer to

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Bernard, whose organizational powers were remarkable, and whose admiration for Koriam led the latter to believe that his ideals would be best realized on Jacquinot Bay. In keeping with local images of bigmanship, moreover, Koriam and Bernard were eminently adept at enshrouding themselves in an aura of mystery of double-talk, thereby also acquiring a status to match the Westerners (cf. Valentine 1963; Mayers and Rath 1988). By 1975 the movement had captured the support of eighteen out of thirtyseven major Mengen villages; of the remaining nineteen, ten were divided in their allegiance. Of the 25 000+ inhabitants of the Pomio sub-district, over 8000 could be counted on as loyal adherents. Rather than to the south, moreover, and toward Koriam's birthplace, growth had been much more to the north, incorporating Sulka and Baining villages (along the northeastern coast of New Britain). The base of cooperation, as we have seen with other movements, was considerably widened; Koriam had changed the place of his major residence. He had a large dwelling built near Malmal, which he favoured while not in parliament at Port Moresby (as the recurrently successful candidate), until his death in 1978. For almost two years, between Bernard's death in 1976 (significantly on a sacred Thursday) and his own, Koriam found himself vulnerable as the leader of a cult he had not strictly speaking organized into existence. Imputations that he accepted his supporters' claim that he was God (= Nutu), and a court case airing strange Kivung views, which was initiated by a competing, yet unsuccessful candidate in the 1977 election, reached the national press, and preceded his death as a member of parliament in office the following year. After that, Bernard's brother Alphonse was in prominence for about a year, until Koriam's more hard-headed political successor Alois Koki and the ultra-secretive 'religious frontman' Kolman Molu edged the movement towards greater respectability. If Alphonse had once engineered the building of an airstrip to receive Cargo in a moment of miracles (near Malakur), threatening the life of the local Papuan schoolteacher into the bargain should he interfere, Koki and Kolman tended to concentrate on the collection and left it up to the tumbuna (ancestors) as to when they should return (Trompf 1990b; 68-69). Over the two decades of the Kivung's heyday the retributive principles underlying the leaders' strategies have remained manifest and basically consistent. Expressing its political disaffection first by a separate local council (called Kaunsal Tumbuna or 'Ancestral Council') in 1964, the Kivung has settled down as an anti-Tolai, anti-[neo-]colonial lobby group, with representation by Koki in the national parliament and by others in the East New Britain provincial legislature. While there is now no talk of the need for a completely alternative form of government, the Kivung claims to govern its affairs better than any other set of institutions, proclaims that all governments should keep strict adherence to the Ten

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Commandments, and sanctions the work of younger, politically minded adherents (the Pomio Tru Grup), who dissociate the Kivung from old cargoist taints and window-dress it as a political force with the highest moral ideals (e.g. Bailoenakia and Koimanrea 1983). One of these protagonists, Francis Koimanrea, was elected to parliament in 1992 and became minister for health. As for more distinctly religious matters, steadying disillusionment with the mission (partly connected with six changes in parish priests at Malmal Mission since 1962, just before the Kivung's advent), has congealed into a special 'neo-Jewish' separatism. Various better-informed members disown the term 'cult' (or halt), because the Kivung is a 'total way' as much to do with subsistence activities as with special rituals, for a start; it is probably fairer to characterize it as a special 'new religious movement'. It is not strictly speaking an independent church (its leaders not seeking this status), although the stress on the Old Testament Commandments (the Latinate capital numerals I-X painted prominently on eight-foot-high village entrance posts), is reminiscent of African ecclesial independencies with a strongly Hebraist touch (cf. Turner 1967b). The ancestors have figured as the prospective Cargo-bearers through the whole history of the movement, however, and while Koriam is a 'Jesus figure' identified with Nutu, his name is listed as the first of the ancestors on the decorated, eight-foot-high poles in cemeteries. It is in setting open hope on the dead, with loud drummings signalling their offerings to them in the evenings, that the Kivung most noisily flouts Catholicism. The lo of the Kivung leaders places heavy social pressure on those wavering over their allegiance or thinking of defection. The Ten Commandments have been interpreted to reinforce a centralized control. Not only is the Fourth understood to refer to Thursday as well as Sunday, and others (enjoining honour to one's parents, the tabu against killing, and so on) consciously related back to Mengen ancestral or customary gavman, but the Tenth (concerning covetousness) is stretched to cover sinning 'in the head' before acting. Confessions of sin have been demanded in evening rituals in the presence of the ancestors (since the late 1960s), and roughly graded fines extracted by leaders from confessors have been ritually paid to the dead for remission (cf. chapter 5). These financial impositions, as well as taxes for Koriam and the fund, fell on villagers much more rigorously than Koriam had earlier proposed. Failure to comply resulted, first, in portents of adverse judgement (with the Mengen phrasepotong, 'I advise you...'), and then in threats of very bad consequences—fines, ostracism, divine punishment, or even reporting to the (outside) government and, thus, gaoling. Both the legal stringencies and the demands to give were integrally tied in to the retributive principle that blessings would not flow unless the new rules were obeyed. Lo, significantly, denoted more than negative requital.

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It also signified the breaking in of the new time of the Cargo (7o bai bruk'), which was a time set in advance in cycles (for example, 1964, 1968-69, 1971-72) and thus in some accord with the rhythm of traditional festal occasions—when masks such as the urasena were worn at initiations, or at the honouring of those with blackened teeth, and so on. In 1971, indeed, at a time when hopes of cargo ran high, Koriam was feted to a large and enthusiastic 'life-cycle' ceremony. All such activity, it seems, amounted to new commitment to the old belief in the efficacy of positive reciprocity with the dead.1 Virtually every night, and especially on Sundays and Thursdays, gifts of food and money, along with confessions, were regularly given to the ancestors. By the mid-1970s, each member village possessed a cult house for this purpose, linked both to the cemetery and so-called Paradise gardens by specially known tracks; later in the decade each village erected a colourfully decorated store-house, in which the Kivung's collections could be safely deposited before they were added to the central fund (Trompf 1990b: plate 2). All these local collections were distinctly cultic and sacrificial, and acts of reciprocation to entice the physical return of their ancestors. While not actually bearing the Cargo, the dead would be able by a mere wish to bring such items as tinned foodstuffs, boats, houses of permanent building materials, and so forth, into sudden realization. A city as big as New York, they imagined, would replace Malmal. By contrast, though, the management of the steadily growing central fund reflects increasing realism in Western terms, if not a (paradoxical) eagerness to participate in the wider world of bisnis. Interestingly, the Kivung turned out earlier on to be a competitor against what (complete and non-Melanesian) outsiders might reckon to be a viable economic proposition, namely a Cooperative Society, opted for by various non-Kitrung villages in 1964. However, the slow demise of this society down to 1979 boosted the Kiwtng's finances. By 1977 the movement had saved at least K100 000, and by 1982 over K244 000 was in a Rabaul bank (with K33 000 invested in government security bonds). Even if Bernard had appropriated a good deal of money for his own purposes (unbecoming for a key upholder of the Commandments?), the growing fund after his death came to symbolize a sound economic stability for the future, and a proud achievement in no way contradictory to the members' longings for a supernatural intervention. In earlier days, members had a sense of participation in the whiteman's money-making fashions through the issuing of bank pass-books, which were treated as 'passports to the 1

Here the data relate to discussion by Kempf (1992) on episodic time among the Ngaing followers of Yali (cf. also McDowell 1985), although he shows no knowledge of my discussion of Eliade's work on time and cargo cultism (Trompf 1989a; 1991: 198-201, cf. Eliade 1965:126-40), or of work on rhythm in the time-consciousness of traditional societies (e.g. Ricoeur 1985; Swain 1993).

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Cargo'. But by 1978 Kivung members were persuaded by Alois Koki (currently custodian of the fund) to embark upon what must stand as the grandest piece of participative reciprocity in the history of all the movements we have been analysing so far: generous donations to help in both national and international disasters, with R6000 to the Papua New Guinea highlands famine relief, and R4000 to the Brisbane flood victims, Australia (SDF 1979). Using the money this way quite evidently 'betokens the leaders' desire to enter into reciprocity with powers which have large financial resources', and which may hopefully choose in return to bestow their benison upon the Kivung (Trompf 1984b: 44). Predictably, the Kivung has been prepared to put money into development within its own region and on its own terms (but in 1974 the national government rejected their offer of R26 000 to build a new [and first] high school in the Pomio area, as a dangerous compromise); predictably, too, the Kivung leaders turned their backs on East New Britain Provincial Government pressure to provide financial succour for earthquake victims on the Gazelle in 1985 (Trompf 1990b). The Pomio Kivung, to summarize, reflects a fascinating combination of reprisal and concession towards the agencies of change. It incorporates within itself many of the forces we have been analysing from a wider mass of data. Whether in confrontation or subtle withdrawal, it wreaks quiet vengeance on the 'officials of interference'; it defends the right to punish its local detractors. Yet, the stringencies of its lo, as well as exploration it makes of possible reciprocities with agencies quite outside its jurisdiction, are part and parcel of expecting the new order of positive payback—of rewards hailing, above all, from the returning dead. There is a recognizable structure and inner consistency found in this movement's logic of retribution, and it both encapsulates materials studied thus far and leads us on to consider more distinctly epistemological issues. Eschatology as explanation Melanesia, in the exceptional lateness of its contact with the outside world, has been witness to the extraordinary encounter between the longest standing inheritors of the Stone Age and modern humanity at the highest point of its technological achievements. We have already made reference to some of the transformations of the last hundred years, and much more is to be said under the heading of 'modernization'. Wherever we turn, so many marvels have made up the aftermath of the 'Second Industrial Revolution'. From windjammer to jumbo jet; from the wide verandahs of settlers' homes in the bush to air-conditioned 'skyscrapers' in the cities; from milking the missionaries' cows to powdered or long-life milk from supermarkets; from Morse code to satellite television and to one of the most sophisticated telephonic systems in the world (at Lae); from folk-cures and

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the allaying of sorcery fears to the dispensation of wonder drugs; from barter markets to multinationals and cash flows; from the armed representatives of the old bastions of empire to the elected members of autonomous national parliaments: where does one stop in epitomizing the 'Great Alteration' over the last few generations? Much ink has been spilt over the subject of so-called 'primitive' responses to these dramatic happenings, or to 'the Cargo' which is the concrete embodiment of 'new change'. A debate persists, for example, between those who interpret cargo cultists' attitudes and activities to be rational (at least under the special circumstances presenting themselves) (e.g. Jarvie 1964; Lawrence 1964a: 222-73; Worsley 1970:274-80; Kilani 1983:5-29), and those who maintain the stance, partly reminiscent of old talk about the 'Vailala Madness', that cargo cultism is a species of unstable, pathologic or psychotic behaviour (e.g. la Barre 1970: 238-48; Burton-Bradley 1973; 1974: 659-60). Tending to favour the former view, although less concerned with the rationality/irrationality debate as such, are those scholars keenly interested in cargo cult ideas as worked-out messages, relatively systematized (if symbolic) thought, careful plans for action, a species of problem- or puzzle-solving, or else 'statements of (a) truth' in their own right (e.g. Merton n.d.; 1968: 91-95; Burridge 1969: 56-73; Strelan 1977; Carpenter 1976; Trompf 1989c). Per contra, other writers labour points about primitive people's higher levels of suggestibility, on their proneness to exaggeration, hyperbole and fantasizing, or the likelihood of their behaviour being very unusual by Western standards when they are ill, or without proper diet, under the influence of drugs, or in utter desperation (e.g. Sterly 1965: 21218; Brozek 1978; and see chapter 3). In this section, however, it is not my business to discuss the explanatory capacities of cargoist thinking as a broad topic, let alone cover almost everything of psychoanalytic interest in its content. Here I am not addressing broad epistemological questions either, as to whether traditional Melanesians could frame generalizations or not, or could think 'objectively' or only 'mythopoeically' (e.g. van der Leeuw 1936, cf. Lawrence 1968; Kilani 1983: 49-61). Taken in en route as these general issues may be, my concentration will remain on the theme of recompense; this time showing how cultists' explanations of their local (and cosmic) situations turn chiefly on a stressed distribution of blame and praise, with the recent dramatic events being conceived as the results of powerful, living agents who can wreak vengeance and bestow blessing. Since all cargo cults, by definition, project the coming of Cargo, they convey messages about important transactions in the future. Almost without exception these pieces of information foreshadow a scenario in which cult loyalists will come out 'on top' and the alleged or genuine enemies of their cause will suffer. As already intimated, the logic of most situations in a pacifying Melanesia was that armed protest against colonialism was

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highly inadvisable and in any case often came to be taken by Melanesians themselves as an unwanted reversion to the 'dark' past. The audacious, warrior-oriented religions of tradition had already been hobbled, or to put it another way, half of their make-up—those constituents directly to do with warding off enemies—had been driven underground. Cargo cult is both a symptom and consequence of this emasculation. Retaliatory inclinations of a physical kind had to be redirected or sublimated. So, since the whites steadily rose to be the would-be manipulators of a new order, as an unusual mix of foe and friend, strategies and images of appropriate reprisal altered accordingly. Powerless as they were before the 'white might', the moment of reprisal—usually of a reversal adverse to whites and favourable to blacks—was projected into the relatively near, if not imminent future, and the enactors of the coming transformation were never exclusively the living humans who sought liberation. The living required a succour which was supernatural enough—via their powerful ancestors, or even from the Jesus they had recently welcomed—to overturn the apparent invincibility of the mastas, or to melt the implacability of their introduced systems (Trompf 1990e: 64-73). In such projections there are already implicit explanations. The events of transformation ahead became necessary because the events of the past have to be accounted for. Because what has happened is of such momentous significance, the recent past has already become extremely portentous, bespeaking what lies just ahead. At the end of a relentless, cycle-oriented, lithic order of existence, which suffered no drastic, persisting series of changes really comparable to the 'white phenomenon' (but only sporadic eruptions, cosmoenvironmental catastrophes, and so on), the breaking in of the 'new time'— from its dawning in the first sermon of some missionary under a shady tree on to its stranger manifestations of machines, money and suburban multitudes—was already 'eschatological' (chapter 5). It was already an unmistakable 'End'; there was already enough taking place for Melanesians to realize that stupendous, cosmic events had already begun to happen 'for them and for their salvation' (to use the appropriate mission talk). Elements of incompleteness and ambiguity were admittedly entailed, and presaged fulfilment and clarity, precisely because so much of the introduced systems during most of colonial times was not fully accessible to local peoples. Melanesians have more than often felt deprived of full accession even in the more distinctly religious sphere, seeming to be on the outer rim of some deep truth or undivulged secret. In this way what was already transformative, already beginning to be outcomes for the blacks themselves, was conceived to be ('supernaturally') intended for them in completeness at some point ahead. The missionaries' message of hope for future Christian communities nurtured such a promise; as sometimes did the remarkable proleptic insights of traditional prophets preceding or during contact

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situations. Also important for this was the traditional endemic assumption that material items and well-being were primordially organized by spiritforces and finally in their charges when it came to the results and harvests of the future. But, before all else, it was the overriding and unequal domination of the intruders over the new modes and products which evoked eschatologies and, however home-grown and bizarre many of these futurist dreams may appear, one may readily grasp how the visible presence or relayed reports of wonders could lead some to imagine that many more extraordinary things were on the way. Those who took each day as it came, perhaps, those who learnt discrimination between divine miracle and human technical achievement, or were taught by their missionary mentors the folly of millennial agitation, acquired a greater realism. Yet, we dare not say that the dreamers and local apocalypticists were irrational, and that in their heralding of transformation they made no cogent, persuasive points. The very projection of change in itself, as we said, presupposes that some explanation of prior events and situations has already been given, and we should not be surprised if some of these explanations are intricately wrought. Such explanations usually take the form of 'story' or 'myth'. While not wishing in the slightest to deny the reflections they provide of the unconscious and the dream-like, the cosmically significant narratives commonly called myths are crucial for all cultures simply because they contain explanatory content or suggestion. Whether or not they allude to some removed, primordial time—to events in Mo tempore, as Mircea Eliade's chosen phrase has it—they almost never fail to disclose by some means 'why things are as they are' (Trompf 1989c: 621-25, cf. Lawrence 1984: 33). Predictably, cargo cult myths turn out to say something about 'the problem' to which the given cult addresses itself, carrying within them both intimations as to why 'the problem' is or came to be as it is, and how it will or can be removed. In some circumstances myths central to cargo cults remain traditional myths barely touched in the re-telling, but a new and special significance is put upon them in the light of colonial events. Such was the case with the Bilalaf myth appropriated by the Fuyughe prophet Ona Asi (chapter 4). There, a stori about a primeval catastrophe becomes a statement about the cosmic danger in dealing with the whites, the hint of this new meaning in the myth itself being provided by the single additional detail that the giant serpent severed by the villagers went charcoal black, and the interpretation being left as a separate cultic teaching by Ona (Trompf 1981b: 27, 50). Such also was a similar case with the most crucial myth behind Wok bilong Yali, which was never revealed to the movement's finest interpreter Peter Lawrence. The most secret of all Ngaing myths concerned an enormous 'cosmic' tree, the long trunk of which bent across the earth from its roots in Ngaing country to the source of all fecundity, somewhere in

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its distant branches. In the occult recounting of this myth among Yali supporters, the clear implication was that the source was the same for traditional fertility and the Cargo alike, and that the whites had found some way of blocking the flow of riches (Silata [forthcoming]). Because neither one of these traditional myths has been seriously tampered with, we note, then eschatological or futuristic content is absent; it is left to their exponents to warn about 'the white danger', to project the imminent in-flow of wealth and the dismissal of the trouble-bearers. In other instances older traditional myths are revamped—by a kind of bricolage as Levi-Strauss would put it (1972:16-21)—or adapted from introduced biblical stories, or virtually created afresh through dream inspiration or alleged revelation (Stephen 1979b). With these it is more palpable how they serve a cult, often specifically reflecting the teaching of its guidingstar and putatively, or at least temporarily, superseding older mythic expressions as the truth about current emergencies. Peter Lawrence has provided easily the most arresting examples of this kind of development. According to his account of the 'Second Cargo Belief in the Madang area (ca. 1900-ca. 1914), for example, a new emphasis was given to the myth of Manup and Kilibob, the two culture heroes whose exploits have been described earlier (p. 172). Despite their concern to outdo each other, the two would eventually be reconciled and 'return to usher in a period of peace and plenty', after they had ousted 'the Europeans' (Lawrence 1964a: 71). According to the 'Third Cargo Belief (ca.1914-ca.1933), by comparison, Bible characters figure in a story of Cargo lost and Cargo regained. God took the Cargo from mankind after Adam and Eve's disobedience and Cain's murder of Abel, but gave it back to them through Noah after the Flood. Ham, however, one of the three sons of Noah, broke a tabu by beholding his father's nakedness. He was the ancestor of the Madangs, and God was so angry with him that he withdrew access to the Cargo. The story proceeds on to an eschatological resolution. If only the Madangs carry out the missionaries' instructions and find the right relationship with God, then the Cargo will arrive—very shortly—at the Last Trump (Lawrence 1964a: 76-78). In this second myth, the traditional Manup-Kilibob cycle has been apparently pushed into the background in favour of a Christianlooking drama of salvation, although in both these sacred narratives the central concern has not altered: overcoming the problem of Cargo withheld. In these and in most other cargo myths, moreover, the futurist, often apocalyptic-looking resolution, the projected cosmic intrusion so worth awaiting, is as satisfying in explanatory power as the recounted details of events leading up to it. What is 'postulated' for the future, in any case—as is typical of these Melanesian movements—is located in a mythic prelude-time, or a period of suspense, just before the occurrence of the great Transformation. Both

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the transformation and its portents will be relative to the degree to which cosmic horizons have been widened (by mission talk, et cetera). In that light 'eschatology' is being used here typologically to embrace all those senses of expectation that the old will never be the same again, but will radically improve—suddenly and imminently. The world has become pregnant with some wondrous new birth, or certain moments of superhuman initiative. And in these cults it is not only myths which betoken such a time, but paradigmatic actions by leaders and loyalists, group enthusiasm and psychic intensity, as well as the kinds of logical principles assumed or enunciated as appropriate to the extraordinary circumstances foreshadowed. Some reflections should now be granted these matters in terms of retributive logic. The logic behind cargo cult activities is typically thus: if the right moves are made and rituals performed, the spirit powers will bring the required blessings. If the road of access to the Cargo is blocked, the barriers will be removed by the actions; if the spirits themselves are not yet willing or simply waiting to be liberal, the action will cajole them. Extract but the death-bearing American markers away, to take Yaliwan's famous 1971 arguments, and God and the ancestors will be free to restore fertility to the region around the sacred Mount Hurun. Place comparable concrete markers on one's own ground—as Yaliwan has done both at his hideout and near a very large, highly decorated house built for him off the Sepik highway—and it will show that the movement has control over the dangerous forces of infertility. Yaliwan's strategies elucidate the general scene. In enacting what is more patently a ritual, whether neo-traditional or quite newly devised, the presumption is that such procedures will, and do, work results. The logic is not so bounded, however, as to preclude the experimental dimension. It is typically alleged that someone has found the answer—Yaliwan the key, Yali the road—and of course it is no use going about the ritual with a non-committal air. There is usually already something about the rituals which makes obvious sense and is quickly persuasive to the participants: the visual link between the shape of a mushroom and the axe-head it was supposed to become in the Mur episode, for instance, or the common association of fecundity between rituals involving sexual intercourse and the generation of Cargo. There also has to be a strong consensus about them among a nucleus of followers in order to at least attract interest and a wider support group. But cargo cult rituals, it seems, because they are performed in contexts without traditional precedence and are in pursuit of goals never before attained by the same means, are inevitably 'tests'. Traim tasol, in any case, is hardly unknown as a working principle of ritualism in Melanesian traditional religions. Whatever substance there may be in distinguishing between highland and seaboard religions, moreover—claiming the former believe spirits are less certain of responding

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to rituals while the latter can automatically manoeuvre them into action (Lawrence and Meggitt 1965, cf. Chowning 1975; Gell 1975: 218-21; Lewis 1980)—cargo cultists were confronted with circumstances too special for the contingency of failure not to be taken into account, at least in the minds of leaders. To that extent the element of experiment was inevitably incurred. On the one hand, then, there is the call to test the spirits in faith. The missionaries had commonly incorporated in their Gospel the injunction to 'give God a chance', and to 'try Him out'. T u t me to the test', was the text of a sermon I remember vividly in Rabaul, and you will see that I will open the windows of heaven and pour out on you in abundance all kinds of good things. (Mai 3:10) And extravagant cargo cult hopes thus chime in with the mission call to an implicit faith in supernatural succour. Then again, there is a typically sectarian quality about cargo cults, such that followers are urged to believe in the 'absolute certainty' of claims being made about the way out of the human predicament (cf. Boerwinckel 1953:23; Toch 1988:116-17). The most effective leaders magnetize support with charismatic attraction as messianic types, as cosmically significant, able to measure (or skelim) all things on the earth or even appear equivalent to God (Lanternari 1963; Rice 1974). Perhaps the intense clinging on to the new tenets and the new leadership can have much to do with depression and cowering before colonial overlordship, not only among people 'nervous, and twittery, jumpy [and] wirehung' after some punitive expedition (Grimshaw 1910: 224), but among societies in which the desperate need to replace lost integrity and initiative has been building up more steadily to a pitch (Lacey 1971). Perhaps there are psychotic features, especially leaders' delusions of grandeur, which require proper emphasis; and there can be no doubt that Melanesians who were extremely anxious about their own status, even bordering on self-hate in the face of black-white disparities, could have compensated themselves by claiming to. possess all-power out of a deep necessity (Burton-Bradley 1965:29). But there is also a cognitive, logical content in such extravagances, since unless extreme measures are taken, and such animus given to the extraordinary, the results will not manifest themselves.2 On the other hand, few religious leaders or prophets throughout history have failed to inject the conditional factor into their affirmatives, insisting that unless certain conditions are met, the rewards of embarking on the spiritual paths they taught would be negligible; cargo cult leaders form no exception to this rule. Typically, as we have seen, some of kind of sacrifice is required of members (by way of financial donation, or this along 2

Here I deny, therefore, that apparently extreme beliefs can be reduced to psychology alone, as if the content and at least symbolic truth of the tenets are redundant. On this I concur with Southwold 1979: 628).

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with confession of sin), or else participation in a great sacrificial rite already under way. Sometimes an extreme sacrifice is required, even leaders themselves being presented as ritual victims. On Rambutyon Island in 1946, for example, while the Paliau movement was emergent on adjacent Baluan and south Manus, a certain Muli proclaimed the coming of a cargo ship, but asseverated it would not arrive without the sacrificial death of his brother Wapei, whose beheading would be quickly followed by both his own resurrection and the vessel's climactic appearance; a tragic case (Dietsch 1977; Jumogot 1983, cf. Schwartz 1962:249,270). Twenty-five years later Yaliwan offered himself as the first human sacrifice for the event of 7 July 1971, when the American markers were to be removed from Mount Hurun (PC, 17 May 1971). Although this particular motif was subsequently withdrawn, such human sacrifices have been enacted or mooted in cultic contexts elsewhere (e.g. Burton-Bradley 1965: 28; Yagas 1985: 21). The stretch to such extremism is integral to retributive logic. No rewards are to be had out of the new circumstances, no reciprocation with the spirit order ratified, without a strain to the limit. By analogous token, unless the prescriptions of the cult are kept, the presaged blessings will not fall. According to warnings by sorcerers pushing the Mekeo Filo cult (1941), for instance, those who went to garden during the moments of tense waiting would be turned into weeds; those who hunted, into pigs; those who fished, into the fish themselves (OT: Soariba 1984). Indulgence in normal life constituted deviation from the pressing task, and augured failure. In some cults, as we have seen, the cultists themselves would do such punishing by their new /o, and not leave it to the spirits. Those who made gardens during the time the Cargo was anticipated, according to the Kopani cultists (central Bougainville), were to be hung by the wrists (Sipari 1986a: 36). In other cases, the punishment for rejecting the cult was projected as future and in the spirits' hands, but humanly vicious in nature. Kaum, leader of the 1944 Begesin Rebellion, for instance, announced that a terrible war would precede the Second Coming, and during this war God's soldiers were to mete out brutal penalties on those not within his movement (Yagas 1985: 19). Following parallel principles, but with less threatening implications, is the case of the Peli followers who buried wooden cases in the artificial cemetery at Malimbunja. They were instructed that, upon digging up the cases, unless they (or at one stage an appointed virgin) went home with their eyes fixed to the front, not quivering either to the left or the right, money would not be found in these containers at the other end of the journey (Gesch 1990: 221). In this last situation, there is a very great temptation to suspect that facesaving devices accompany cult promises. And, of course, nowhere are they more evident than when the forecast transformation fails to materialize. When the Cargo does not reach the shore or landing strip, explanations

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have to be provided to stave off disillusionment, disappointment, and possible danger to the predictors themselves. Significantly, the common resort of leaders trapped by this 'cognitive dissonance' (cf. Festinger 1957) is to blame someone. Perhaps the leaders will single out individuals who are culpable. Just as Filo allegedly witnessed Jesus descend to place a gun on one of her altars, for instance, a man approached who was too eager to snatch it for himself (and for his own undesirable designs?). 'OK', said Jesus as a result (according to Filo's reminiscences), now that your people have not followed my instructions and have done this thing to me, I shall now bring all the things back, the gun, money and clothing (Fergie 1981:100) and all the things I promised you. Upon the dashing of hopes, to go on, prophets or prophetesses have been accused of experiencing faulty visions (rarely of lying). To such accusations there have been given various and common answers: that someone in the group has secretly committed a serious wrong and marred the promising work; that sorcery has been employed by someone when it should have been abandoned; that the people have only themselves to blame for not being worthy or for not following instructions so that the spirits are displeased (e.g. Worsley 1970:69; Tovalele 1977:126; Teske 1983:121-24). Rarely is there talk of the Devil; that is perhaps indicative of the common Melanesian propensity to locate the cause of a group's worst fortunes with its human enemies, and in various cases the treachery of the whites is emphasized, if they are thought to be diverting the Cargo for their own ends, or if colonial officials actually put down a movement before its dreams could possibly actualize. The analysis of what goes on in the minds of people when what they are 'certain' is going to happen does not transpire is far from easy. As far as logic is concerned, the best work invokes the plotting of group or leadership rationalization over time, and that takes both pains and inside information. The Manus scholar Polonhou Pokawin has shown the way with his reflections on the events of Christmas Day 1984 at Lorengau, a day portending to be important for the regeneration of Makasol or the Paliau movement in general, when hundreds of Paliau's supporters, together with interested persons from Lorengau itself (including public servants, academics and teachers on vacation, et cetera), were told to expect a dramatic occurrence on the waterfront. It so happened that a ni-Vanuatu man—Tommy Ndrokas, who married a Manus woman from a line of Makasol supporters—claimed a traditional gift of calling dugongs by 'telepathy'. It was in the confidence that a demonstration of this man's extraordinary powers would reinvigorate interest in Makasol, that Paliau called for a great gathering on the Lorengau beachfront to 'welcome the dugong'. Like the nautilus, the dugong had become a symbol—in this case of contact with sources of hidden power.

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The broader context of the gathering should be made clear. Since 1983 Manus had possessed its own provincial government, but due to misappropriation of funds by the Manus premier, the Papua New Guinea national parliament exerted a constitutional right of (temporary) suspension. Paliau and the Makasol group in advocating a quite alternative (third-level) political order (chapter 4), naturally took the suspension as a justification of their cause. On 19 September 1984, for instance, when the provincial government was closed down, Paliau turned up at the assembly offices looking to collect keys, and standing ready to take over the reins of power. If at that time he was turned away, the Christmas Day dugong calling was to mark a fresh turning-point in his favour; and his flock, wearing their T-shirts with slogan 'Paliau Maloat 1946; Like Fire He knows the Way' converged on Lorengau for the Christmas noon 'miracle' in the bay. The implication of this event was meant to be same as the brief interchange in September; Paliau gave it out that he had known in advance what was going to happen. The logic behind his positioning was his ability to say 'I told you so'. Subsequently, he was to predict that if the national parliament did not reconstitute the provincial government (by the projected date of 18 March 1985), the stage would be set for ushering in the 'revolution' he had long championed. Some of his supporters have taken Paliau's recent knighthood (granted 1991) as part fulfilment of these political projections (Swain and Trompf 1993). As it happened, on Christmas Day the dugong did not arrive. The mixed crowd waited for over two hours, but in vain; and in the end it dispersed disunited and caught between sheepishness and vexation. Pokawin's plotting of changing explanations among the Makasol leadership on this occasion is enlightening, and the upshot is classic. The first consensus had it that the dugong was not arriving because the tide was too low; as time went on, a second line was that, with the tide too low, the dugong was caught between reefs in a bay further around the coast. The third and final view preceded the dispersal: the tide, being so low, made the dugong vulnerable such that it was caught and killed by Makasol's opponents. Someone, in the end, was to blame (OT: Pokawin 1985; PC 20 Sept. 1984; W 23 Feb.-2 March 1985: 6, cf. Lawrence 1964a: 162 for a comparable example elsewhere). The moment of collective anticipation we have just considered, admittedly, was not that of classic cargoism; but, even with the new setting of power-jostling in a 'modernizing' Manus readily acknowledged, the essential structure of the situation is the same. It is a structure in which acts of expectancy and explaining affairs are integral. People wait. In their hopes we already find explanations about who is right and who wrong, who to be rewarded and who penalized. And in any eventual disappointment concerning these hopes, or following the occurrence of anything

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constituting a gain, however small, the expectant ones show they would rather not lose face in the eyes of others, and go on explaining to their own satisfaction why the world has not yet been turned upside down, or why some small shift in their favour is of cosmic significance. It is easy to see why churchmen have solidly challenged this kind of reasoning as 'false logic', and why it would be all too tempting for trained (especially Western) analytic philosophers to dismiss all cargo cultism as wrongheadedness (Scharmach 1953: 1; cf. Strelan 1977: 91-92). Phenomenologically, however, cultic ratiocinations have to be understood. They include explanations which themselves need to be explained if intercultural communication is to go on and social problems solved. Explaining dilemmas and puzzles Many of the traditional explanations for trouble, sickness, death, and their opposites, as well as for the alleged condition of the dead, have persisted through the colonial period and into the present day. As we shall show (chapter 9) they now sit side by side with, or are often replaced by, more patently Christian or Western interpretations of such events. There is not much in cargo cult and related 'ideologies' which represents a distinctive contribution or new set of developments meriting detailed analysis in this connection. The only special crystallization worth mentioning is the belief about the collective return of the dead, a belief integral to retributive logic insofar as the ancestors are often the projected bearers of requital in the cultists' interests. Now this notion of such a collective return, especially in some moment of transformation, is far from easy to find in traditional religious repertoires, when historically researched (Trompf 1979c: 134; 1990b: 46-47). Certainly, there was group recognition that the ancestors were gift-bearers. As early as 1889, for instance, Bishop Navarre noted that the Roro villagers on Yule Island (coastal Papua) looked to the distant inland as the place from which the dead would bring them increased wealth (MSC 1888-89: 90); and as recently as the 1970s various Roku (of western Papua) held on to their pre-contact view that all gifts from outside their region, including stones for their stoneless swamplands brought along trade routes from the west, were initially made by the dead up in the sky realm (OT: Tapari 1976). Looking to the collective reappearance of the departed ones, however, seems to have been inspired by the diffusion of talk about the General Resurrection and the Last Judgement, and was drawn out by the urgency of each preconceived predicament. Of more outstanding interest in cargo cult thinking, however, are various fascinating efforts to account for the whole 'colonial disruption' and its consequences. If the 'new time' brought its dilemmas and puzzles, Melanesian reasoning was at work to make sense of them through a stock

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of retributive principles—and with relatively more time for local people to do the thinking, too, considering the dissipation of war and the impact of steel tools on labour time. The perceived logic of any situation, admittedly, was not always baldly expressed through listing sets of actions (such as broken tabus, right or wrong ritual procedures, and so forth) that incurred a listed set of appropriate results. The more interesting cases, in fact, have messages about rewards and punishments being conveyed mythically. Cargo cult ston contain within themselves clear indications as to where the Source of power lies (which usually amounts to the Source of 'the good' and 'the Cargo' as well). In their unfolding they indicate who has been rewarded in the past, and why, as well as whether and why a working out of desserts will apply in the future. Here we recall that many stories have been floating in separation from the outgrowth of cargo activities. Some of these have an almost purely explanatory function in showing how the whites have come to fit into the cosmos. On the southern side of Irian Jaya, to illustrate, we find postcontact myths making it plain that the people who mattered, or sometimes indeed all people, however different their looks and ways, originated in the local cosmos. Among the barely contacted western Asmat, for example, a widely accepted narrative circulated by 1952 about two women who survived a great flood. They: visited the dry land by means of an aeroplane which they made with their own hands. In the country of the whites they took the names of Maria and Wireremina [Queen Wilhelmina] respectively. From the former descended Jesus and the mission, from the latter the Dutch government; these two authorities really had their points or origin, therefore, in the land of the Asmats. (Nevermann et al. 1968:108) With people in Mimika further west, somewhat analogously, local creation myths had it in the 1950s that: administration, Christian religion, trade, and all Western culture-goods had their origin there. After the creation the various nations of man [sic] separated, and each developed along its own lines, so that the native and the stranger came (Pouwer 1955:276, cf. OT: Pouwer 1984) to be greatly different.

In both these instances, however, the myths do not serve or possess association with any cargo cult that is significant in itself, because the myths are more incorporative than retributive in implication. For the Mimika, we note, it was more important to recognize and arrange a compromise between 'two worlds', since the whites, like their own black forebears, were descendants of the original Mimikas and had chosen to return and settle in the land of their distant fathers. Other 'mythological macro-histories' comparable to these are not so tame. In the revamping of myths belonging to the Manup-Kilibob cycle

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(from the coastal Madang area), for example, we are told more definitely about the local people's foolishness in the past; yet, also about the change of 'moral situation' which justifies their redemption in the future. According to one of the myths preserved in 'Second (Madang) Cargo Belief (ca.1900-ca.1914, under the Germans), as Peter Lawrence demonstrates (1964:100-03), the deity and culture hero Kilibob secretly built a steel-hulled ship which was 'immeasurably superior' to the traditional-style canoe made by his brother Manup. Kilibob then provisioned his own vessel. He stocked it with native men, artefacts, and food plants. According to some informants, he next created European cargo and white men, took them on board and hid them below deck. When all was ready, he left Karkar (Island) for Madang and the Rai coast. At each of the major villages on his route he anchored and put a man ashore, offering him the choice between the two types of material culture he had created: between a rifle and a bow and arrow; and between a dinghy and a native canoe. In each case, the native rejected the rifle as a short and useless lump of wood, and chose the bow and arrow because it was lighter and easier to handle. He rejected the dinghy because it rocked in the choppy sea, and accepted the canoe which, with its outrigger, rode steady and firm. (101)

According to some versions Kilibob went on and left the whites in another country, giving them the provisions in his vessel, which 'the natives had forfeited because of their own stupidity'. In other versions (70) he found the whites in their own country and gave them the cargo on his arrival. The implication is plain: the Madangs have only themselves to blame for being without the Cargo. They committed the kind of cosmic error which, as we have found with myths in various Melanesian cultures (chapter 3), brought about mortality. This more passive explanation, however, which at once accounted for black-white differences and yet conceded that the whites were simply fortunate enough to have everything their way, was almost bound to give way to a statement coupling the interpretation of the past with the promise of future rectification. Significantly, with the 'Third Cargo Belief (ca.1914-ca.1933), as one Garia (Lutheran) version has it, the blame was now projected on to the more cosmically significant mythic figure of Ham. The solution to the Madangs' problem, however, was thought to lie with the missionaries, who came to relieve New Guinea of its darkness—to 'undo Ham's mistake'—and provide access to the Cargo (Lawrence 1964a: 76-77). The myth managed both to unravel the puzzle of the differences and to suggest an answer to the dilemma. When the adoption of Christianity did not invoke the arrival of Cargo, however, the intrusion of a retributive sting against the whites was sure to follow. It came with Tagarab's wartime 'mythological macro-history' in which Manup and Kilibob turn out to be Satan and God. Having already noticed the millennial and retributive thrust of Tagarab's teaching

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(chapter 4), it behoves us to fill out the ideo-mythological bases of his position. Manup, in his view, was really Satan, who held the local people in his power after his invention of sorcery; Kilibob was good and he possessed an engine-powered steel ship as he sailed down the coastline, although (as with the First Cargo Belief) the Madangs all stupidly preferred traditional artifacts to the cargo he carried with him. Kilibob sailed on to Sydney, leaving his ship, and from there went to hide in Jerusalem 'for a hundred years or more' (we note here the signs of temporal and geographic acculturation), and the whites, who desired to possess his vessel or others like it, could not find him. Kilibob now decided to become the God of the Europeans. (They called him God but the natives were to call him Kilibob). God-Kilibob's first act was to appear to Moses in or as the Burning Bush and give him the Ten Commandments. The people ... were to live soberly and amicably together. Moses relayed these instructions to the Europeans, who obeyed them and were accordingly rewarded with gifts of cargo. Jesus came later, but his importance lay in being the 'guardian of the spirits of the dead' after being sent as God-Kilibob's son. The New Guineans, however, had been left in Manup-Satan's bondage 'for a long time', because of God-Kilibob's anger, but now the latter's attitude was changing. He had sent the missionaries; yet, because they had failed to tell the truth—that God and Kilibob were the same—he was now coming in person, in a ship full of European goods and munitions, to 'drive out the Europeans, missionaries included' (Lawrence 1964a: 100-03; Trompf 1989c: 629). Once more the black/white differences are explained, but now the blame falls far less on the Madangs and much more on the supra-human manipulations of Manup-Satan; and as for the rectification, it now entails the 'just' redemption of the blacks and the punishment of the deceiving whites. In the passage of time, of course, the Europeans were not expelled, mission influence deepened, and no supernatural intervention—whether in the form of the ancestors, God-Kilibob or Jesus—transpired. Yet, the process persisted of both explaining differences and working out the retributive implications of affairs. Beig Wen's way of adapting lines of thought current in the postwar Yali movement to the 'Salvation History' he had picked up from Lutheran missionaries is a most significant recent shift. Whites and Madangs have their separate plans of redemption (chapter 4), and thus any differences between the two simply arise from the fact that the spirit order has fore-determined two separate, fitting and parallel patterns of development toward a future goal. On Beig's view, Jesus returns for the Europeans, not the kanakas) the local Madangs are awaiting the return of their ancestors, and what will automatically mean Madang for the Madangs, or the redemption of the land by its own people as a whole, when the township and all evidence of expatriate intrusion is wiped away (Trompf 1976).

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Similar motifs and devices to the ones we have traced in the Madang narratives can be uncovered from a mass of post-contact mythologic materials around the region. We learn of Kapaour attempts to trace the blacks, Chinese and whites to the three sons of the same ancestor, a piece of (Irian Jayan) bricolage which is at once 'Kapaourocentric' and pointedly levelling (Nevermann 1938:24). We hear of fascinating Huli efforts at subtle spiritual 'one-upmanship' in identifying their ancestral hero Bajabaja, the good and perfect man, with Jesus. This is done by means of parallel stories, since Bajabaja, who was unjustly killed, gave his shed blood to fertilize Huli soil, with relics from his person (pieces of his hair, bits of his clothing) still being preserved as talismans (in the southern central highlands) (OT: Maiaga 1985). In Paliau's oral Longpela stori bilong God, delivered on the Admiralties, and more recently in his written Kalopeu, we find a re-casting of the spiritual journey in the Bible to justify kanaka spiritual independence and to implicate the white interferers in treachery. Somewhat like Beig, but this time combining traditional with Biblical conceptions, Paliau pictures the Adamic paradisal time as one with many people (ancestors) who 'never got hungry, never had to work hard, or grow old, get sick and die'. The time is coming when, instead of the work of 'King, Government and missionaries', and despite the influences of Satan, the first lost taim will be recovered (Paliau 1982: 4, 14, cf. Schwartz 1962: 252-60). In John Teosin's paralleling of the careers of Jesus and the culture hero Mattanachil (on Buka Island) (chapter 3), by comparison, we see both a satisfying explanation and the element of payback coupled together, with the implication that the Gospel is not really meant for the islanders after all (Trompf 1983b: 56). In a less traditional and somewhat Adventistinfluenced independent church further east, on Malaita, we discover how the island's great ancestor Beldigao has been transformed by some into a wandering Israelite—Moses Levi Solomon—who was a lost tribesman successfully eluding the ancient Assyrians. According to members of the socalled Remnant Church (with a following among the Langalanga, etc), Beldigao made his way to Malaita via Fiji and New Britain. Something of a Morone-figure (if the parallel with Mormon mythological macro-history can be accepted), he revealed to the islanders in the earliest time of Malaitan history the 'true law of God'. But over time the people forgot what he had told them about the Ten Commandments, and strayed away from the truth into their kastam. As a result they sank into the misery of savagery and ignorance. Eventually the expatriate missionaries arrived, but their truth was partial (and they certainly did not keep the Sabbath on Saturday, which Remnantists take as seriously as Seventh Day Adventists). Only with the dramatic spiritual experiences and preaching of the Malaitans Christopher England and Zebulun Sisimia does the 'true law' get revealed again (Maetoloa 1985: 137-42, cf. Ouou 1980; Trompf 1990e: 72-73).

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One could go on multiplying examples, but there is already evidence enough for our conclusions. Integral to cargo and other transitional movements as collective acts of reprisal, and as quests for partnership and revamped reciprocity, are fascinating intellectual exercises in the interpretation of events and the legitimation of group causes. One central rationale for these logical exercises is the collective need to work out who has been and who will be rewarded and punished, and why. In assessing how a retributive logic has been perceived behind cultic narrative or expressed openly in cult ideologies, we are better able to understand the motivations, rationalizations and justifications of new religious movements in Melanesia as phenomena in the ongoing history of payback. That history, as we shall now see, is by no means over.

PART THREE

'Modernization'

'The conquest of the earth, which mainly means the taking it away from those who have a different or slightly flatter nose than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.' Joseph Contrad Heart of Darkness Tor good and ill belong to man alone, when he stands alone on the other side of death, But here upon earth you have the reward of the good and ill that was done by those who have gone before you.' T. S. Eliot, Chorus from The Rock

-

• •

International border District border (Irian Jaya) Provincial border (PNG) Capital of Countries Provincial Canitals

P A C I F I C

O C E A N

MANUS <»

NEW IRELAND

BISMARCK SEA

SOUTHE HIGHLANDS

I PAPUA i I NEW

mtm I

AMAFUMA SEA

WESTERKx Kundiawa; Goroka **: nnui tune >" ..'EASTERN I '"' HIGHLANDS /

AUSTRALIA

Map showing modern provincial arrangements: the main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands (key opposite)

285 KEY TO MAPS PART III Modern provincial arrangements: the main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands (opposite). Location of cultures: the main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands (overleaf); the Solomons, also showing modern provincial arrangements (overleaf); Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu, also showing modern territorial arrangements (overleaf). The cultures are those referred to in Part III: shown by number on the maps, they can be identified from the accompanying key (below). Note: The Index of Melanesian Cultures provides an alphabetical listing of tribal cultures. 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Moi Biak Sentani Dani Oksapmin BimimKuskusmin Wassisi Arapesh Ilahita Arapesh Negrie-Yangoru Iatmiil Buna/Angoram Murik Lakes Nubie-Awar Bogia (Sepa, etc.) Manam Kridime Middle Ramu cultures Trans-Gogol Begesin, Simbai Garia Bilbil Ngaing Hube Timbe Kabwum Wain/ Ngarawampum Wompa (Laewomba) Atzera Mumeng Gadsup

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Bulolo (Karin) Wai (Biangai) Waria Binandere (Orokaiva) Jaua (Orokaiva) Koko(da) (Orokaiva) Gereina Maisin Wedau Kalaume Trobriands Dobu Daga Massim Misima Suau (Kwato) Dovaraidi Keveri Mailu Hula, AromaVelerupu Rigo Motu Koitabu Koiari Gabadi Nara Roro Mekeo Kuni Fuyughe Tauade (Goilala) Kunimaipa

64 Toaripi-Moripi 65 Elema 66 Kerewe/ Goaribari 67 Purari (Kapuna) 68 Wiru 69 Yombi (Kutubu) 70 Homan (Kutubu) 71 Bosavi (Kaluli) 72 Kiwai 73 Samo 74 Gizra 75 Debere 76 Daba 77 Min 78 Ningeram 79 Huli 80 Foi 81 Kewa 82 Mendi 83 Enga (Ipili west; Mae, Tayato - central; Kandep, Laiapu, San - south; Kyaka - east) 84 Melpa 85 Kaupena 86 Erave (south Kewa) 87 Wahgi 88 Chimbu 89 Chuave (fringe Chimbu)

90 Siane 91 Bundi 92 Asaro (Kama, Unggai) 93 Bena(bena) 94 Fore 95 Kamano 96 Taiora 97 Agarabi 98 Finingitu 99 Ponam 100 Manus 101 Loniu (Matangkor) 102 Rambutyon (Matangkor) 103 Mussau 104 Nalik 105 Tolai 106 Baining 107 Taulil 108 Sulka 109 Kove 110 Sengseng 111 Solos 112 Kopani 113 Nasioi 114 Santa Isabel (Cheke Holo) 115 Toa[m]baita 116 Raga (Pentecost Is.) 117 Fiji groups

P A C / F / C

Location of cultures referred to in Part III (key p.285)

OCEAN

N

287

LOCATION OF CULTURES

Santa Cruz Is.

EASTERN DISTRICT

(above) Map showing modern provincial arrangements and location of cultures referred to in Part III: the Solomon Islands (key p.285) (below) Map showing modern territorial arrangements and location of cultures referred to in Part III: Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu (key p.285)

CHAPTER 7

Recrimination—in 'Modern' Guises

Four Melanesian nations achieved independence during the later decades of the twentieth century—Fiji in 1970, Papua New Guinea in 1975, the Solomons in 1978 and Vanuatu in 1980. In those sectors of the region which have remained dependent (Irian Jaya [or West Papua] being an Indonesian province and New Caledonia, a French colony), there have also been internationally publicized campaigns, even military action, for decolonization during the 1980s. The journey from tribal separatisms to nationhood (let alone pan-Melanesian alliances) involves massive changes in consciousness. It is a voyage accompanied by much questioning, a reorientation of cosmic pictures, adjustments in values and prejudices, and a discovery of new 'truths' along with discarding or modifying the old. All this has everything to do with religion. Since traditional cultures remain virtually indistinguishable from religions (Geertz 1975: 88-125), it is natural that the typical Melanesian response to the unprecedented social changes of the colonial era should be 'new religious movements' (Turner 1977, cf. Mair 1959). But then, missionization was a key element in these changes, and no consideration of changing consciousness and values as preparation for the embracing of national independence can disregard the massive effects of missionary (especially Christian) activity (Trompf 1991: 139-87). The introduction of the colonial powers' inherited religion into traditional societies, in fact, is a key factor in the processes called 'modernization' (cf., e.g., Lerner 1956; Apter 1965; Black 1966; Weiner 1966; Singer 1972; Chirot 1977; Higgott 1983). To make achievements in 'modernity', however, implies more than religious change, because 'secular', technological, economic and political developments are understood to be modernization's primary constituents. 288

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289

Part of the problem for analysis here, too, is that the processes of so-called 'secularization' (often thought to undermine traditional societies pari passu with modernizing tendencies), reduce 'the distinctively religious' to but one component in social morphology (cf. Margull 1965; Wilson 1966; Shiner 1967; Fallding 1967; Lemmen n.d. [1960s]; Hill 1973:228-51; Trompf 1977d; Martin 1978: 12-99). In the modern sphere the temporal and secular are divorced from religion, at least in common Western perception and, thus, the traditional unity of religion and culture is threatened. On the other hand, traditional religious diversity (and social atomization) is replaced by cross-cultural movements of universal pretensions (mainly by Christianity, but occasionally by other importable 'universalisms'), yet these in turn have not been co-extensive with the introduced package of 'introduced civilization' as a whole. Christianity, then again, was a universal faith with institutional divisiveness. Its various denominations were quite capable of producing regionalisms (with consequent inter-regional competition, even tension) and at the local level Christian presence often spelt new disunities (converts differing from traditionalists, protagonists for one mission working against those of another, reacting cultists opposing the rest, and so on). Thus, religious choice or pluralism has come to manifest itself as a further weakening of tradition and a suggestion of modern trends. The constitutional preambles to independent Melanesian states may place their realized nationhood under (the Christian) God (LF 1979: 22; PNG 1975: 1; SIIO 1978: 145; CRNH 1980: 3), but these countries also guarantee freedom of religion and separation of church and state after the fashion of modern 'secular' nations (cf. Martin 1978: 70-73; Fingleton 1982: 332-30). Now, despite the disintegrative potential of 'modernization' and the possibility of new scientific, technological entrepreneurial and political outlooks dissolving traditional cosmic orders (Berger 1969: 105-54; 1979: 101 -12), the Melanesians' ways of adapting to rapid social change have been characteristically religious. The new, manifold attempts at meaningbuilding and the hive of collective activity which have gone into the remarkable processes of adaptation are very much the stuff of which religions are made. If, let us say, we were to regard so-called ideologies, the forwardplanning of politicians and the business 'spirit' in modern Melanesia, as independent motivating forces, capable of being abstracted for the purposes of assessing their effects, we would find them as expatriate-introduced devices which are not taken in isolation by most Melanesians, but absorbed into religious frames of reference (or epistemologies). Here, Christian frameworks are not the only ones meant, since the lineaments of traditional religions hold on even despite the acceptance of Christianity or the impact of strikingly different modes of living. Culture cannot be destroyed except by genocide and, thus, Melanesian cultures have had their documentable effects on the expressions of Christianity in their midst and on the way

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imported modern modes of thought and behaviour have been handled. Given the very extensive interchangeability of traditional religion and culture, moreover, we can look for the ways in which Melanesian religion has endured even within the Christian churches (cf. Barker 1990b), as well as in other quarters—in parliamentary corridors, in business and public service offices, on sports fields or at hotel bars—which seem to epitomize modernity and the post-traditional style. The so-called cargo cults have already provided the clue, for a start, that the most heightened of Melanesian hopes (as they have sporadically manifested themselves) have been for 'total salvation' (Talmon 1966: 159); and far from this salvation being merely 'spiritualized', its hallmark is economic and political ease. It is the pretension of this last part, though, that the intricate shifts of consciousness in modernizing Melanesia are probably best understood and analysed by documenting and reflecting upon the adaptations of retributive logic. Having explored the dimensions of this logic in traditional and protest religion, it is time to reveal those changes in its forms and applications which are relevant for independent nationhood and the embracing of international or universal styles. What has happened to the traditional configurations of negative and positive reciprocity, we shall now ask, and how have Melanesians come to explain significant events in their lives if they are becoming more imbued with Christian teachings and even live in urban settings? Considering our analysis of cargo cultism, can we speak of modernization's 'success', and has there been a general epistemological transition towards the 'modern scientific outlook? Has 'payback' become transmuted into a crucible of ostensibly non-traditional materials, or do primal modes of thought, and the languages upholding them, prevent such 'free movements of mind' that universal, let alone secular(ist), world views are forever circumscribed by tribalist principles? (Bowra 1966: 14, cf. Whitrow 1989: 12). Is the Christian outlook (when reviewed generally over the last two centuries) more secular in its expressions of retributive logic than in any small-scale traditional religion (Trompf 1977d: 212-17, cf. Horton 1967; 1982; Millar 1973), or are some 'earthly' pragmatic cultures already closer to the modern ethos of this-worldly gain (Lawrence and Meggitt 1965: 19-20, 24, cf. Finney 1973)? Do retributive logics manifest themselves the less when in secular guises or when modernization is most obvious? What, indeed, are the new complexities of retributive logic, when 'traditional', 'Christian' and 'post-Christian' (or secular) values present themselves to Melanesians in 'competitive concurrence' (Trompf 1989d). To manage the utterly diffuse body of data before us, it makes sense to begin with the forms of (negative) payback most clearly connected to the agencies of modernization, before asking how those traditional (and transitional) expressions of it already considered have been reasserted in dramatically changed or different settings. Not that we can draw some

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ready-made line between traditional and modern behaviour, even between indigenous and introduced thoughts; for, any act of retaliation by a Melanesian in an entirely non-traditional context (a luxury hotel, for instance) can hardly be deemed modern just because the surroundings have glass and concrete, and the agent wears pants rather than a penis gourd. Besides, revenge, reciprocity and explanations of significant events are human or cultural 'universals' (see Preliminaries), and so one has to be cautious about the way epithets 'traditional' or 'modern' are to be pinned on basic patterns of human instinct, emotiveness and rationality. We must, however, naturally begin with the effects of the missionaries and 'Christianization', precisely because these have borne the most massive changes in Weltanschauungen tending towards modernity, and have redefined the limits of negative retribution most markedly. The 'sinews of sectarian warfare' and related matters The missionaries, whether of European extraction or those Polynesians and Ambonese who were trained by Europeans to work in Melanesian fields (e.g. Sinclair 1982: 7-16; Moluccan Church 1987), generally abhorred the use of violence. Not a few of them, in fact, died as martyrs at the hands of those for whom pacificism would have seemed an absurdity or a crime (e.g. Murray 1885; Yonge 1874: vol. 2,566-79; Gutch 1974:150-60; Langmore 1974: 105-25). In earlier years, certainly, a few missionaries had recourse to guns, but it was quite against their purpose to kill people with them. A rare exception is the Reverend Dr George Brown's punitive expedition against some Tolai in 1878, after the 'murder' of the Fijian Reverend Sailasa Naucukudi, but Brown was disciplined by the Sydney Methodists after such drastic action (Powell 1883: 128-35; Brown [1908]: 259-79). The earliest South Sea representatives of the London Missionary Society (LMS) were issued with rifles, which were used to frighten off 'hostile natives', not just hunting; but men, such as the Rarotongan pastor Tauraki, lost their own and others' lives to payback raiders (in 1887) for not shooting to wound or kill (Lovett 1914: 296-97). With the slow pace of pacification, rifles could still be found in missionary hands up until the Second World War; in one American Lutheran report of 1938 there lies the confession that two Kridime warriors might have been shot dead in the Adelbert Mountains (hinterland Madang) when, after the Reverend J. Mager succumbed to an arrow wound, his companions felt forced to do some 'well aimed firing in self defence' (Flichler et al. 1938:7,14). But such actions by Gospel-bearers were rare indeed, since a prime object of pioneer mission work was to replace traditional warfare by instilling peaceableness. The degree of mission influence on pacification was hardly uniform throughout Melanesia. In areas where colonial administration and business

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were rapidly established (as in Rabaul and Madang, 1885-1900), the political forces of law and order were being vigorously imposed as the missionaries continued to settle in (Jaspers 1981; Bade 1989). In areas considered too dangerous for non-violent evangelists, administrations preferred to establish a patrol-post system as (in Fuyughe and Goilala country, 192040) (Sinclair 1969: 24-27; Trompf 1981b: 31), or tame such an area as the Wahgi Valley with the threat of lead and steel (before 1947), to avoid unnecessary martyrdom and facilitate subsequent mission work (chapter 4). In these situations traditional warfare ceased more by 'secular' force than 'spiritual' persuasion, the missionaries supplying back-up rationale as to why such cessation had been necessary and was worth maintaining. Where missionaries saw the brutality and exploitation of officials and settlers compromising their message, they were bound to dissociate themselves from a 'perverted colonialism' as much as from unacceptable local traditions, and thus to act for the protection and betterment of 'the natives' conditions'. They were known to oppose the deprivation of education and coercive labour recruitment (faced by the Tolai, Baining and Taulil, for instance, Jaspers 1981; ToBurua 1981; cf. Hempenstall and Rutherford 1984: 134-50), 'blackbirding' with its exacerbation of depopulation, and the predatory seizure of island outliers by traders (especially in the Solomons, Hilliard 1967: 271-80, 329-31, 346-48; 1969; 1978: 62-79). After early and isolated Wesleyan missionaries to Fiji had to deal with cannibal feasts at their very doorsteps (cf. Hogg 1966: 23-34; Garrett 1982: 279-86), they put up resistance to the involvement of gun-running settlers who turned tribal into what looked like 'civil' war by 1873; so that missionary pressure was quite crucial for the 'voluntary cession' of Fiji to British two years later (cf. e.g., Morrell 1960: 117-33). In very many cases, however, missionaries explored and pacified regions before secular authorities made their presence felt. This is especially true of the 'foundation period' last century (cf. Garrett 1985: 33-35). Aside from Wesleyans in this position on Fiji, there were German Evangelicals Ottow and Geissler at Doreh Bay, west New Guinea (1855-61), John Paton and his Presbyterian successors in southern Vanuatu (1859 on), LMS South Sea teachers in the Papuan coastal fringe (1872 on), George Brown among the Tolais in 1875, the Lutheran Johannes Flierl and his predecessors in and beyond Finschhafen in 1886, and the Anglican Copeland King in 1891 (e.g., Geissler in BM Sept. 1861; Miller 1980[?]; Sinclair 1982:17-38; Brown [1908]; J. Flierl 1931; 1932; Wetherell 1977). It also applies, however, to the opening up of hidden, landlocked peoples in this century. The first Europeans to set foot in the central highlands of New Guinea, after all, were the three Lutheran missionaries, Oestel, Pilhofer and Stoessal in 1920 (Pilhofer 1963: vol.2, 228-31; Reitz 1975: 160); and there were other 'conquests' for the Gospel's expansion—Alphonse Clausner to the eastern Fuyughe (1909),

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William Ross to the Melpa (1934), Herbert Brown to the Kunimaipa (1940), Norman Cruttwell into the Daga Valley (1946), David Hand to the Siane (1953), Roy Woods to the Daba and Debere, to cite well-known Papua New Guinean examples alone (Trompf 1981b: 21; 1991: 156; Mennis 1982b; Saunders 1965: 169-75, etc.). At times government officials were only too thankful that missionaries broke down hostile barriers before they could (as when the Sacred Heart Fathers entered Sulka country on the Gazelle in 1901) (GG 1979: 226); occasionally, missionaries succeeded where police power failed (as when Kwato missionaries negotiated peace between the formidable Dovaraidi and Keveri in 1937) (Williams 1944, cf. PAR 1938: 23). Thus it was that missionaries were often the first to offer 'the hand of friendship' from the outside world, and were certainly the most persistent on-the-spot advocates of a non-violent way of life. The missions' record on that score has been remarkably consistent. In 1878 Ruatoka bravely rushed in between a large number of Motu warriors and some miners whom the former intended to spear, dissuading them with the striking, diversionary questions: 'Why do you want to kill me} What have / done?'; and, after successfully reasoning with them in their own language, he even preached, and prayed for them (Chalmers in Lovett 1914: 134). At the beginning of the 1980s an interdict (or refusal to dispense the elements at mass) was imposed by the local (black American) bishop on any Chimbu Catholics who initiated or abetted a tribal fight (Caesar 1980). Between these two acts, virtually a century apart, missionaries and their evangelical or catechetical assistants have supervised many a ceremonial burning of warriors' weapons (e.g. Dupeyrat 1964; Radford 1977) and delivered hundreds of sermons against blood revenge and sorcery (cf., e.g., Boseto 1983: 74, John Paul II 1984)—urges which have been especially underscored by choices to remain in patient service, even to face martyrdom, during the Japanese invasion (Sacred Heart Sisters 1947; Freitag 1948; Scharmach 1960: 133-52, 231-49; Pilhofer 1963; vol.2, 259-60 [and plate 6]; Boger 1972; Wiltgen 1966, etc.). No account of payback in Melanesia is complete, however, without considering those side-effects of missionization which have made for tension rather than peace, and those factors which enabled traditional pressures for retaliation to be kept alive, even if they were diverted along different channels. Not for the sake of dwelling on human imperfection, though nonetheless having an eye for major problems confronting modern Melanesia, the other side needs examination. There were various cases in which missionaries were embarrassed by bad race relations within their area of labour, and became so ensnared in the colonial system that it was difficult for local people to dissociate them from white oppressors in general. In New Caledonia, for instance, although the Catholic Mission was founded ten years before Louis Napoleon's decision to annex the islands as a potential convict settlement (1853), the Marist Fathers had to work hard

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to appear separate from the French military administration (DoussetLeenhardt 1978: 50-60). The Lutheran Rhenish Mission at Madang had similar problems (Lawrence 1964a: 52-53; Hempenstall 1975; Bade 1989). Even so, if these French and German personnel looked like accomplices of colonialism, local uprisings (in 1868 and in 1878 on New Caledonia, and 1904 rather abortively at Madang) deliberately excluded them as objects of revenge (Kemelfield 1976: 15-20; Lacey 1974; Kigasung 1977). Aside from such cases, however, there have been three major problems to do with (negative) retribution which are of a more directly religious nature. These can be listed in a chronological order. First, there was a new vulnerability for newly converted groups of individuals when they still remained surrounded by potentially hostile peoples; second, denominational enmities were transplanted from European to Melanesian contexts; and third (a more recent development), there arose a more intense competition for souls with the 'mission explosion' of the postwar period. With reference to problem number one, supporting an early missionary meant courting death. When Tauriki was killed, for instance, it was along with other men from Motumotu laying themselves open to attack. A missionary's choice to begin work with one particular group in a culture area also had a potential to incur jealousy among those not in 'the new centre of attention' giving an added reason to carry on old animosities (cf. e.g., Hogbin 1970b: 135). In 1881, for a striking case, a raid by Kalo warriors on Hula in the Hula, Aroma-Velerupu culture-complex brought twelve deaths, those of four South Sea teachers and at least one Hula. Kalo village, inland and agriculturally oriented, was the largest village in the area and its members did not like the preferential treatment given their coastal neighbours. Britain's response with a punitive expedition (by HMS Wolverine) hardly endeared them to the mission either, and half their population was still rejecting church membership by 1964 (Chalmers and Gill [1890s]: 168-70; Oram 1975: 123-24, and OT: 1982). Those most affected by such raids would be excused by traditional standards for taking revenge, as did some 'native Christians' on Erromango (Vanuatu) in 1871, who fell on 'isolated members of the guilty Tribe' after the killing of missionary George Gordon (and saved British Captain John Moresby the trouble of an imperial reprisal) (Moresby 1876: 110). But neophyte Christians were usually expected to abandon even the 'eye for an eye' retributive principles of the Old Testament, and set aside warriorhood for good. Even exploitative traders, let alone colonial officials, were supposed to be able to count on the new indigenous commitment to the Commandment against killing. That expectation often produced cultural isolates, and mission work would suffer. The Lutheran Johannes Flierl, for instance, made little headway around Simbang for being too individualistic in his approach

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to conversion, and not until Christian Keysser applied his policy of 'group change' in the 1920s did matters improve (Keysser 1929; J. Flierl 1931; Vicedom 1961: 11-13). Sometimes it was women, whether as individuals or small groups, who risked death for turning to Christianity. Take the fascinating gender tensions developing among the Wain (Morobe highlands) from the 1920s. Curiously enough, the men in this society often took the part of place spirits, forcing women to take these beings' existence very seriously by role-play. As the women minded pigs, for instance, a hidden man would don a mask, whirl his bull-roarer and then appear suddenly and fearsomely from behind some outcrop. The woman would flee and a pig would be stolen. The masked pretender and other male supporters would then proceed quickly to a secluded spot, cook and devour the pork, and then return somewhat weary-looking to the women, bearing only the uncooked entrails and less relishable parts of the animal. Holding up these remains, they would aver that a spirit had 'taken our pig and left only this!' Whereupon they would feign hunger, yet now sit with the women, cook the meat left and share it out between all! Now any woman cognisant of this strange secret was summarily killed in pre-contact times—myths sanctioned such an extreme (Bodrogi 1967: 73)—yet some daring female converts lost their lives in their attempt to expose what they saw as this invidious system at the time when Lutheran evangelists sought an entree into Wain society (OT: Okona 1971; 1975). Here, the coming of the new way touched a raw nerve which meant peril for 'women-in-the-know' (who were quite without traditional leadership roles), until whole groups decided for change (see also Christiansen 1969: 116 on nearby Ngarawampum, cf. Mead 1950: 110-11). In other areas, mission presence would reinforce pre-existing local bases of inter-group enmity when some ambitious male deliberately invited in missionaries to boost his leadership claims or heighten his clan's prestige. Such was the case with Dabus and Kaun of the Begesin area (Madang) in 1937, who also claimed for themselves a privileged access to the whites' power, and thus to the world of 'God's soldiers'. These two men implicated all the Begesin clans in the disastrous rebellion against the Europeans seven years later (Yagas 1985, cf. Hogbin 1970b: 205-06; Dixon [forthcoming], for other cases more generally; and Strathern 1984b: 35-52; Barham 1984: 55-65, on Wiru in particular). The second major problem had its long-term background in the Reformation. It has taken a long while for the flames of Catholic-Protestant hostility in Europe and European-occupied territories to be dampened. Although the so-called Wars of Religion (1618-1648) became but distant memories, the sounds of theological polemic constantly reverberated during two-and-a-half more centuries (Johnson 1970: 288-328). The Protestant denominations admittedly had their special points of disagreement— Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Quakers, and Methodists with British

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backgrounds, for a start, all disputing the principle of an Anglican establishment—yet all these groupings were capable of sinking their differences when it came to worldwide mission, as their cooperation in the London Missionary Society (founded in 1795) nobly illustrates (Goodall 1954). Cooperation between Protestants and Catholics, however, even on the mission field, was always difficult to find, and this ecclesial antipathy had some part in the competing imperial interests in Melanesia. In 1843, to take an important earlier example, after the French Marist failure to gain a foothold in New Zealand, the Fathers turned their attention to New Caledonia to fight 'against the Protestant heresy that spread to the whole Pacific'. With the first representatives of this predominantly French order being landed on the island by a French gun-boat, and provided arms for protection, it was only natural that they favoured New Caledonia's annexation by France (Saussol 1969; Wiltgen 1981: 225-64, cf. Freitag 1959: Map 26A). Their influence in this island complex was soon so strong that Catholic-Protestant village fighting erupted on Lifu in 1864, when the chauvinist gouvemeur Charles Guillain tried to blot out LMS mission presence (established since 1859) from the nearby Loyalties. Only LMS missionary Samuel McFarlane's 'paper war' in Australia and England, which eventually led to the Emperor Napoleon Ill's intervention on his behalf, removed this threat (McFarlane 1873: 189-223; Rickards 1983). Further to the west comparable tensions mounted when the French Sacred Heart Fathers began work on Matupit Island in 1882, not far from the anglophone Methodists on the Gazelle peninsula. It suited the Fathers to cultivate a German membership for their order (in principle meant to be cross-national), because a mission with more of a 'German character' had much more clout in a German colony (from 1885). By 1892, moreover, Bishop Couppe had returned with a plan to undercut Methodist influence over the Tolais: by adopting the Tolais' unwanted children and their slaves from the Bainings and Taulils, by projecting the mission at Vunapope as a model settlement, with the teaching of new skills, and by declining to forbid the big dance-festivals (such as the dukduk) as the Methodists did. Between 1895 and 1897 he thus 'provoked a mass movement towards the Catholic Church' from 'within the district of the Wesleyan Mission' (Jaspers 1981: 17, cf. 8-11; DZ 1893; Knight 1982: 404). It was with the problem of such mission competitiveness in mind that Sir William McGregor called for a missionary conclave in 1890, to lay down a 'spheres of influence' policy for British New Guinea (or Papua) (Murray 1912: 27; Lutton 1969: 1, cf. Weitbrecht 1908 for background). If there was major Protestant representation at the meeting, however, the Methodists agreeing to take the Papuan islands, the Anglicans the Papuan north coast, and the LMS the south coast 'excluding that already taken by the Roman Catholics' (BNGAR 1889-90: 19), the Catholics made no showing and

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the Seventh Day Adventists were as yet an unforeseen complication. Throughout the 1920s the Protestant parties to the agreement consistently objected to Catholic encroachment (among the easternmost Toaripi in 1923, the Motu of Hanuabada, 1924, and at Samarai, 1929), and lamented the incursions of the (allegedly 'unChristian') Adventists among the hinterland Koiari (from 1917) (Lutton 1969: 2-6, 8; Dixon [forthcoming]). When it came to new opportunities for other orthodox Protestant mission societies, however—the Worldwide Evangelical Crusade moving into the Fly River area (1931), Lutherans crossing the artificial New Guinea/Papua border (1932), and Kwato extending into the Samberigi Valley (1938)—these major Protestant groups raised not a murmur of objection. The Catholics in Papua, for their part, denied that either the country or government regulations disallowed new expansion along the south coast and further inland (e.g., Navarre 1897, cf. Delbos 1985: 101-73). Bishop de Boismenu wrote jubilantly of Pere Dubuy's trek to the far eastern reaches of Fuyughe country—actually into pre-mapped Anglican country—as 'blocking (bloquer) the Protestant advance' (MSC 1928, cf. PNA 1927); and the greater resources of personnel allowed Sacred Heart Fathers to secure most Kunimaipa villages from 1946, even though LMS missionary Herbert Brown had opened up this Papuan highland area for evangelism (OTs: Brown 1973; Munster 1982). With 'sore points' felt between missionaries, and vitriolic exchanges either against 'Popery' or 'defectors from the One True Church' (even into the 1950s), one can appreciate how such hostility could be translated into violence at the village level. At borderline points, tension could result in brawls. Father Davide Coltre, whom we recall was attacked with a conch shell during the Filo affair (chapter 4), once told me how there were recurrent skirmishes between 'Catholics from Siria (on Yule Island) and Poukama, and the LMS villagers of Delena (close to Poukama), before the arrival at Delena of that well-known missionary-teacher Percy Chatterton in 1939 (OT: 1972). Traditional weaponry was not used, significantly, but rocks and sticks often supplemented fists, with serious injuries resulting. As expected, there had been traditional enmity between these three Roro communities (especially Siria and Delena), yet now the issue concerned 'which one was the true mission' (OT: Awai 1973, cf. Chatterton 1969; Oram 1981: 214-17). In other places, such as the North Solomons, where Catholics and Methodists were at close quarters, indigenous church leaders tried certain competitive devices to settle this kind of ill-feeling without violence. Two factions would play soccer (on Buka called kik kros) to prove which church was right, and sometimes even mathematical games; yet, hand-to-hand fighting was not always avoidable (OT: Zechariah to Bili 1976, cf. Chowning 1974: 153; du Toit 1975: 136).

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Debating about the finer points of theology, and deciding on the adoption of one 'externally introduced' position as against another on dogmatic grounds, has not been the characteristically Melanesian response to missionization (in comparison, for example, with Polynesia) (cf. Freeman 1959). Most cargo movements, admittedly, presented genuinely theological alternatives, but usually stood between the competing pressures of tradition and Christianity, thereby putting pressure on whole groups to decide between alternatives in terms of 'right belief, not just pragmatics. Once one form of Christianity was adopted, however, group loyalty tended to congeal around that particular brand as a social, even tribal, rather than fideistic, bonding. In earlier days on Fiji, defections from one to another mission allegiance brought a flogging from the offended chiefs (Pritchard 1866: 304-09 on the 1860s)1, and if much later Melanesians came to insult 'one another's beliefs' and perhaps came 'to blows', the starting point of quarrels lay in the differing social allegiances which had consolidated (Hogbin 1970b: 206 on Malaita and Guadalcanal in the 1930s). Thus, what most missionaries might have hoped to be at worst a justifiable rivalry between Christian groupings from time to time slipped into genuine, if limited conflict (cf. Beckett 1971: 30). This has been a tendency all the more evident with the arrival of minor sectarian concerns challenging the hegemony of longer established missions, especially in the Papua New Guinea highlands. Even there, however, well before the burgeoning of minor missionary contenders, and thus before the emergence of the third problem we are to discuss, uninspiring outbursts of CatholicProtestant antipathy were in evidence. Late in 1935, for example, a Catholic priest was reported to have 'sent armed native employees of his mission to drive o u t . . . Lutheran native teachers... and to burn down their houses' in the Iwan district of the highlands, an area only freshly opened up for evangelism by workers in both Christian traditions (NGAR 1935: 25-29, and cf. Mitton 1983: 216-18 on Irian Jaya). The third problem, however, was the postwar 'mission explosion' in which long-term denomination rivalry was exacerbated by the arrival of many sectarian groups, which became most visible in the densely populated New Guinea highlands. In at least one case, in fact a 'mission advanceguard' of various denomination representatives lined up for a 'great race' waiting for the Australian government Gazette to cancel restrictions in the Porgera area (1962), so that new fields for evangelism could be staked (Nelson 1983:159). The rather absurd competition between mission bodies, particularly the minor ones, still persists in a few quarters. In the small, decidedly new little town of Pangia in the southern highlands, one came 1

But on sectarian strife and internal military struggle on Fiji, see e.g., Henderson 1937— an exception for Melanesia, cf. on Polynesia Swain and Trompf 1993.

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across 'Church Row' during the 1980s, where over five church buildings were erected side-by-side like a 'spiritual supermarket'; indeed, on market days one could hear roistering, revivalist evangelists trying to sell their special doctrinal 'wares' over megaphones (OTs: Weeks, Gay 1985). The presence of smaller missions jostling for opportunities, admittedly, has a longer history than most readers might suppose, and charges of their 'sheep stealing' and 'confusing the people' go back at least to the pioneering days of the Seventh Day Adventists (in Fiji as early as 1891, Papua by 1908, the Solomons by 1917, west New Guinea by 1921, and New Caledonia by 1925). (SDA Encycl. 1976: 45, 458, 959; Dixon [forthcoming]). In some cases the Adventists were the first to open up virtually unmissionized areas (as among the Papuan Koiari and on the St Matthias group north of New Ireland (102; Dixon 1981), and they were occasionally granted land to act as a 'buffer' between the bigger missions. Five better-known tensionproducing developments were the Seventh Day Adventists accepting a settler's invitation to start work at Marovo Lagoon, New Georgia, in 'Methodist country' in 1914; establishing stations near the Vailala River (among the Elema) and near Marshall Lagoon (Aroma-Velerupu) in 1928, and thus in traditional LMS territory; setting up a station on Matupit (New Britain) in 1929, on the very island the Catholics first chose to commence their labours in 1885; as well as following hot on the Lutherans' trail into the eastern highlands in 1934 (Were 1970:23-33, Steley 1989:100-03; Garrett 1992: 81; Trompf 1984b: 30; Dixon [forthcoming]; Radford 1987: 133). The Adventists, while acknowledging the uniqueness of their 'JewishChristian' emphases, were indicative of sect-type missions more generally (cf. Troeltsch 1931: vol.2, 691-728). Their prohibitive stresses—not to eat pork, crabs, fish without scales, betel nut and other unclean goods (Lev. 11: 1-46; White 1938, cf. also the SDA 'Baptismal Vow')—and their insistence upon the Sabbath rather than Sunday as the key day of worship, imposed a puritanism upon Melanesians far more demanding than the major missions (and in a region where pork and crab are delicacies). That their demands found some acceptance, however, conveys something about the relative attractions of other puritanisms. The smaller sects could accuse the older denominations of spiritual laxity; the traditional tabu-systems were, in fact, far more impositional than mainline Christianity, so that it made greater local sense to adopt a more 'legalistic' version of the introduced faith. At the same time sectarianism offered the opportunity for a legitimated rejection of the older missions, which had not met some groups' expectations, or not paid enough attention to some areas, or brought divisiveness within given village communities, or grown stronger among traditionally enemy tribes. By the 1980s, however, the sectarian issue had truly reached explosive proportions, and beside the plethora of tiny, often highly idiosyncratic

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mission organizations, the 800 000-strong Adventist church looked positively august.2 In 1977, for instance, I documented over sixty distinct Christian denominations and sects operating in the eastern highlands province alone, surely making it the most complex mission scene in the world (Swain and Trompf 1992, cf. also Robin 1979 on the southern highlands). If New Guinea housed 564 non-indigenous mission personnel by 1934, with only 1.38 per cent of registered Christian adherents not belonging to the major denominations (NGAR 1933-34: 101), the exploration of the central highlands that year foreshadowed remarkable shifts, almost three times as many expatriate missionaries working in this vast new unevangelized frontier alone by the 1960s (extrapolations from NSO 1983), with large tracts of densely populated country falling under the loose supervision of sectarian or 'independent' bodies. Up to thirty-eight of these small missions to Papua New Guinea, we concede, have become members of a coordinating organization for teaching and interchange called the Evangelical Alliance (EA) formed in 1975, (EA 1981; Sanders 1978; Weymouth [forthcoming]); and others, again of a pentecostal(-charismatic) stamp, colluded to form a PNG Pentecostal Council in 1980 (Trompf 1991: 158; Barr [forthcoming]). Yet, a significant minority keep their distance from these (differing, as does the New Apostolic Church discussed in chapter 4, over special doctrinal points), while some bodies (such as the Christian Revival Crusade) post-date efforts at close cooperation between the EA and the pentecostals. Small wonder that the Melanesian Council of Churches (representing major denominations and the Salvation Army) suggested government control over the entry of expatriate missionaries (MCC 1978; 1993, cf. EA 1979). Major problems arising from many conservative Biblicist groups (whether in or out of EA) have been to do with vehement antitraditionalism and a severe dogmatic opposition to mainline denominations. In an extreme instance an expatriate missionary of the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism at Goroka advocated that his two highlander trainees should 'come out from among them and be separate' (II Cor 6:17), so that they could be properly prepared as missionaries to convert the (wavering) Christians in Australia! (thus OT: Gardiner 1977). A more typical situation can be witnessed in the Wahgi Valley. While Catholics permit their flock's participation in the great Kongar ceremonies, with priests conducting Masses on the singsing grounds before the major day of dancing, and while Lutherans discourage their adherents' involvement yet permit them to kill pigs at home and thus maintain the old system of gift-giving and exchange on a secular basis, the Swiss Evangelical Note that at least four SDA members served as ministers in the 1972-84 cabinets of Papua New Guinea (OTs: K. Wilkinson, Stanley).

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Brotherhood Mission insist on the abandonment of every old ritual as 'Satan's ways'. On proceeding once with a company of Wahgi men to a preparatory dance among the Komunka tribe in 1976,1 discovered the track we used lined with 'Swiss Mission' protesters—men, women and children— all glowering at obdurate 'pagans' or 'compromisers' (cf. Graf 1975: 112— 20 for background). As for Pentecostalists, their acclamations of a radical spontaneity in worship—with fervent prayer, collective joy, speaking in tongues—have often produced severe reactions among the defenders of old worship-styles, which have in time become veritable 'neo-traditions' (thus, see tensions within the United Church on New Ireland in 1972 and at Kapuna in the Papuan Gulf in 1977) (OT: Lenterut 1981; Calvert 1981: 1, cf. also Trompf 1984b: 30-31 on an Anglican case near Popondetta). Those experiencing these new worship modes rather naturally expect other Christians to follow suit, even to criticize prior modes as deficient. It is small wonder, then, although the preached image of a Christian as a person of 'right conduct and piety' acts as a restraint (Beckett 1971: 29), that we find various acts of reprisal as a result of splinter-group activity, especially by representatives of established majorities against those said to be disturbing the status quo or 'causing confusion' (UCN Sept. 1981: 17). As a minority element, Jehovah's Witnesses have probably been subject to the most attacks, considering their attempt to set up 'tent ministries' in deliberate opposition to orthodox churches, and with their Arian and intensely millenarian version of Christianity (Cole 1956). In April 1959, for instance, a mob of Tolai Catholics rampaged through Vunabal (48 kilometres from Rabaul), ominously threatening the expatriate Witnesses (who narrowly escaped in a police car) and destroying the sectaries' teaching equipment (Smith [forthcoming]). In 1979 angry Anglicans burnt down the Witnesses 'Kingdom Hall' in Alotau township (Milne Bay, Papua), only to have their own church burnt two years later (by incendiaries most people believed supported the Jehovah's Witnesses) (OT: Hand, cf. PC 10 Sept. 1979: 16). In the 1970s, university students made enthusiastic for the Gospel in the cities by the Christian Revival Crusade (or such comparable bodies as the Christian Life Centre), have been forcibly sent from their own villages into temporary exile by annoyed conservatives, who consider them 'big heads' trying to impose their education and city experiences on local people happy with time-honoured arrangements (OTs: e.g. Temu 1973; Pala 1991). Even newly appointed ministers can fall foul of conservative parishioners; a pastor of Rapitok near Rabaul was badly beaten up by stronger and younger members of his Tolai flock for trying to introduce a pentecostal mode of Christian practice, and this incident set the stage for off-and-on brawling and severe accusations, largely involving youths from United Church, Catholic and pentecostal breakaway groups, all this being sensationalized in the press as 'war' (OT: Kadiba 1981; PC 18, 30 May, 8, 21 June

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1983; UCN 1983). Other, albeit scattered conflicts are in evidence (cf., e.g., Matas-Kalkot 1985: 156 on four members of a new indigenous sect being killed by villagers for their 'depredation' from Anglicanism on Raga or Pentecost Island, Vanuatu). The fact that 'over-missionization' allows for new choices in religious matters, moreover, has sometimes meant that internal conflicts within given groups can be deepened by an aggrieved party—such as a slighted bigman—calling in a rival mission. In a society of a mere 170 persons, for one real absurdity, a leading man at Longgu, Guadalcanal, sought victory in his quarrel with neighbours by inviting in Catholic missionaries—into an area where Anglicans and South Sea Evangelicals were already resident! (Hogbin 1970b: 205-06 on the 1930s). In 1978, to cite a later example, when one village in the Purari delta area (Papuan Gulf) wanted the Bible translated in its own distinctive Kaimeri dialect, it used this as a pretext to obtain a new mission (the Presbyterian Reformed rather than the United Church, and with a white missionary to boot), so reasserting its identity over and against better serviced groups (Barr [forthcoming]). The allusion to the European should remind one, moreover, that missions have often been judged by Melanesians according to a cargoist mentalite; thus, one can be found wanting and rejected in favour of another for not having brought tangible results (pidgin: kaikai or 'food'). After four field trips to tribes to tribes in the upper Bena River region between 1973 and 1980, for example, I was able to establish that family and hamlet choices to attend (or change attendance) at one or other of the four available churches were mainly determined by hopes of material improvement. In this situation negativities were involved when one brand was changed for another in the hope of outdoing a competing family or clan, or when dissatisfaction was expressed in lack of returns from a denomination being abandoned. Adumbrating more details of inter- (or intra-)church conflict would be superfluous, and many of the squabbles and power-struggles—to do with high or low churchmanship, for instance, or the repression of female church leadership, expatriate or indigenous (Wetherell 1977: 73-76; Langmore 1982; Ninkama 1987; Trompf 1985)—are not unique to Melanesia. More important is the relative success of mission work in limiting the reeruption of traditional tribal conflict, often by a planned distribution of church office-holders through previously enemy groups (Kigasung [forthcoming]) or by abetting colonial pressures to re-locate human settlements or foster cooperative social and economic ventures (including education). The immense shifts in favour of 'the Christian ethic' (cf. Spate 1968: 117-19), have meant that negative payback is no longer typically enacted by physical violence. There are still zones in which violent recriminatory actions remain a frequently enough used option to constitute 'trouble spots' for governments; and there are also persisting traditionalist elements, such

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as sorcery, and cargo cult exercises in reprisal, which are countervailing to the main trend of a Christian peaceableness (see below). No analysis of more distinctly Christian or ecclesiastical phenomena, however, can avoid the relatively greater role of subtler, non-violent negativities since contact, especially via rhetoric and group psychology. When missionaries created their own altercations, they used the 'pastoral power' of words (cf. Foucault 1980), and Melanesians inherited their argumentative power, if not vitriol, along with common traditional predilections for oratorial persuasion. The missionaries were past-masters at railing against 'untruth' or 'injustice' and, as in many colonial situations, the verbal reasoning and rhetoric they employed was eminently usable by 'the colonized'. How significant it is, for example, that on the day every 'washboy', 'cookboy', even 'policeboy', in Rabaul refused to turn up to work for their (horrified) masters on 3 January 1929, in protest against pitifully low wages, virtually all the strikers took to the Catholic and Methodist missions as the safest places to press their claim (Gammage 1975: 15-19). How significant has it been that the most prevalent and effective means of challenging white hegemony, and mobilizing local support against it, has been appropriated missionary rhetoric, which in turn has been used by Melanesians in defining the new differences or points of suspicion between one region (with one set of mission influences) against another? Differing rates of modernization, or more precisely the locally perceived differences in various groups' capacities to come to terms with introduced changes of style, have affected the operations of negativities within church life. There has been steady urbanization in Melanesia (in Papua New Guinea, for example, the proportion of people living in towns growing from 7 to 13.1 per cent between 1971 and 1980; NSO 1980, cf. Skeldon 1978, tables 1-5); and, although churches cooperate more ecumenically to tackle special urban problems, migrating families bring with them inherited prejudices and on arrival discover mind-sets in which various groups assess each other negatively or positively. Within larger denominations, the containing of tensions can vary. In Papua New Guinea, the Evangelical Lutherans avoid many of them because the Morobe Province is a strong territorial catalyst for unity, and pidgin is almost universally accepted as a language of both fraternization and worship. By comparison, the forging of the United Church through widely dispersed Papuan, New Guinea and Solomons groupings in 1967 (Williams 1970) has produced problems to do with language differences, previously different liturgical styles and varying degrees of experience with the modern world. In Port Moresby a number of previously Methodist Tolais and New Irelanders have found themselves swamped by predominantly coastal Papuan congregations, which used Hiri Motu rather than Kuanua as the lingua franca and followed unfamiliar non-Methodist procedures; while, with the

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appointment of a southern highlander to the suburban congregation at Waigani in 1975, both such New Guinea islanders and coastal Papuans found it hard to give consistent support to a newcomer whose people had such little experience with church and modern institutions (Trompf fieldnotes 1971-77,1983-85). In faraway Fiji, where one might have thought the overwhelming predominance of Methodism would quite dissipate such problems, they do not depart; for, the so-called vanua congregations in urban centres of Suva and Watoka are exclusively for people from given areas and are thus not the best expressions of Christian unity (OT: Somerville 1982). The problem of separation and mutual suspicion between 'more sophisticated' groups and those people considered 'inferior' for coming from less developed areas, applies especially in urban contexts. The beginnings of class distinctions result, in fact, when the former secure better housing, educational opportunities and jobs, while many of the latter eke out a precarious existence on urban fringes in squatter settlements. The segregating tendency between advantaged and less advantaged can manifest within a denominational complex. Under the Catholic umbrella, for instance, the Roro and Mekeo have had a larger and much richer experience of the missions west of Port Moresby, and have tended to look down upon the small-statured, large-footed Fuyughe and 'Goilalas'. In the capital the coastal groups gravitate to the 'middle class'-looking congregations at Waigani or at the cathedral, with the labourers and unemployed doggedly attending inadequate places of worship in or near squatter settlements (until action is taken, as when Cardinal Sin of the Philippines was invited to open the new Six Mile Church in 1979 (OT: Mordaunt 1977, cf. Norwood 1983: 87-90). The tendency for such groups to keep apart is an attenuated form of negative reciprocity which church leaders struggle to dissolve. Enforced change and legalized retribution Missionaries to Melanesia have had no legal rights to enforce change of traditional belief and practice to the alternatives they favoured. The colonial administrations, in contrast, by virtue of annexations and agreements between European states, assumed that 'the right to make laws' was vested 'in the supreme [conquering] power' (Bentham [1789] 1948: 83), and in practical terms thus had far greater enforcement power than those claiming to bear the 'true Way' (cf. BNG 1900: 12 for laws restraining unauthorized mission activity). Not a few missionaries, admittedly, felt impelled—in local and isolated circumstances—to 'lay down the law' for their own protection (or occasionally because of their judgemental temperaments), and thus to appear like law-enforcers. But that was only to reinforce what every missionary was bound to make plain in frontier situations: that God's

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commands and government regulations concurred in requiring good order. The missionaries could rarely avoid being advocates of legality in Western terms. As a result, Melanesians found themselves confronted with at least two bodies of introduced lo (the pidgin carries with it the sense of 'order' or 'ordained way' as well as 'legal regulations'), over and above their own societies' requirements. In New Guinea the distinction emerged between lotu rules (the demands of the church) and gavman (political enforcement), with the originally unified traditional governance over right or wrong, permission and prohibition now being split asunder into three (and potentially as many as five) competing elements: the requirements of government, mission and tradition. A fourth element became entailed when individual Melanesians worked under a business manager or some bosman. In earlier colonial days plantation owners were in the habit of punishing, usually flogging, their labourers for laziness and misdemeanours. At least one settler actually grumbled to the Australian Defence Administration of New Guinea in 1915 when his right to enact corporal punishment was under threat. 'What shall I do?' he asks indignantly, 'when a labourer kicks his wife and nearly kills her that she is lying for weeks in hospital? By my opinion the best is to pay him back in his own way ... and this at once'. (Petheridge in Rowley 1958:104)

The motives for retaining such punitive power were usually not as estimable, and in any case there were times when the mastas as a group were quick to invoke government regulations to keep the natives in their places. An irate correspondent to the Rabaul Times in 1929, for instance, before the unexpected Rabaul strike, protested at some Tolais wearing shirts in church (the government then requiring both indigenous men and women to go topless), insisting that such recalcitrants 'must not be allowed to lose sight of the fact that they are natives' (RT 8 Feb. 1929, cf. Chatterton 1980: 11-12 for Papua). The fifth element is in contrast to the fourth, and decidedly latter-day. In the course of time, and this is a development occurring since the 1960s, once traditional prescriptions achieved recognition as 'customary law' rather than barbarities, and traditional beliefs were steadily granted the status of 'religion' rather than superstition, tradition emerged with two, not always complementary, aspects—as a local code of social management capable of supplementing (or clashing with) national law, or as a fashion (cf. pidgin: pasin bilong tumbuna) or body of customs (kastam) which may (or may not) be reconcilable with the versions of Christianity at hand. Colonialism, then, bore not only new legal burdens but the problems of distinguishing different types of rules and sanctions. The Melanesians had to make what they could of these distinctions, with any contradictions entailed; and if events show anything significant about their responses at

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all, it is not confusion which is characteristic but a remarkable ability to play off one pressure or mainspring of authority against another. Now there were matters, to be sure, on which governments and missions were usually found to be in firm agreement against tradition: in their opposition to native violence, above all, as well as to any customs clearly not conforming to Western standards of health. Over other matters, and I think primarily of situations in which government officials and missionaries were found posted in the same locations, there tended to develop a division of concerns and duties. Churchmen expected cases of theft or larceny, or the state of village houselines and latrines, to be handled by civil service appointees (patrol officers, native constabulary, or such local officials as luluais and tultuh). Representatives of colonial administrations, on the other hand, felt they had no mandate to direct the change of 'personal belief—a missionary's job—and yet they misguidedly assumed that blocking warfare, or stopping the unhealthy-looking habits of exposing the dead, or even the access of unfenced pigs to human waste, was not an enforcement of religious change. The regulative power of missions: its scope and effects If the missions, for their part, had very limited temporal powers to bring about change, they could make good use of the 'fear of [police] punishment' as 'a motive for modifying conduct as a promise of reward' (Hogbin 1958: 96, cf. Skinner 1962), and some villagers 'twice shy' of punitive expeditions— from Siar, Biliar, and so on, after the 1912 revolt near Madang, for instancemade willing converts (Mennis 1982a: 277-78). More typically, missionaries were simply left with their own powers of persuasion, and their personal vulnerability was made up for by the sheer novelty of their presence and their blatant opposition to key aspects of tradition. They were not easy to satisfy, especially, as long as blood was being shed in war. Open opposition to 'unChristian' traditions was in itself an attempt at enforcement, but more through convincing local leadership that it should try new rules. The history of the relative effects of this opposition or better, the give-and-take between Christianity and traditionalisms which developed, is too complex to be adequately treated here. Some apposite illustrations must suffice. Occasionally the very first outbursts of missionary opposition could bring immediate change. After the Rarotongan Piri landed at Boera near Port Moresby in 1874, for example, he very soon encountered (through smell!) the Motuan custom of leaving corpses exposed in shallow trenches, often under a house belonging to a dead man's family to remind kinsfolk of the tragedy. Widows were even expected to lie beside the corpses for hours whispering to the departed, smearing their bodies with decaying flesh in lamentation. Piri expressed his utter disgust. Surprisingly, the Boera

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chieftains agreed, and the custom was abandoned forthwith! It took years, by contrast, for other features of tradition to disappear. Right up until the Second World War many Boerans enacted the annual dance festival to bring fertility to the fruit trees, with 25-foot high spirit-masks dominating the proceedings. After the awesome spectacle of modern military struggle around Port Moresby, however, these Motuans saw no point in carrying it on; and the parish practice of imposing (not unfriendly) fines on those indulging in pre-Christian festivities had already helped them along this route (E. Thomas 1976: 9; Trompf 1981a: 162-63, OT: Oram 1983). What had been set in motion by missionaries usually became neotraditional village regulations (part of the fifth legal component referred to above), brought into being by local will and only subverted in time by movements which wanted either to turn back the clock to the past or to reject settled neo-tradition for not going far enough (towards Christianity or modernity). Common talk among educated Melanesians has it that missionaries have been responsible for 'destroying traditional cultures', but of course these critics almost always lack the details of history and we must reckon with their need of a scapegoat to compensate for a lessened sense of identity. Their approach, paradoxically, hardly does justice to the astute and wily nature of their predecessors, especially Melanesian leaders—with the suggestion that they were so easily duped into a new fashion of life and acted without thought for the longer-term consequences of their decisions. It goes without saying, however, that missionaries and especially their appointed (often ultra-loyalist) Melanesian representatives—pastors, catechists, local evangelists, sios kaunsels and the like—took as many opportunities as seemed fit to impose their wills (or God's will, as they would often want to put it). Christian bullying there certainly was (cf., e.g., Iani 1978: 71 on the Rigo area; Robin [with caution] 1979 and 1981 on the southern highlands), and the occasional destruction of fences and pigs to secure boundaries (e.g. Laracy 1976: 55 on Bougainville); but the classic means of enforcement was verbal threat, laying down a regime of services and new obligations and all with intimations of diverse judgement for sinners. The study of the effects of verbal castigation by Melanesian Christian leaders is a fascinating subject in itself, and early Christians attained some posthumous glory for having bravely challenged pagans or 'backsliders'. A phrase which has hung on among the Mailu (coastal Papua), for instance, is 'Ga Boi Oreore' (you Satan!), which Kuripi, the first Mailu to study at Lawes College (LMS), would direct to any whose 'words, acts, feeling or thought' he considered 'contrary to Christ's teaching' (UCN Sept. 1981: 16). Nearer to our own time APCM-trained Huli pastors from the southern highlands, Papua New Guinea, have recurrently issued the 'threat of imminent Judgement Day' among the more recently contacted Bosavi

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to the south, and their preaching, at one stage organized among themselves into week-long marathon sermonizing, played on the susceptibility of a people who already had a traditional fear of a 'fiery pit'. For fear of these pastors' words, most Bosavi gave up performance of their old songs and ceremonies during 1971-75, because perpetuation of former ways was said to 'confuse your mind, so that you do not learn God's word properly and go Satan's road to the fire' (Schieffelin 1978: 30, cf. 1981). In response to persuasion often came public, symbolic acts against material symbols of 'an unChristian life': weapons were burnt, sacred stones smashed before new and potential converts, shrines or cult houses burnt as paradigmatic acts of retribution against (the way of) the ancestors and their gods (cf., e.g., Trompf 1981b: 31, 61). Such deeds, of course, were not possible, nor advisable, without people's consent and involvement; yet, that these dramatic actions very much suited missionary interests meant that they could later fall liable to anti-mission sentiments (even local ones, as among the Trans-Gogol, near Madang, before the war, De'ath 1979: 37). In the typical course of affairs local churches and their committees took on more and more regulative power: to expose sinners publicly, to impose fines, or to recommend more drastic action from the hierarchy, such as excommunication. If the secular legal system came to prescribe punishments for various offences, such as adultery, swearing, gossip, quarrelling (cf. Beckett 1971: 33), the churches retained their power as the general denigrators of evil and misbehaviour, involving repentance and holding the awesome right not to remit sins (cf. Matt. 16:19,18:18). A not uncommon tendency to 'put down' various Melanesian customs as inferior and childish is not to be forgotten here (e.g. Chignell 1911: 16; Wigg 1912). And at times missions have been powerful enough to frame and police their own social laws independently of secular authorities (as with the Presbyterians' theocratic, 'fundamental moral laws' on Tanna Island at the turn of the century (Langridge 1935; Guiart 1956:124-35). In our own day conservative Methodists of Fiji, as the black majority, have overridden even General Rabuka's retractive recommendations by insisting on the strictest Sunday observances (Lasaro in PIM Sept. 1989). When it came to the employment of physical coercion, however, what corporal punishment occurred on mission plantations (Gissua 1982: 6, cf. Towers 1974) or at the hands of schoolmasters (e.g. Sinclair 1982: 32; Eri 1970: 2-7; Abbott 1984: 14, cf. E. B. Thomas 1976: 4) seems mild beside the government officials' fire-power and forcible arrests.3 Misbehaving 3

Secular officials had a vested interest in emphasizing occasions when missionaries could give 'plaguingly' mischievous and 'thieving' indigenes a good thrashing, to make the missionaries appear 'arrogant' and keep them from interfering in the development of colonial frontiers. I think esp. of Jim Taylor's reports (e.g. ANA 1935: 13, cf. also Brown 1990a: 471). Over and above the kinds of corporal treatments here listed, there was also 'in-house' punition, which was imposed on Melanesians who joined church orders but committed some misdemeanour. But I possess only hearsay evidence of this.

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pupils, or adults who had not paid expected church offerings, might be required by mission rules to cut grass or clean up the church grounds (OT: ToBurua 1981: 14 for the Methodists; OT: Vetunawa for Catholics, etc.), but this was tame in comparison to the dragooning of carriers and the sharply ordered projects of officials. The paradox remains, though, that missionary rather than secular-political methods were to prove far more effective in bringing about serious modifications to the ancestral ways. Kiaps and constables might have possessed the bullets to forestall, but it takes little probing to realize that they were rarely in a position to tackle epistemic and institutional change. It was the missionaries and their local abettors who moved societies at a deeper level. True, government-enforced pacification shackled warriorhood religion, but it was the missionaries who worked on the rites bolstering that religion—trying to disconnect initiations from military concerns and to break up the men's longhouses by enjoining single husbands and wives to bring up 'godly families' together under the same domestic roof. By hindsight, then, the latter-day criticism of missionaries as those most decidedly 'white-anting' tradition is not unfair, though it stands up only while conceding that mission work was as much about removing the notional and ceremonial underpinnings of recurrent violence as about opposition to 'idols' or 'false gods', and while acknowledging the willingness of local groups to take on board the new rules. These new rules, moreover, restrained new converts from active physical interference against defenders of the old ways. This restraint stemmed much less from fear of government policy than recognition of a final, spiritual source of authority, which chimed in with traditional preconceptions; thus, it was the persistent, onthe-ground 'Christian mediation' rather than in-and-out 'foreign justice' which 'eventually won through and brought... to an end . . . decades of unrest' (Tippett 1967: 194-95). This last thought draws to mind a crucial factor in the missionary purveyance of law, and one usually endowing the churches with a status superior to secular authorities in the minds of villagers: the teaching of the Ten Commandments. It is saddening that legal histories of Melanesian nations always gloss over this important datum, when these laws, more than any others on the colonial Western statutes, have had palpably the most influence in Melanesia; and their effects, because they have been promulgated as religious truth rather than social expediency, and have thus been reminiscent of sacred traditional rules, have penetrated much more deeply psychologically. Whatever the differences missions had in relying on or framing special ecclesiastical codes, or in the degree of lenience over such habits as kava-drinking or alcohol, smoking, and so on, or the amount of interaction allowed between missionaries and 'the natives'—all missions were of one mind in hallowing the Decalogue, the 'schoolmaster' preparing the neophyte for the freedom of the Christian life (cf. Gal. 3:24-25). And to the extent that the churches seemed

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to govern the sanctions and judgements affecting the evildoers who flouted these absolutes, no frontier ambassador of the Gospel could escape local associations of 'law enforcement' and the possibility of negative requital. Thus, when one talks of law and legalized retribution in Melanesia, one must appreciate how for a steadily emerging majority of (hamlet-dwelling) Melanesians, the commands and ordinances of their church(es) have been taken—in a somewhat mediaeval way—to possess as much power to 'police' their lives as secular laws (cf. Bouscaren et al. 1965: 1-12 for background). We would, therefore, expect to find examples of a triangular tension at least between traditional, church and government law. The north Solomonese scholar Alexis Sarei provides us with the only in-depth analysis of this issue to hand, when he assessed the impact of Christianity on marriage rules of the Solos, Buka Island (on the North Solomons). To single out for comment but one component in Sarei's findings, we find an interesting.side of these unwritten marriage regulations concerned 'impediments'. Actually these people 'had almost all the nullifying [marriage] impediments given in [Catholic] canon law' (Sarei 1974: 44-48), and these were: 1 nonage (no marriage before puberty and its evidences). 2 impotence (manapei) (through deformity, mutilation or obvious inability to perform the sex act). 3 insanity (including those completely insane [boponoari], borderline cases [babaru], those with defects in speech and bodily movements [beverehu], the deaf and dumb [korong], and epileptics [gokorei]). 4 laziness (those showing no capacity to take up family responsibilities). 5 being crippled (piningon) (and thus being unable to protect a family). 6 existing marriage bonds (those already engaged, being unable to contract another marriage). 7 totemic relations (marriage only within and not between totem groups). 8 imposition of tabus (haret) (no marriage between those imposing prior tabus and those imposed on). 9 adoption (hameng) (an adopted daughter being taken as an ordinary daughter and sister and cousin). 10 affinity (singit) (no valid marriage bonds being possible between special in-law relations, e.g., between father-in-law and daughter-in-law). 11 consanguinity (pinopossa) (no marriage between blood relatives to the sixth degree). 12 cowardice (the lack of ability to protect a family). 13 sorcery (parents being disinclined to marry daughters to a known antisocial person).4 4

Number 13 is evidently a more recent, post-pacification development.

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Now when it came to modifying such Solos regulations, pressure was not applied by representatives of the secular administration, for they had no mandate to enforce cultural change unless they found practices 'repugnant to (our) humanity' (Rowley 1958: 67), and none of the above regulations fitted that description. Those rights and privileges of these officials quickly secured for the colonial regime, however, did remove the Solos chiefs' power over life and death, so that the traditionally harsh sentence of death imposed on anybody breaking precept 6, for instance, could not be carried out without fear of adverse government reaction. The missionaries, on the other hand, even while lacking physical sanctions, exerted much more pressure to change—and exerted it effectively. Even though their own Canon Law bore so much in common with Solos impediments, they disregarded the notion that any part of tradition could be 'true' in the same way that the Christian positions were. It was not just a matter of precepts 7-8 smacking of pagan beliefs; some over-zealous missionaries went so far as to declare that any marriage contracted outside the church was invalid, and all wanted an additional, for them vital, impediment—polygamy. Despite British law proscribing bigamy, the patrol officers usually turned a blind eye to pre-existing marriage customs; but missionaries did not, and it was typical Catholic policy to insist that men with polygamous relations could not become communicants without setting aside all but their first wives (Sarei 1974: 49-52, cf. B Feb. 1950: 3; Rowley 1958: 150-51, etc.). And this, as one component in the new ecclesiastic set of rulings, came to be widely accepted with due seriousness. Maintaining a new order: the phases of acculturation What, however, of the legal systems and penalties imposed by governments? How do they impinge on our inquiry into the logic of retribution in Melanesian religions? In brief, the colonial administrations wielded immense power over the persons and properties of their Melanesian subjects. They sanctioned severe punishment on local people harming 'legitimate' settlers, they acquired land at ridiculously low cost, recruited labour (including personnel into the police force, bearers for patrols, and auxiliaries during military operations), collected capitation tax, relocated many villages, and imposed a regime of 'law and order' on regions previously both turbulent and stateless (May and Nelson 1982: vol.1, 143-78; Dornoy 1984: 26-29). In Australian-run Papua during the 1910s, to illustrate, patrollers working under a resident district magistrate had the power to pass summary sentences of up to two years with hard labour and to inflict fines of up to £200 (Monckton 1921: 723); while in 1928 on New Caledonia, kanaks found themselves liable to serious disciplinary action by police if they

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withdrew their labour (or corvee) on farms or other workplaces, and rules restricted their movements, even actually putting a 'capture price' on their heads if they fled (JO 29 Sept. 1928). The tone of this political regimen was recognizable for its harshness and direct physical action, reinvoking something of the traditional world of inter-tribal relations, yet now resonant with the note of undefeatability (in military terms). When reflecting on the effects of imposing a supra-tribal government on Melanesian societies and religions, three major phases show up in the whole acculturative process. Here we will concentrate on well-documented Papua New Guinea. The first one is the shortest, belonging to the contact situation. Since the exaction and justifications of revenge were integral to traditional religions, the earliest manifestations of the whites' might, as in punitive expeditions especially, were assumed by local people to reflect their access to sources of supra-human power of magic—or a possession of a 'superior religion'. The new tabu on tribal warfare, in any case was first conceived to affect the total way of pre-contact life, and thus to have deeply 'religious' not just 'socio-political' implications. The close historical connection between police-backed peace and the presence of missionaries served to reinforce the initial impressions that the old total way of life (connecting warriorhood and ceremonial) was giving ground to a new total way with its two complementary prongs of Christian rite and indomitable force. The second phase follows efforts by missionaries and officials to distinguish their respective roles. Melanesians soon perceived that it was the government personnel rather than the missionaries who almost always took physical measures to punish breaches of the new rules, and also that the former were the ones to whom the most effective appeals could be made when disputes brought on (or looked like generating) violence. LieutenantGovernor Murray's policy for Australian rule over Papua and New Guinea best introduces shifts involved in this phase when he ruled that individual law-breakers or suspects were to be tracked down, and that fire-power on the groups to which such culprits belonged was no longer allowed (unless in self-defence) (Rowley 1958: 71). The reliance on an 'informer' system resulted, with unarmed luluais or trained Melanesian constables reporting on serious situations to an expatriate officer when they had been unable to resolve disputes themselves (e.g. BNGAR 1906: 86; PNA 1910b: 1-2; 1912b). Upon arriving at a village, one can see, the patrol officer (kiap) had to act as health inspector, adviser to the headman on community improvements, policeman, as well as judge in the rural Court of Native Affairs he would set up on an ad hoc basis. It was arduous bearing 'the strain of such many-sided power', and in 'his magisterial role' he was bound to make arbitrary decisions depending on his patience, the number of queries and disputes to be heard, the general security of the area and where a given

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village lay in his whole circuit (Rowley 1958: 77, cf. 79). Snap and necessarily dictatorial decisions often left aggrieved parties dissatisfied; yet, at least this system of arbitration allowed recriminatory attitudes to be aired. When temporarily stationed at outposts, kiaps commonly received urgent messages and delegations. Indeed, Jack Hides (1935: 16) vividly recalls how hands and other parts of corpses were sent to him wrapped up in banana leaves by aggrieved Goilala, who were expecting him to retaliate on their behalf. When the regime dubbed Jim Tela ('Jim Taylor') was thrust upon the inhabitants of the Wahgi Valley in 1934 (chapter 4), one tribe (a Chimbu group named the Komblo, which first settled in the valley as late as the 1860s) found itself landless and as refugees, having not long before been driven off the land they had acquired. Their first delegations to the kiaps brought no results; but a patrol was eventually diverted to the relevant area and reparations made for them on the spot (Kondwal and Trompf 1982: 105-06). Although indigenous government-appointed luluais were sometimes able to settle disputes 'out of court', the externally imposed legal order of this second phase was really only effective when foreign authority-figures, backed by armed police, were physically present. The local power of local luluais has to be acknowledged, although it was frequently selfaggrandizing, or biased to the advantage of the office-holder's tribe. In some interesting cases, however, luluais were men of such stature that they adapted indigenous notions of tabu into new lo which met the expectations of the new authorities. The eight commands of Kondom Agaunda, the Chimbu bigman, afford an outstanding example, his eight decrees— against killing, adultery, stealing, infanticide, playing with another's wife, and so forth—fast acquiring a sacral character expressive of the 'new time' (Brown 1967, cf. 1972: 112; 1990b). On the other hand, in the Chimbu and elsewhere in the Australian territories local people had little control over the methods and results of the arbitration (even if village heads might be persuaded to back one version of a story against another), while penalties inflicted could conflict with traditional expectations (adulterers, for example, being fined and escaping customary execution) (cf. Rowley 1958: 70). The new laws, furthermore, were in the whites' (and very much against old parti-pris) interests, even though, with an un-Melanesian emphasis on individual rather than group culpability, they injected some newer senses of fairmindedness and personal responsibility. Trials for 'the natives' were almost exclusively to do with criminality, and two court systems applied: one basically to keep the blacks under control, and the other to keep up the kind of protection for expatriates which they had enjoyed overseas (Chalmers 1982: 169, cf. Logemann 1959 for comparisons with Dutch New Guinea). Regulations in towns accentuated this colonialism and its principles of 'apartheid'. Legal restrictions

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designed either to prevent the blacks entering into expatriate social life, or to deter them from succumbing to the whites' weaknesses, were many and varied. Until its repeal as late as 1959, for example, Papua and New Guinea towns were subject to curfew laws, requiring natives to remain indoors after 9 pm; in 1925 Papuans could be fined for loitering on footways to the inconvenience of other people; in both territories native possession of alcohol (1923), knuckledusters or razor blades (1933), without lawful excuse, were punishable offences; and one could go on, listing Native Administration Regulations against gambling after 9 pm, for instance, or the playing of sport in other than specifically proclaimed areas (Wolfers 1975: 39, 45, 50,96-97, cf. 178). There was, thus, a host of new tabus: almost all designed to preclude any possibility of violence or rioting in urban centres, perhaps, yet also simultaneously guaranteeing to keep the blacks in their place and without any determining role in 'the system'. The Melanesian town was a novel, or alien, phenomenon for local people, however, and there they were naturally readier to play life according to new rules—usually coming in from villages to fulfil duties as the white lords' lackies (Stuart 1970: 273-74; Oram 1976: 44-59, 148-53; cf. Willis 1974). In relatively unpoliced rural areas, by comparison, the full range of administrative rulings were not known or relevant, but then tension between imposed and tribal law was at its sharpest. The gap between the primal and Western approaches to law is, after all, formidable. One legal theorist was led to conclude that: there is and can be no finality in primitive law. There are no binding decisions: primitive law is an endless series of compromises, [and] . . . a dialogue . . . can be reopened at any time . . . This central difference between primitive law and Western law makes the establishment of 'law and order' by colonial administrators in primitive societies so hopeless. Primitive law and the primitive group as a political unit have to be destroyed and a colony has to become a state before (Sack 1973:18) a Western type of law can begin to rule. According to this view, which has the problem of the blood-feud especially in mind, modern Western law is based on principles of legal equality and justice, and these can never be realized as long as each member of each separate tribal unit 'depends on one another for the survival of the group', with no concern for a permanent inter-tribal, let alone supra-tribal unity (Sack 1973: 15). On the other hand, the chasm is not so unbridgeable when one reflects that, in the absence of professionalized law enforcement, prisons and (ofttimes) trials, Melanesians had developed notions of justice—of appropriate desserts and penalties, and relative equality before the law— in their basic security circles. Thus, the potential to appropriate the values and principles of a modern legal system already lay within each micronation or ambience of binding loyalty; and while tribal law appears so decidedly non-universal, one needs reminding that ancient legislators have

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used the very principles which bound even the smaller unit of the family as those upon which whole states should be founded (cf. Smith 1973: 73 on Confucius; Watt 1961: 94-96 on Muhammad). Surprisingly, legal analysts and political scientists who have worried over the great discrepancies between primitive and modern law have overlooked the contribution made by the missions and their abettors to an important bridging process. Colonial law was merely a set of arbitrary, sometimes unintelligible, tabus and regulations if there were no disclosure of the values underlying it. For all the recent nostalgia over the old kiap system (ca. 1920-1957), and the firm, and decisive actions of its representatives (Cleland 1983: 213-19), it is better known for its satrap-like authoritarianism than for instilling an indigenous understanding of legal principles (Chalmers 1982: 170-71; Paliwala 1982: 195-96, cf. Brown 1963). 'Classic' kiapery, in fact, would have been an exercise in superficiality, even in local dictatorship, had it not been for others at the edges of the 'Western legal system', particularly those whites who were considered god-like or whose words intimated an utterly supreme Source of authority. Indeed, mission instruction offset the capriciousness and aggravation of secular enforcements. Since every modern colonial government has lacked the manpower to preach the ideological and axiological underpinnings of their legal systems in local areas, it has been up to the churches to fill the vacuum. This is a task evangelists to Melanesia were only too willing to accept, and certainly expatriate anglophone missionaries have been sedulously concerned to elevate the ultimacy of the divine Law, or the Demands of God, by claiming that the British legal system is based on the Ten Commandments (Weeramantry 1982: 81-82 for background, cf. TP 30 Aug. 1984: 10). In getting behind the law, the missionaries have been able to explain their own roles rather more satisfactorily to those confused about power, at the same time pointing beyond the government law to a higher one (or to the 'freedom' of life in Christ). This has sometimes led, admittedly, to indigenous speculation about a deeper lo, which in certain cases provided ideological foundation for cargo cultism (chapter 6). Above all, however, this Christian teaching about correct behaviour, however mid-Victorian, puritanical or paradoxically legalistic its presentation may have been, has educated many Melanesians through the conceptual shifts necessary for workable cross-tribal arbitration systems, ones over which they themselves could acquire an increasing amount of control. Through Christianity the law has received back some 'religious legitimation', something which was already fundamental for traditional law; while the trans-tribal quality of the Christian presence suggested that at least Christians (or at least Christians of the same persuasion!) must cooperate and resolve their differences in a peaceful, preferably friendly, fashion. This acculturative or

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educational process might have been set in train by expatriates, we may add, but was substantially in the hands of indigenous catechists and church leaders working from day to day at the grassroots (Swain and Trompf 1994). Phase three, it will by now be obvious, is the stage of increasing indigenous involvement in the working of contemporary legal systems, which themselves have been adapted in most Melanesian nations to accommodate conditions in the countryside, where the great majority of populations still reside. By the 1950s, for example, the Australian administration had accepted a system of local government councils for most of Papua New Guinea, these councils facilitating the work of dispute-solving falling on the kiaps as magistrates. During 1958-59, in fact, local ceremonies were organized at which former luluais and the like, many of them having acquired a respectable dignity through age and experience, placed down their long recognized captain-like caps at the feet of assistant district commissioners and thus bowed out of office in favour 'white shirted' komitis or council members, new persons elected to office by clusters of villages (and who then had the difficult job of combining political representation with unbiased legal pronouncements) (Cleland 1983: 215-17). As independent nationhood approached, and following the significant 1960 Derham Report, which gave impetus to the official recognition of customary law (first in 1963), the decolonialization of law gained pace, and previously separated courts for handling cases involving expatriates were phased out (Chalmers 1982: 169-71; Paliwala 1982: 193, cf. Barnett 1967). What were earlier 'multi-racial' councils shed expatriate membership, and when the pre-independence parliament passed the Papua New Guinea Village Courts Act in 1973, elected local councillors were expected to be indigenous, their ward committee members and village peace officers being given the task to maintain order and settle serious conflicts within their own localities (as specified through the district government offices) (PNG 1973a, cf. Gaso in CMA 1977: 55, and for comparable developments elsewhere, e.g. CMA 1977:98-101; Powles and Pulea 1988:207-10). By 1975, the year of Papua New Guinean independence, the Law Reform Commission issued its first report, and detailed work was underway, not only to remove legislation unfairly discriminating between native and expatriate, nor only to clarify the role of village courts in handling such difficult matters as wilful murder, summary offences, adultery, and so forth, but also appearing to take the 'noble traditions' of Papua New Guinea more seriously. By this time 'noble traditions' had appeared alongside 'the Christian principles that are ours now' in the preamble of the Constitution. Moreover, as the Constitution's very fundaments, the traditional and the Christian were expected to coincide—ignoble traditions being implicitly rejected—while all those which had stood the test of time as beneficial complements to 'the Christian way' were extolled. (With slight variations,

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this increase in local participation in the judicial process, as well as the gathering together of worthy customs and Christian values as the 'mythic' bases of constitutions, has been the shared experience of the other independent Melanesian nations.) This third phase, still very much in motion as it is, has a many-sidedness hardly lending itself to an ordered statement. Concerning the issue of legalized enforcement, and the meting out of appropriate punishments and arrangements, the meshings of secular with religious principles abound through the contemporary scene. Even in rural contexts with a long history of interaction with the outside world, village dispute-solving and courts do not tend to be purely secular mechanisms. Villagers who hold responsibility (or are looked up to) in the church usually find themselves in the position of arbitrators, and formal decision-taking often sees a blending of traditional, Christian and modern legal motifs. Many disputes reflect the tension between strict adherence to old laws and the greater freedom under the Christian or modern order. As a participant in a death payment at Delena (Roro, coastal Papua), I recall a typical evening's dispute illustrating this tension. When, with the help of her deceased husband's close kin, a widow went some way towards discharging unfulfilled obligations with a procession of food and a feast, the pleasant evening's proceedings were shattered by the piercing screeches of an aged woman in black, lurking in the shadows. Not only had her family received too little from the pork distribution, but, considering her own prolonged retention of the black drapes of widowhood, she accused the younger widow—who sat in full view wearing an ordinary dress—of discarding her black clothes of mourning much too early. After a small interval the elders who usually formed the village court sat once more upon the ababa (feast platform), and a hearing ensued into the night. Significant was the fact that the arbitrators were virtually all deacons or church stalwarts (although admittedly a few secondary-school educated ward komitis represented influential new blood), and more significant still was the way of handling the debate. In the end, with the alleged inequality in the distribution being discounted as a piece of 'sour grapes', the debate's sticking-point concerned whether the village should hold on to the inured custom of requiring a widow to mark her seclusion and unmarriageable status for three years (a tradition absorbed into 'Christian village life' by the use of a black dress rather than mourning clay), or whether 'true Christianity' had brought the 'new freedom' to set aside such increasingly irrelevant restraints. The tribunal of elders, which facilitated as much open debate as possible, decided in favour of the latter principle, but while implying that the accusing widow had over-prolonged her lamentations, it openly warned the younger widow against possible indiscretion.

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Christian and traditional values are capable of becoming so enmeshed in certain contexts, though, that an outsider without a 'feel' for religion might be excused for supposing that disputes solved without any overt mention of Christian belief are traditional tout court. Documented cases on Matupit Island (Tolai, New Britain), following century-long interaction with mission and foreign business interests, are to the point. Admittedly, the most frequent disputes are over land usually devolving around who has the best ancestral claim over given areas, but others reveal the human values guiding the tena varkurai ('judges', 'elders' or in pidgin komiti) (Epstein 1969: 185). In one moving statement, a komiti intervened to reprimand an enraged man for holding his own mother in contempt (the mother having both complained about her son's children, when his wife was in hospital, and used her daughter-in-law's canoe rather selfishly): Esau, let us think a little of those who bore us. We are not wild animals that live in the bush ... If IaTaunia (your own mother) behaves ill towards you nevertheless you should continue to help her ... A house means a family, it means a mother and children, but a canoe is just a piece of wood. Will you (Epstein 1973:658) look after IaTaunia? Traditional Tolai principles of family solidarity, matrilinearity, and the expectation that the son must care for his mother on the death of her husband, underlay this injunction; yet the Tolai will also be quick to tell you of the popular recognition that these principles square perfectly with Christian teaching about caring and forgiveness (OT: ToKilala 1973, cf. Epstein 1969: 97-99; Watson-Gegeo and White 1990). It is arguable that the blending of two sets of religious values has been crucial for the viability of the village court systems in Melanesia, and that only after such a mutual assimilation has proved fruitful to a small community do its members begin to see the point of district and higher courts. This injection of universal values from beyond confined Melanesian cosmoi engenders the notion that fairness and justice are deserved by all well-meaning citizens of the new nation, even if it may become palpable to the more experienced villagers that on any level of the court structures people will pursue litigation for self-interest and recrimination. If the village courts work most effectively, however, when they are looked to as centres of fair-minded assessment, and often of sensible compromise (cf. Somare 1975: 23, 37-38, 110, 148 on sana), there will remain a common tendency to use them as a vehicle for getting one's own back, and for securing avengement in the way 'Traditional Man' would dictate. I estimate that, where there is not sufficient permeation of Christian values calling into question family, clan and even tribal 'selfishness', there the village court system is in danger of breaking down. This may sound a surprisingly mediaeval judgement. Yet, just to promote courts as secular 'safety-valves', expecting that peoples of a new nation ought to solve their problems

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decently for vague humanitarian reasons, or taking the cynical view that at least courts give retaliators something healthier to do than throw spears without also cultivating connections between law and the new universal spiritual truths, will bear socially schizoid fruits. If Law and the Mission are imaged as two competitive-looking agencies, Melanesians will play them off against each other when it suits. In the central highlands of Papua New Guinea we see this last problem writ rather too large. The village court system has arrived comparatively early to highland societies, yet in most cases the initial acceptance has been with alacrity. For such societies, however, with little time to consider relating universalistic ethics to forums for resolving conflict, the courts have been introduced carrying a decidedly politico-secular image—one which has been reinforced by post-independence politicians, who rhetorically exploit the existence of village courts as one token of local political autonomy. I suspect the eagerness with which most highland groups have taken up hot has contributed to the quite misleading impression that they are a more 'secular' lot (cf. chapter 2). The apparent independence of spirit by highland groups involved in disputes derives, on the other hand, from the basic fact that the language of litigation and the values enunciated in disputes are not yet very strongly affected by Christianity. A number of problems have arisen in consequence. First, there is a tendency to over-rely on courts—and this at the expense of nurturing a moral integrity which can solve problems of human relations away from 'the bench'. When the hot delivers some apparently adverse decision, in any case, the reaction is generally, not acquiescence before an awesome oligarchy of highly respected religio-political elders, as is common on the islands and coast, but further litigation—'fighting in the courts', as Meggitt puts it (1977:157)—or the urge to use traditional methods of force to bypass law (cf. also M. Strathern 1972b; A. Strathern 1972). The village court system, secondly, as Neil Warren (1972) shows of the southern Kamano (eastern highlands) often has the effect of demoting previously prominent warriors, including bigmen, in favour of a younger breed who show aptitude in handling court proceedings. This rather too rapid alteration in the balance of local power has the potential to produce violent reaction, older traditionalists leading moves to resort to spears because not only are they dissatisfied with decisions by the 'new men' but want to circumvent their influence. This shift partly explains eruptions of tribal fighting among the Mae Enga (1971-85) (see below), despite their widespread but rather untutored espousal of Christianity, whereas on the coasts the tension between warrior and new-style leadership was over and the new court system more readily accommodated. Thirdly, the popular recourse to hot can compete against mission efforts to restructure the bases of group and personal morality because it generates

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intermediate fashions of conduct—curious by-products of the court system which stand contrary both to pre-contact tradition and Christian teaching. One set of conditions I know well from personal experience concerns Wahgi divorce cases (fieldnotes 1974, 1976). It is now all too common for women to run back to their own kin when they do not like their husbands, a measure only the most desperate would have taken in the former times of delicate alliances (and over countryside once devoid of the neutral ground now provided by modern roads). Unfortunately for the stability of the marriage state, and very upsetting to church leaders dismayed by upsurging divorce rates, economic advantages accrue to those whose daughters run home to them. They have already received the brideprice (sometimes generously exceeding the K200 stipulated by the local government council), and the subsequent court ruling rarely expects the return of a sum anywhere near this entire bridepayment, because the runaway wife and her relatives can easily concoct good reasons why flight from an unenviable situation was her only alternative. The possibility of such flights naturally discourages families from calling on the church to sanctify the (traditional) marriage of a young couple until it is clear the partners are very likely to stay together. Various quarters of the highlands, as is well known, have seen the virtual breakdown of the court system—a fourth problem—with law enforcement coming to devolve more and more on the police stationed in the larger towns. In zones where tribal fighting has been recurrent, and especially during the State of Emergency (declared for the Papua New Guinea highlands 1979-80), riot squads assume cross-regional power to coerce troublemakers, make summary arrests, and gaol culprits pending trial at a district (now provincial) court (RPC 1979: 16-17, cf. e.g. PC 13 July, 17 Aug. 1979; BCM 22 June 1979: 8 for press coverage). Under the Inter-Group Fighting Act (PNG 1977) (sects 3, 5, 9, 61, 77), collective arrests were sanctioned in areas declared 'fighting zones', on the understanding that any group whose members organize a procession with 'offensive weapons . . . connected with any religious or political distinction or difference between classes of people' shall be guilty of 'unlawful assembly' (cf. Weisbrot 1982: 73). One might justifiably describe some troublesome situations and the measures for handling them as the persistence or return of conditions applicable to our phase two. Certainly, in the Irian Jayan highlands, where modernization is minimal and the neo-colonial approach predominates (with Indonesian soldiers, for instance, often using tear gas to break up tribal wars), entrance into phase three has been limited anyway (Mitton 1983: 226-34; Garnaut and Manning 1974: 24). If the highlands present exceptional situations and problems, that only goes to show that the relative success of local court systems (where applied) has to be gauged for different parts of the region. When it comes to the

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use of police enforcement, in any case, exceptional and sporadic local circumstances can demand their use—to prevent the development of private armies, for example, such as that of the Papuan Republic fighters under the leadership of Simon Kaumi (Jaua, Orokaiva) in 1975 (Jojoga 1993), or even those of expatriates in pre-independence Vanuatu (NT 12 May 1979: 13), and to check the development of alternative police forces set up by 'third level' governments (as among the Kopani of Bougainville in mid-1970s) (chapter 4). Police play a role alongside army personnel to counter internal rebellion (see below), whether within independent nations or continuing colonies. It has of course been in urban contexts over the last two decades, right across the region, that the police enforcement of the law has been most obvious. In towns people are expected to conform to a common code of conduct appropriate to cultural pluralism. In Papua New Guinea a style of hot comparable to those in villages has worked in urban squatter settlements where there is a sufficient degree of homogeneity; yet, with heavier migration to towns in the 1980s, this has become increasingly difficult (Norwood 1982b: 288, Keris 1986). Urban areas have become a realm for mobile police patrolling, independent security services and of courts dominated by judges less likely to fix penalties by customary standards especially because they handle so many cases—of break and enter, rape, dangerous driving, disorderly behaviour—different from the usual run of village disputes (OT: Narokobi 1983). Setting guidelines for penalties in urban settings is a challenging task. The mixing of peoples in towns suggests the bases for national rulings; and yet, the glaring differences between town and country make the arrival at uniformly appropriate rulings very difficult. The work of the PNG Law Reform Commission (1973 on) is of great interest in this connection, the country's 'autochthonous constitution' providing her with 'a unique opportunity to develop its own legal system' (LRC 1976: 1). On the one hand, we find the Commission's opposition to the severities of traditional penalties (adultery, for instance, being made punishable by a fine of K2000, not even by immediate imprisonment, and this decision being founded on the Gospel of John 8:1-11) (LRC 1977: 3, 12, cf. PC 1 Aug. 1977); while, on the other hand, the Commission pressed for bench judgements to take customary law more seriously. This last pressure, however, was not always met. Homicide cases constituted the biggest problems. By 1980 it was accepted that deaths by revenge warfare were 'diminished responsibility killings' with a maximum liability of three years' imprisonment (Weisbrot 1982: 489), but degrees of leniency with custom in view became sensitive issues. After all, the old and not long relinquished 1921 Native Ordinance fixed the maximum at only six months (cf. Meggitt 1977: 150), and in 1980 an indigenous acting judge of the National Court, Bernard Narokobi,

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made a most contentious decision when he gave four Ipili Engans only four years' gaol with hard labour for killing a sorceress. 'Among the social mores of these people', he contended, 'it is an act of honour to kill sorcerers [and] . . . not a bad thing'. Not surprisingly, the Crown Prosecutor appealed, and the Supreme Court extended the apparently light sentence to six years (OT: Narokobi 1984; SMH 8 May 1981: 6). Soft-pedalling over homicide could not wear. Soon after Narokobi's decision, in the context of the State of Emergency applied to the highlands, the national parliament nearly passed hanging laws for murder (PC 14 Nov. 1980; cf. PC 13 June 1979, 9 Jan. 1980 for short-term background, and Nelson 1979 longer)—a shift of opinion in turn producing vocal opposition (for example, by Fr John Momis, NBC Broadcast 11 June 1985). In 1984 three Supreme Court judges imposed a severe life sentence on a fifty-year old 'Goilala' who had killed the entirely innocent son of the man who had previously killed his son, and the judges appealed to the 'right to life' under the constitution—payback killings being contrary to 'the general principle of humanity' (Ruling 5c-239, Kidu, Bredmeyer, Amet, 1 April: 12). By 1984-85, after spates of pack rapes in urban settings and public reactions to them, parliamentarians were contemplating both hanging and castration as suitable punishment for rapists. Despite the non-existence of prisons in traditional Melanesia, moreover, the view that malefactors should be kept well apart from society behind bars and cage wire has rapidly gained unquestioning general acceptance, notwithstanding alternative lines of thought—about a national probation system, 'restitution' as an 'alternative to punishment'—put forward by social workers, Christian social thinkers, and so on (e.g. Giddings in MCC 1985; TP 30 June 1985: 5, cf. Campbell 1977: 105). The death penalty eventually returned in mid1990 as the law's ultimate payback mechanism (A 28 Aug. 1991). Space does not permit illustrating modern enforcement and penalty system in every other Melanesian country. Suffice it to say that, in other independent nations (the Solomons, Vanuatu, even Fiji) the police profile has been low because the law and order problem among the indigenous peoples there has been much smaller in comparison to Papua New Guinea, while in non-independent countries (especially New Caledonia) police power has been repressive because of active kanak opposition to restrictive legislation (Connell 1987: 257-84). We can develop a more comparative perspective when surveying negative payback in modern politics below. Traditional physical avengement revamped For peoples whose traditions set such store by warriorhood and clan solidarity in the face of all-too-proximate enemy neighbours, the achievement of a genuinely peaceful cross-cultural order requires an enormous shift of consciousness. Caution and suspicion were virtues necessary for personal survival in 'the old time', and to break from this mould—'taking people

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as they come' like a casual Western suburbanite—amounted to a daring vulnerability. For those seeking to preserve the fighting spirit of the past, moreover, especially older traditionalists left unaccounted by Western-style decision-makers, or youths 'dropping out' of the new school system, pacification has frustrated the age-old impetus toward outward aggression. Despite the massive effort of 'conscientization' by the churches, then, the endemically human urge to retaliate has re-reared its head, and the endurance of local enmities, sometimes producing physical clashes, has provided an unhappy principle on which district and regional antagonisms have been grounded. In this section concentration will be on the recent resurgence of tribal warfare in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, but not before briefly reviewing the complex story of post-contact tribal warfare that preceded it and the exacerbations brought to small-scale conflicts by the introduction of firearms (cf. Shineberg 1971). In Fiji the consequences of the new weaponry were horrendous. There, the Swedish castaway Charles Savage joined forces with Nauvilou, chief of Mbau, and entered the fray against the latter's enemies in 1810. Protected behind shields, he picked off many human targets with his gun (Lawry 1850:95). And there, with firearms increasingly used in tribal war, one whole village population was exterminated in 1861 (Seeman 1862: 177), and the same problem affected Malekula, the Loyalties and Malaita only slightly less seriously over the next half-century (Layard 1942: 602; Corris and Keesing 1980: 77-90; Howe 1974, cf. also Tippett 1967: 193). Over in the Admiralties by the turn of the century, Manus warriors who possessed carbines from the Rabaul area massacred almost 100 Ponam islanders in a raid (King 1978: 73-74, cf. Sack 1974a: 88). As official control widened over the interiors of both Papua and New Guinea, tribes siding with white officers were known to convince them to open fire on (allegedly attacking) enemies or else using new weapons themselves for the same ends (e.g. PNA 1935-36: 6 on Finintigu; Waiko 1983 on Orokaiva Binandere; OT: Laba 1983 on Kiwai and Gizra). In the highlands of Irian Jaya, furthermore, one could trace the extension of traditional tribal warfare over time into more recent conflicts between faction groups within the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM) or Free Papua Movement (and then also between OPM fighters, some armed traditionally, some with guns, and Indonesian or pro-Indonesian military) (Utrecht 1978: 7; OT: Fairio 1985). It is to the Papua New Guinea highlands we now turn, however, to examine developments of greater relevance to modernization. Tribal warfare resumed A distinction needs drawing between the open resumption of battle-field skirmishing between tribesmen and the covert perpetuation of avengement through sporadic acts of homicide. In the Papua New Guinea highlands both these forms of 'revamped tradition' are in ample evidence to this day.

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The return to group warfare, in fact, in the Chimbu, Western Highlands and Enga Provinces especially, prompted the national government to impose the State of Emergency on affected areas (1979-80), for by that stage up to 100 lives were being lost through tribal fights each year and the costs in accompanying property damage ran to thousands of kina. I will concentrate on examples most familiar to me, and which best illustrate how tribal war re-emerged and was also 'modified by modernization'. Kup, in the Wahgi Valley, has been a nerve centre of conflict since 1972, when animosity between clans from the Kumai and Golagu (Gualaku) developed into war during the proceedings of the Kumai's Kongar festival. In a burst of rhetoric hardly atypical of Kongar hosts, a Kumai bigman boasted of the greatness of his own tribe, and contrasted it to the minimal accomplishments of the Golagus. Taking these insults to heart, the Golagu warriors invited to this feast quickly mobilized to burn down the cult- and rest-houses bordering the singsing area (cf. chapter 2), an act which brought the area into a state of war for the first time in twenty-five years. In the succeeding years, the clashes became centred on the area between the Kaling Ridge and Kup settlement (with its police station and Catholic Mission), the two main combatant groups being the Kumai and the Endugla (a Chimbu-speaking tribe traditionally allied to the Golagu, and one standing with the Kumai at the linguistic border-line). The two major contesting tribes both fall under the control of the Chimbu-based provincial officials rather than those from the Western Highlands (Kerpi 1975: 11, 13, cf. PC 6 Dec. 1974). A few pertinent observations should be made about this trouble-spot. First, there is the intriguing datum that, with one exception, open fighting broke out recurrently during the 1970s in the month of December (that is, from 1972 on) (PNG 1973b). Fieldwork on location soon revealed that this was because young men had returned to the hamlets and male longhouses for the Christmas vacation, being otherwise occupied in educational institutions for most of the year. Students at Kondiu (Catholic) High School some 10 kilometres away tended to board during the school year rather than walk backwards and forwards through dangerous territory, and other willing fighters were in tertiary institutions outside the Western Highlands or Chimbu Provinces. One young warrior interviewed in 1976 was attempting studies at the Madang (Catholic) Seminary (though finding it hard to last the distance), and his reason for joining his fellow Kumai on the ridges was quite simply: 'I believe I should be fighting for my country'. Periodic access to additional manpower, then, has been vital for the timing of skirmishes. Also, even though there were loudly vocalized pretexts for each episode—the alleged rape of a Kumai woman in December 1973, for instance, the attempted suicide of an Endugla woman, married to a Kumai, in the same month in 1974, and so forth (Kerpi 1975: 13; PC 29 Nov. 1979),

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we will stand by the position stated earlier (chapter 1) that the causes of these conflicts are much deeper. They have to do with the keeping of scores from pre-contact times, war magicians and custodians of the Kongar continuing their practices, and constantly calling to clan memory the honour of the unrequited deed, despite pacification (cf. Reay 1987). They have to do with the long-term history of tribal pressures on each other and past patterns of alliances, both of which are invoked in the saga material passed on by each clan (fieldnotes 1976-77; Kerpi 1975: 15, cf. PNA 194142: 3; Kondwal and Trompf 1982). It is true that, among the pretexts for war, lie attempts to occupy or plant gardens on disputed land (as in 1976). Land shortage, however, whether due to population pressure or diminishment of arable ground, is not a root cause of turbulence there. Much more important is the opportunity for the resumption of traditional ways presented to those bigmen and warriors in the area who felt they had lost 'their dignity and respect', and been reduced to mere bush kanakas after the coming of patrol officers and missionaries. Much is suggested by the fact that the first war between the Kumai and the Endugla in 1973—a two-and-a-half month conflict resulting in two deaths and many serious woundings—was initiated on Papua New Guinea's Self-Government Day, a transition-point bigmen expected to spell the end of kiap control and the beginning of a return to the old ways (Kerpi 1975: 7-10, 12-13). In this and other Wahgi fight-zones, moreover, young men have been only too willing to regain the prestige lost both for not coping with Western-style education or for making no mark for themselves at home (fieldnotes 1976-77; cf. OTs: Mangi 1984 on Tangilka/ Kapanka vs Kamblika, near Minj, 1969-82; Ramsay 1980 on Ariamb-Tur conflict further west, 1979-80). A good deal of excitement returns to rural life when a situation of 'military alert' reapplies; there is a more intense tone of cooperation, tabus are more carefully observed, tactics discussed, the prospect of a pig killed and eaten after a successful engagement, and the possibility of fame. Weapons need to be prepared, even if the shields are now coloured in silvers and blues from the paint-tins bought at trade stores and the axes have steel rather than stone heads. There was also an all-pervasive sense of pride in the mid-1970s that the police were being outwitted by the local warriors, since the former arrived on the scene only after the skirmishes were over and when warriors 'were returning home from the battle fields' (Kerpi 1975:23). The police tended to make one-sided arrests, and by charging too many Kumai with 'riotous behaviour', they enabled the Endugla to take Kumai lives while the latter were temporarily weakened (fieldnotes 1976-77). The resultant anger toward officialdom only added fuel to the fire—an aspect of the situation well illustrated by the near spearing of Mr D. Biri, national minister for Corrective Services, who joined a riot squad at Kup to quell a Golagu-Kumai clash early in

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1979 (PC 28 Aug. 1979: 3). By then a police order throughout the Wahgi Valley required all weapons used in the mock display of aggression at the Kongar to be burnt straight after the ceremony (OT: O'Hanlon 1980), thus showing up the (neo-colonial) government agencies as the really active threat to traditional culture and religion. As for the Catholic missionary to Kup during the 1970s, he recognized his own powerlessness to avert the strife, aware not only of dwindling congregations in large churches but also that various Kumai involved in the fighting used the proximity of their houses to the Central Mission complex as an ail-too convenient measure of protection (OT: Kuerten 1976). Besides, many people considering themselves 'good Catholics' feel it their duty to fight and defend their kin, thus living in a 'split level' world of new faith and old fury. Needless to say, although I did hear family prayers to God for succour and protection, it was the ancestors who were constantly recalled in rites to do with battles and peace (the old war-gods and their stone emblems no longer being accessible, cf. chapter 1). To the east of Kup, and thus into the Chimbu Province proper, stands further evidence of resurgent tribal warfare, again peculiarly affected by the attempts to graft modern institutions on to cultures with little more than thirty years of extensive contact with the outside world. During the State of Emergency in 1980, while three boys were returning home from Kondiu High School for Holy Week, one drowned in the Wahgi River. It was alleged by members of a sub-clan, one from the Nalegu tribe, to which the unfortunate youth belonged, that a Siambuga boy had pushed him in, and accusations were made direct to the supposed culprit's kin. The accusers claimed to be witnesses, and reminded those protesting the Siambuga youth's innocence that, according to a Kondiu school regulation, anyone found trying to swim in the river was automatically expelled, a fact they used to confirm foul play. The sad loss triggered off memory of the tragic death of Kondom, the famous luluai who had framed the eight basic laws for peace in the Chimbu (see above), and who, while a member of the House of Assembly and head of the Local Government Council, was killed in a traffic accident at the hands of a Siambuga driver (August 1966). The hotel bar at Kundiawa now played its part in providing a pretext; word came to the Nalegu of 'dirty talk' against this, their former hero and, despite Kondom's renowned insistences on law and order, they went to war for the first time in nearly three decades. Significantly, it took a death, a long memory of apparently unequal scores, and a good deal of alcohol consumption for extra courage in the face of government sanctions, to set them going. Many Siambuga houses were burnt, and open clashes and ambushes resulted in three dead from each side by November. The protracted nature of this struggle between the two tribes was partly due to the absence of agreed traditional procedures for peace-making.

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Kondom and the Divine Word Fathers had succeeded for too long and, in contrast to the situation near Kup (chapter 2), details of the peace rituals had gone unremembered. For thirty years the two tribes had formed the habit of holding informal hot and resolving most of their major differences on Sundays after Mass, in the shadow of the Mingende mission station. Now the mission, planted on Siambuga land, became the scene of glaringly different activity. On the first Sunday in June and a little more than 100 metres from the station, Nalegu warriors surrounded up to twenty Siambuga, and could have killed them all in a cluster (pidgin: olsem basket). Singing out and despatching one, they chopped up his body into little pieces, and placed his dead hand on the top of a stake at the side of the Highlands Highway (a somewhat Homeric touch, cf. Iliad 10.470, but a popular Chimbu means of marking a successful revenge killing). Twelve years earlier, the Nalegu had dug and decorated Kondom's grave near the highway as a display of their sorrow and bitterness; now they could advertise what they deemed to be a just retribution (OTs: Welling; Hassett 1980). It was in this context that the African bishop Caesar promulgated an interdict, and debarred all those joining a fight or destroying others' properties from confession and communion (p.293). The Catholic primary school at Mingende was closed down; even the Siambuga, on whose land it stood, were very reluctant to send their children there. The Kondiu High School continued, yet with Nalegu and Siambuga pupils conspicuously absent. Police watched over the opening ceremony of a small hospital near the mission on Siambuga soil, only two weeks after the early June incident, and the public dancing for the occasion put on by the enemy group saw feigned enjoyment and hardly a hint of possible compensations. By then, group violence had re-surfaced elsewhere in the Chimbu—in the Chuave, Kogi and Yuri areas—contributing to a tightening of the State of Emergency in the highlands. In other hotbeds of conflict we can detect important points of comparison and contrast with the struggles around both Kup and Mingende. To the southeast of both settlements, in the Gumine district, noteworthy matters concern attitudes to the police and intra-clan fighting. Back in 1974, significantly, police burnt a men's clubhouse of the Kipaku clan (Golin tribe) at Dirima, and at the time the author left the field tribesmen awaited their opportunity for revenge, with their score-keeping incorporating a new element. Among the Yuri, inter-tribal warfare has been sporadic since contact but recently intensifed through two agencies of modernization— roads and the district mobile squad. Road accidents provided a rationale for serious inter-clan (that is, intra-tribal) fighting, incidents of which were minimal in pre-contact times (chapter 1), and in some cases members of the one family refused to have dealings with each other. When nine people were killed and some of their bodies mutilated near Onkal in 1980, Yuri justified it to the missionaries as pasin bilong mipela (our tradition)—a

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warped interpretation of the past—and yet were without traditional conventions to stop it (OT: esp. J. Kai 1980). The roads had not only brought in the new killer vehicle but also truckloads of beer by which to mishandle it. A new pressure on land among the Yuri, moreover, came from at least three sources: from immigrants (male members of other tribes renting or purchasing land, or marrying local women and deciding to settle on Yuri terrain once pacification made such changes of residence viable); from the new impetus to engage in cashcropping (good garden land being taken up in the hope of procuring money and, thus, consumer goods); and, ironically, from better health care (very few children now dying from yaws, and the central highlands sustaining the highest population growth rate in the world, ca. 1960-80) (Brown 1972: 65-109; Keaney 1977; SPC/ESCAP 1982: 26-27). Moreover, 1979, saw the weakening of the external forces of law and order after a mobile squad descended on a Yuri inter-clan fight near Omdore. In the ensuing melee the police lost one of their guns; and when setting fire to a men's clubhouse, an action which caused most of the warriors to scatter, an innocent man inside was burnt to death. Policemen, many of whom are not highlanders, became loath to return to the area (OT: Mantovani 1980). Such have been the complexities of the Chimbu situation. Naturally, in view of local adverse reactions to the police and government, missionaries have been forced to dissociate themselves from both, to avoid losing clout with influential Christian tribesmen who could ease tensions. Aside from deploying mobile squads, however, various government answers to the problems are accepted and relayed by the missions as valuable. Yet, such responses are of a super-structural nature and do not get to the heart of the matter: that is, the crucial difference between one religious attitude and another, and thus the attitudinal change from preserving clan honour through blood revenge at all costs to establishing a tcu(m)bu against war and homicide as the top social priority. In June 1980, the provincial government administrative secretary wrote off to all schools and missions about the desperate need for 'comprehensive community education' for adults to be drawn as much as possible into the education process (PG, 1980). Meanwhile the district court judge (G. Lapthorne), taking his cue from the 1977 Inter-Group Fighting Act concerning collective punishment, ruled that a K5000 fine would be imposed on bigmen as group representatives if they either initiated or allowed war to happen (cf. PNG 1977; PC 21 Nov. 1977). One of the more imaginative thinkers in provincial politics, Barunke Kaman, insisted that employment through the creation of government-paid minor labouring jobs was the answer (although he soon paid dearly politically for diverting provincial funds to create work for 1500 people and, like most of the other Chimbu politicians, found he had to divorce himself personally from the tribal turbulence) (OT: Kaman

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1980, cf. Standish 1979: 76, 132). Late in 1980 the Provincial Executive banned the sale of strong drink throughout the Chimbu for two weeks, and two competing groups mustering before the government offices at Kundiawa, one for and one against the ruling, were dispersed by tear gas (fieldnotes 1980, cf. PC 17 Nov. 1980), while the stormiest of highland politicians at the national level, Mr. Iambakey Okuk, then minister for Transport, occasionally tried threatening helicopter flights over troublespots before and during the Emergency as a warning against truculent behaviour (cf. PC 20 July, 4 Oct. 1978 on). Emergency and riot-quelling situations like those discussed above have arisen off and on up to the time of writing (see p. 338). The clash between traditional expectations about justified revenge and the insistence on the maintenance of law and order by representatives of the new superstructures is very striking! Through it, on the one hand, we see the age-old resilience of primal religion. Admittedly, the accepted course of violent action has been reinforced by a politicization of payback, by a more conscious agreement among the combatants to keep the agencies of change from interfering with what tradition dictated as a group's spiritsanctioned imperatives. And the channelling of the aggression has been complicated by the side-effects of pacification and economic development, such as pressures put on previously more coherent social and economic relations by immigrants, or on land and food resources by cash cropping and bought ownership (Strathern 1977b). Yet clan cohesion has provided the basis for group acts of recrimination nonetheless, and thus homicide is hardly being secularized in any clear sense, when the motives are neither merely 'personal' nor merely 'socio-political'. If anything, this clan cohesion has been taken to un traditional-looking extremes so that, just as the pretexts for fighting have become more complex (with road accidents, for example, or new pressures), so too the tribal solidarity so important for survival in the pre-pacified era has been undermined in the Yuri area or around Gumini—the shift towards intra-tribal, inter-clan conflict bearing out the warning to ethnographers we stated earlier (chapter 1). These points and more are reinforced by recent outbursts of fighting in the Melpa and Enga culture areas further to the west, where warfare has resumed on a scale comparable to that in the past. Experienced ethnographers in these areas, Andrew Strathern (1976; 1984b) and Paul Brennan (in P May 1979), say little for the popularly held (and sometimes vulgar Marxist) view that pressure on land and resources is the root cause of recent conflicts in the highlands. For them land is one factor among many, and both recognize the crucial consequences of 'inter-group antagonism over past acts of violence', Brennan also stressing that the Mae Enga hold unavenged ghosts possess the true 'authority' as 'enforcement agents', not

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the police (OT: 1979). This conclusion might fly in the face of Mervyn Meggitt's arguments, mainly based on administrative records for the years 1961-73, that out of sixty 'armed conflicts' among the Enga in that period, dispute over land was the 'ostensible reason' up to forty-four times (1977: 178-81). Such data, however, are misleading, especially if we draw no distinction between cause and pretext (as done above in chapter 1), and if we forget the natural appeal of Engan co-defendants to the 'land pretext' in hot to shield their warriors from obvious cases of revenge, and lay claim to as much land as possible into the bargain. The data does not make sense, furthermore, of the much greater and more complex ruptures of 1978-90 (cf. Feil 1977; Gordon and Kipilan 1983; Allen and Giddings 1983; Young 1986: 9; Schiltz 1987). The most recent developments lead one to take the religio-social solidarity of the clan as a network of human relationships under strain, yet best capable of asserting its identity by securing some victory (or score) over others in an immemorial contest. And in Enga, when it came to a collision between such networks and the cross-tribal pressures (whether church, government or, even more recently in the Porgera area, gold finds), the pull of tradition has been the stronger. Admittedly, all the major Enga groups went over to Christianity, in its Catholic and Lutheran varieties, very rapidly (1950-70), yet usually without solid entrenchment of new leadership institutions. Thus, within clans good Christian leaders might point the way to a totally different order of inter-clan cooperation, yet they were soon reduced to pawns in a serious game of inter-clan vendetta. Sein Ipata of the Sau, for instance, as co-manager of Lutheran Tora Enterprises (a cooperative of the Gutnius Luteran Sios), chose to avoid involvement in fighting, and steered his people as long as possible out of conflict— until the number of clan deaths made it impossible. Once fighting did come, unfortunately, he became a marked man and was tragically killed by members of the Kaikini in mid-1980 (OTs: Teske 1980; Stottick 1981). It was very tempting to conclude, moreover, that as soon as mobile squads were sent from Mount Hagen to stop the earlier eruptions to a previously quite peaceful Enga Province in 1978, their presence only gave added impetus to traditionalist fight-leaders in other clans to set about embarrassing the new, utterly superficial control centred on Wabag, Hagen and the camps on the highway in between (e.g. PC 22 March, 7 Nov. 1978). In August 1978, to illustrate, I found the Enga politician, Sir Te Abal, then leader of the Opposition, drinking in the Wabag Inn. Bewildered by an uncontrollable constituency, knowing it was suicidal to preach law and order in the field, and sensing his forthcoming loss of credibility (cf. Griffin et al. 1979: 245-46), he was more interested to learn how his son was doing at university. Eventually police brutality made matters worse, and the provincial government, thought to be the panacea for the 1980s, only

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rubbed salt on old wounds (Standish 1981; Gordon 1983; Lea and Gray 1983, cf. PC 17 May 1983; NN 4 Oct. 1984, etc.).5 It has been concern over threats to clan or tribal (rather than national or regional) influence, which was crucial in regenerating warfare. As Brennan has aptly put it of primal Enga culture under pressure (in P May 1979: 11): the discontinuance of several cultural institutions [e.g. men's houses, under the impact of Christianity], increased mobility, the widespread acceptance of certain innovations (e.g., alcohol) [legalized for indigenes in 1961] and a host of other changes have increased the threatening power of those outside one's clan membership. Clan allegiance, once re-enlivened in all its demanding reality, can rapidly undercut all other ties, even those of the church, easily the strongest of the non-traditional inter-clan linkages among the Enga. By October 1980, even armed teenagers from two separate Lutheran youth groups (from two separate clan groupings) came to face each other on a battle-field at Papiyuka. Church leaders could not stop the fighting until blood was drawn, when one taunting youth exposed his own flank and was speared (OTs: Binner; Teske 1980). Here, the church competed against barbed wood, not the switchblade (cf. Wilkinson 1963)! Yet it can be seen how easily school and mission fostering of common peer group interests could 'backfire' into the independent formation of gangs (see below). With the strange mix of interest in Christianity and the atmosphere of violence, moreover, it is not surprising to find competitive institutional experimentation among the younger university-trained Engan leaders. On the one hand, we find Chris Kopyoto, who both conducted the anti-tribal fighting campaign which led to the Enga Peace Foundation (1977-81), and declared himself bishop of a new church (because of others' failures) (Trompf 1991: 233), later taking temporary refuge in Australia when payback actions by his kinsmen against other tribes made him a marked man (OT: 1990). On the other hand, there emerged an outlandish (and armed) Enga Liquor Licensing Commission Security Service at Wabag (under one Malipu Balakan)! Small wonder, then, that it was openly admitted, by 1985, police authorities that the basic problem in Enga—as it is elsewhere—is one of competing worldviews (NBC News 25 March 1985, cf. TP 21 April 1985: 7), which can only be solved by religious and attitudinal change away from warriorhood culture. In all those areas for which we have just documented the re-emergence of revenge fighting, this admission carries weight to this day. 5

In the Western Highlands Provincial Premier Mara actually entered the field of battle among Melpa clans.

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Homicide: from yonder hamlet to urban hotbed—and back again Homicide, it will appear, is hardly an intrinsically religious act and hard to place in a study of distinctively religious issues. To take another's life, however, is an act of tremendous existential significance for the person responsible, in whatever cultural context; in Melanesia, where the hunting and killing of animals has such strong connections with value inculcation and ceremonial activity, the enactment and rationale of homicide are without question a fitting object for religious inquiry (cf. chapter 1). The phenomena of (apparent) secularization, however, suggest that the motivation behind man-slaying can no longer be almost exclusively explained in terms of tribal or group honour and solidarity, but involves a multiplicity of factors. Commentators on urban affairs, for instance, often assume that much urban violence is a by-product of the undermining, not the perpetuation, of hamlet-grown principles. For them it would thus be false to 'read in' religion as a motive behind many urban killings and, besides, media personnel among them could think it unwise to link homicide with religion, when literate town-dwellers so often read the latter as Christianity. In urban areas, indeed, homicide has been increasingly treated in the courts as murder when there is no evidence of local-traditional hostilities, the absence of appeal to tribal (and thus, to us 'sodo-religious') sanctions making for severer penalties (OTs: e.g. Narokobi 1983; Akuram 1983). The fact is, though, the neologism 'payback' has made a recurrent appearance in the press and popular talk over the last two decades (e.g. PC 5 July 1979: 3, 28 June 1985: 3; SMH 9 Feb. 1982: 2, etc.), and people have come to appreciate—particularly in Papua New Guinea—that the term encapsulates a reality which covers or mixes both old and new, ranging from old 'traditional-religious' syndromes, across new interregional conflict, to remarkably 'personal' action. The problem makes many people very cautious. I know individuals living in Port Moresby who will proceed from house to business and back again along the same undeviating 'safe' route, for fear of surprise attack; and I know very many others who decline to complain to the police about offences against them, or even complain publicly about the police themselves, for fear of consequences on themselves or kinsfolk—above all, for fear of violence or death. What can be intelligently said, then, about the relationship between religion and homicide in an apparently 'modernizing' Melanesia, as one moves analytically from country to town, and keeps in mind constant interactions between rural and urban areas? Despite the apparent effectiveness of pacification in most rural areas of Melanesia, the pre-contact struggles of virtually all societies which have preserved the (once warring) security circle are still being carried on surreptitiously. Select cultures with very recent (pre-war) access to the wider

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world, in fact, even if their social units have not drifted back into tribal war, keep old sores open by sporadic and unpredictable acts of homicide. New Guinea's eastern highlands hold cases in point (chapter 1). Isolated inter-tribal killings still recur among the Bena(bena), more instances of them being towards the end of the year (a time of drinking and disputing after the cash-flow of the coffee season, as well as at the onset of school vacations). The increasingly accepted principle, however, is not to mark leading men for death but rather males who lack prestige, or who have an alcohol problem. Payback running to prepare for homicide is still known, but an imprisonable offence, while the typical trucking of dying patients to Goroka Hospital at the last minute has created a different atmosphere around mourning and funerary activity (than discussed in chapter 1). Such homicide is all too readily importable into towns. In fact, apart from occasional cases of running amok (when villagers out of their senses deal some fatal blow) and localized 'cult murders', no form of homicide can safely be declared exclusively rural. Running amok, however, though not easily analysable, may well result from new uncertainties borne by civilization, with confused social isolates (unconsciously) trying to 'rehabilitate' their 'sense of personal and social dignity' by violence (Burton-Bradley 1975: 53-57). Cult murders also occur in transitional contexts. One ritual killing from an unspecified culture-area, Burton-Bradley deems paranoid and related to comparable confusion (1965). Calling the village together, even inviting a white official for the occasion, a man unexpectedly slit his friend's throat on a platform, later avowing that this deed, which the victim himself had wanted to happen as an end parallel to Jesus, would bring wonderful changes, including an end to killing, pig-stealing and quarrelling over women (cf. chapter 6 on Muli). Confusion resulting from recent conversion has caused deaths in rare situations. One effect of Huli pastors from the APC Mission on new Homan converts (in the outlying Lake Kutubu area), for example, was the violent jumping on a traditionalist opponent—to exorcise and requite his evil (Robin 1980: 389-462). If such scenarios are more particularly rural, there are more typical acts of inter-tribal homicide (including efforts to kill by sorcery) which can be worrisome in both town and country. A killing or 'accident' may occur in the village; within a few months a man from the unavenged tribe may 'afford' an aeroplane ride to the capital, where he will (not unfairly!) let the rumour circulate that he has arrived to exact a price. In the anonymity of the city he seeks out and catches his prey. My own children lost one of their best friends at primary school this way (1973). The little body of a small Wompa boy (of Morobe parents) was found in a storm-drain on the fringes of the University in Port Moresby, days after an avenger announced his coming. In one respect, of course, some slight improvement

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over traditional revenge syndromes might be seen in these more premeditated fatalities, because the requital is more likely to fall on the particular family or close kin of the one held responsible for a previous death, and not on any one of the traditionally enemy. Even if vendettas persist, then pacification and modernization have bent retaliation patterns toward lex talionis, or towards a relatively more discriminating arrangement. But perhaps it is only a shift of phenomenological significance; for, espousers of 'higher principles of justice' will deny the results to be humanly better. The avenger still often avoids going to a culprit himself; he prefers to make the culprit suffer more in this life by taking one of his children, let us say, who is innocent. Retribution on the actual offender obviously makes for better justice, although there have been times when aggrieved clansmen have rushed in to axe down accused men before they have even reached the court dock (e.g. A 28-29 Oct. mag. 3), or when the wrong man has been avenged by mistake (NN 21 April 1983). And then there can be controversial notions as to who 'the right man' is. When one of six arrested tribal fighters fell off a police truck and was killed in Enga country, 1980, his kin interpreted the death as deliberate and blamed the driver (a common highland decision) and they bided their time until the relevant policeman returned to Wabag township, beheading him after he left the hotel bar (OT: Carrad 1984). In urban centres, on the other hand, tit-for-tat manslaying is capable of being played out on a regional rather than purely local basis. We discuss wantok (= 'one-talk') systems later (chapter 8), noting how people who speak the same language, even if hailing from traditionally hostile tribes in the countryside, tend to cooperate and support one another in towns. The wantok principle can operate towards negativity, however, not only positivity, with town dwellers gravitating into wider cultural or regional groupings which bear enmity towards each other and, thus, place payback on a newer, though more thinly spread footing. Whether it is a 'less religious' and therefore 'more secular' footing is a moot, if fascinating, point; but, certainly, the aetiology of the conflict between larger groupings, namely the loss of human life (whether by accident or wilful violence), and the beginnings of a 'history' of see-saw avengements, is comparable to that found in tradition. A notorious example of inter-regional revenge sequences lies with the Chimbu-Goilala struggle, centred on Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. The precise origins of this conflict are obscure, but its heat clearly followed the influx of central highlanders to the capital and such surrounding nodes of employment as plantations in the 1960s. Its existence is manifested by individual attacks, occasionally by the axing of enemies in stores or on suburban streets in broad daylight, outbreaks of the bitter feud being particularly noticeable in Port Moresby during 1970, 1977-80, and in the

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country township of Wau (Morobe highlands) in 1985 (OTs: Martin, Kolia, Okona 1977-85, cf. Norwood 1982a: 85-86; PC 4 Aug. 1978:15; TP 21 April 1985: 3). If this conflict is to serve as a useful introduction to changing patterns of revenge in modern settlements, though, two common misconceptions must be cleared. First, the term 'Goilala', so often on the lips of nationals, townspeople and press reporters in derogation, does not only refer to the Papuan mountain people of the Goilala sub-district (more properly the Tauade, one tribe of whom is named Goilala), who have been maligned even in modern ethnography as killers 'for pleasure' (see Trompf in PC 7 March, 1980: 16, cf. chapter 1). There is a balance of power based on regional groupings in Moresby, and those locked into it understand 'Goilala' to include the Kunimaipa (even as far as Gereina), the Fuyughe, some mountain Koiari, as well as the Tauade (or Goilala proper). It is likewise inaccurate to infer that the term Chimbu (or 'Simbu') when applied to this conflict denotes only native Chimbu, or migrants from the province of the same name, when other central highlanders, especially from the Goroka and Hagen areas, are lumped together under this generic title. Second, contrary to popular imagination, there is no clinching evidence that the Goilala-Chimbu death-feuding is perpetrated by gangs. The journalese image of the Goilalas as the Melanesian Mafia, holding secret rituals as confederates in blood revenge, and sending large quantities of stolen goods, such as stereograms and crockery into Papua's mountains by local airlines, is a fabrication (against Forster 1979; cf. Norwood 1982a, yet see next section, below). It is wiser to begin explaining the hostilities, rather, by first noting how migrants from a given region already share comparable cultural and historical experiences and are inclined to be supportive of one another along supra-local lines once serious trouble has erupted. The existence of feelings of mutual support among members of the same wider region, then, needs explaining, while also remembering it is only a minority of men among them, typically traditionalist and with prior experience at payback skirmishing in a rural setting, who get locked into the feud as the unswerving activists (cf. also NN 29 Aug., 3 Dec. 1984; 26 April 1985). Throughout Melanesia's colonial history, movement to places of nontraditional activity, such as plantations and mines, brought representatives of different cultures which previously had little or nothing to do with each other into conflict. In earlier days tensions arose through unmarried labourers from one region being set to work on plantations away from their homeland. In 1904 and 1912, for example, local villagers near Madang attacked the German Neuguinea Kompagnie plantations because their women had been sexually abused by indentured labourers from New Ireland; the villagers, much to their resentment, were deported to the Rai Coast for their trouble (Firth 1982: 82). On the bigger plantations,

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groups of workers from one region came to develop 'healthy suspicions' of those in others, recognizing that the beliefs and customs of neighbouring groups were not so dissimilar, as against those of peoples far removed, and seeking to bolster themselves against alien sorcery threats with a common regional stock of relevant lore. During the inter-war decades, as has been recently shown (Kuluah 1990), the laborization of New Guineans in large numbers on the Morobe goldfields (at Wau and Bulolo) brought these tendencies to a head, setting in train those loose antagonistic divisions now called 'Sepiks', 'Morobes', 'Tolais' and so forth. Because of the top-heavy historiographical preoccupation with blackwhite relations, we should add, and latterly with black protest against colonialism, a veritable dearth of material on the longer-term relations between indigenous 'regional groupings' makes an adequate history hardgoing. We have already noted the prevalent jealousy of other New Britain islanders toward the Tolai, for example, and the feelings of Mekeo and Roro superiority over the Papuan mountain peoples (chapters 1, 6). But many other attitudes require exploring; antipathies toward the Papuan Motu in and around Port Moresby, let us say, or the Sentani near Jayapura, as peoples who have secured special advantages and employment opportunities for being near capital cities. In 'dually colonized' Vanuatu, moreover, it suited various French and English settlers to foster disrespect between island inhabitants who were living under different jurisdictions (Molisa et al. 1980: 100-04). Careful working analyses of the emergence, manifestations and consequences of these regional configurations are badly required. To return to the Goilala-Chimbu case, crucial background to the feuding probably lies in the employment of central highlanders together with Papuan highlanders in the coastal business contexts, such as the Doa plantation 70 kilometres west of Port Moresby in the 1960s (fieldnotes 1973-74, 1983). The clash between the two regions at this micro-level has tended to breed special, if precarious regional ties in localized nontraditional settings, with the allegiances eventually spilling over into towns; and again, detailed research has never been attempted. The impersonal, foreign, glaringly inegalitarian and sometimes fearful qualities of city conditions also contribute to violence by urban latecomers. During the 1970s large numbers of central highlanders migrating to Moresby and Lae have been left tramping the suburban streets, plaguing expatriate housewives with the same question: missus, yu gat wok? ('Mrs, have you got work?'). The greater the numbers and the more the squatter settlement houses, the deeper grew fears of trouble among coastal dwellers— the provincial government of the Central Province, for instance, once (in 1979) calling on the national parliament to issue identity cards for the control of inter-provincial travel (PC 30 April 1979). Most Papuan highlanders, admittedly, are located geographically within the Central Province

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itself. But with few professionals and university graduates from among them, they are generally found in menial employment—in Chinese-owned bakeries, bulkstores, and such like, working in torrid, humid conditions— and are relatively despised by coastalers. The fact that informal associations of Papuan and central highlanders have competed against each other to secure the contract to collect Moresby's suburban rubbish is an index both to the lack of respectability and socioeconomic opportunity depressing both groupings in coastal urban contexts, as well as to the limitations of the labour market exacerbating their conflict. One can make too much of socioeconomic disparities in towns, however, as a means of explaining homicides, as if the beginnings of Melanesian 'class warfare' are reflected in death-feuding. Certainly, the unevenness of development—which gives advantages of better jobs, wages, housing, education, health care and leisure possibilities to peoples with a longer contact history—breeds inter-group tension (cf. Young 1975; Valentine 1979: 95-98, cf. Latukefu, 1985). Unwelcome results are street and hotel brawls, break, enter and thefts of private houses by gangs of youths lacking employment prospects, and new sorcery syndromes (see below). Yet it is in an act of killing that we find the crucial propelling force towards homicides in return; the loss of life is just as damaging as in any traditional situation. One can see the urban neo-traditional response to it in certain 'Goilala' squatter settlements in Moresby, where, on the outskirts of the city, lineaments of village tradition persist—totem poles, a platform to overlook the killing of pigs, and so forth, along with new decorative motifs of bottles and dummies from the city's rubbish tip (Beier 1978). When a man is killed or goes permanently missing in such settlements, a sign is hung from his house to indicate it, and his European-style clothes, sometimes even his beer bottles, are hung up on a string between two saplings. This latter phenomenon is a deliberately contrived modern version of the pre-contact platform burial (OTs: Esef, Norwood 1977), a reminder to the many of a missed one, yet also an incentive to those few who feel obliged to avenge the dead. The majority of the group may try to disengage themselves from violent acts and, despite their inevitably violent thoughts and words about men murdered or women raped, 'all go to lotu on Sunday morning' (cf. PC 4 Aug. 1978: 15); but there is a small minority known or expected to remain true practitioners of traditional religion, not disdaining brutality. Important complicating factors in continuing traditional-looking homicides are the police and roads. Police en bloc become objects of revenge in colonial or neo-colonial political situations (as on New Caledonia in 1983-89 and on Bougainville in 1988-90 during the pro-independence actions there, against France and Papua New Guinea respectively (Connell 1987: 286-372; TP 6 Dec. 1989: 5). In the turbulent urban situation of Port Moresby, especially during 1975-86, the police force was popularly imaged

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as top-heavily New Guinea islander, an imbalance festering sores with putatively 'more relaxed' coastal Papuans and 'more aggressive' highlanders (the latter having the highest proportion sent to gaol). The very numbers of the police, both in the highland trouble spots as well as the capital, exacerbated the problem, producing police—in Emergency areas, military —brutality (with deaths, e.g. PC 28 Sept. 1983, W 2 March 1985; T-M 16 March 1991: 31; GL 12 June 1992) and then reactions (with attacks on individual police) 'rapidly outstripping the capacity of the force' (BCM 22 June 1980: 8, cf. PC 4 Nov. 1980: 16, etc.) Fear of surprise payback attacks has disinclined police strategists from using the kind of grassroots methods, such as local 'beats' most likely to improve relations with urban groups (Harris 1988: 32-33). Roadbuilding, the other factor, is one means by which regional hostilities can be exported, and by which individual officers and professionals find themselves vulnerable when sent to culture areas far from their own. It is on these roads that accidents occur, that alcoholic beverages are transported to make accidents even likelier, and that 'highway robbery' and the quicker manoeuvring of warriors for revenge activity take their course. In enabling police to reach trouble spots, and in enticing young men into cities or labourers to new rural development projects (such as Tolais and highlanders to the Gimpi oil palm project on New Britain), roads give more room for inter-group hostility (PC 29 Nov. 1979: 3 on Gimpi). Road accidents widen the geographic interplay of payback, especially in Papua New Guinea, when drivers (or papa bilong ka) can find themselves objects of revenge in areas far from their own. Take the great winding Highlands Highway. Should a Melpa man run over a (fringe) Chimbu from Chuave, let us say, this immediately renders unsafe every local Hagener travelling down the highway toward Lae. Thus, as the supervisory doctor at Kudjip hospital put it to me (in Wahgi country), uncompensated accidents and prior failure to ring police at accident-prone points along the road can 'make it a fearful thing for New Guineans to drive longer distances in their own country' (OT: Ramsay 1980). A man from one region may run over a local man on foot, as did a 'Kerema' (from the Papuan Gulf) just outside Kainantu in 1976, and as a result all 'Gulf persons employed in the town took off for refuge at Goroka, until the compensation was made and the matter at least looked as if it were closed (OT: Vogasung 1977). It was on Christmas Eve 1972, long before independence, that two of the finest among Bougainville's young elite skidded near Goroka and killed a young child which had strayed on the road. Both men were doctors, but when one, Dr Luke Robin, got out to attend to the child, local bystanders became an angry mob that put both doctors to death. The national repercussions were considerable, this event first igniting the flame of Bougainville secessionism (Somare 1975: 115-22).

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Those taking this retribution on many of Papua New Guinea's rural roads are not culturally preconditioned 'to distinguish between negligent and accidental driving', and because they live in a world of 'payback killing', they carry out acts in their distress which 'the ordinary reasonable man' would expect 'to be a likely consequence' of someone else's negligence (Cassidy 1979: 20, 24, 26, cf. Hookey 1969). Common discussions in villages along highways about the possibilities of road deaths gives group killings of unfortunate drivers a definite air of premeditation, such homicide falling into the genus of traditional avengement. Certainly, when a fatal accident occurs in a highland zone, it is usually treated as if it is one homicide deserving another; thus, it is tailored to fit the resilient tradition rather than secularized. Wherever and by whomsoever accidents are reckoned to be 'outside the system' of traditional give-and-take, they can stand as examples of secularization, naturally being much more frequent in towns (or on smaller Melanesian islands where 'Christianization' is more apparent or vehicles few). Violence and crime, gangs and rebels: the secularizing of payback? Violence and crime 'Violence' is an ail-too nebulous term encompassing a host of actions from war and homicide on the one hand, to the breaking of a chair (or even violent 'speech acts') in a domestic quarrel, on the other. Now, no culture takes every act of violence to be a socially punishable offence or 'crime', and every traditional Melanesian grouping acknowledges some sphere of violence as legitimate. Aside from the recognition of the right of selfdefence, one such sphere is familial, and some degree of violence, especially on the part of parents, or between siblings, is respected as 'owned' by the family (whether nuclear or extended) and thus not subject to 'higher' social control (cf. chapter 1). Violence, then, is not universally synonymous with revenge in its normal meaning, although one may conclude it is almost always consciously retributive (and thus vengeful in a broad sense), while including extras—ritual violence, psychopathic behaviour, and so on. A spectrum of possibilities can be drawn between death-incurring events and those aggressive acts causing no readily detectable harm to body or property, but the whole grey area between is hard to graduate. In contemporary Melanesia, judges may have their measuring-rods for arriving at appropriate penalties or decisions—trying to gauge the effects of an injury, the local customs, the alleged motive (whether traditional or individual), the presence of provocation or duress, perhaps even the psychological state. Even so, inadequate knowledge and pressures of litigation bear inevitably arbitrary results. Then again, in turbulent Papua New Guinea, where the

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number of instances of violent acts (assaults, rape, and so forth) and property damage has perceptibly risen between 1970 and 1990, the statistics are faulty and limited in the information conveyed. So many crimes go undocumented or undetected, the data being collected with no concern for motive, and many citizens declining to report incidents for fear of subsequent retaliation if culprits are arrested (cf. Clifford et al. 1984: vol.1, 28-42, 204; Harris 1988: 19-24). The limited object of our inquiry here, however, is to raise basic questions about the relationship between religion and both general violence and crime, concentrating on the 1970s and 1980s. I proceed on the assumption that major forces determining the level of 'culpable behaviour' in any given social context of modernizing Melanesia are sets of shared values, and that the level cannot therefore be explained solely in terms of the effectiveness and spread of law enforcement agencies, or the degree of socio-economic change (cf., e.g., Rokeach 1976: 156-78; Lewis 1990: 159-63). These factors remain crucial, but they form the theatre in which the agents of violence play their part, and are the conditions against which minds react, without being of purposive significance in themselves (cf. Marx [1885] and Engels 1951: vol.1, 225). The relative influence of sets of values, on the other hand, predisposes individuals or groups toward one mode of behaviour as against another in the face of change. When one set is perceived as paramount or widely appealed to in given situations, or as being the most effective means of 'getting by' under certain circumstances, the immediate satisfaction of melding reasons for action with valuebased justification—of 'being right'—presents itself.6 Commitment to Christianity qua a demanding personal morality is normally an antidote to Violence and crime' and, unless compromised, is the least ambivalent of the major value-sets in Melanesia. In the eyes of governments, of course, Christian ideas can fuel rebelliousness (Bougainvillean secessionism in 1975, for instance, or the OPM, e.g., Mamak et al. 1974: 25, 29-50; Ireeuw 1987: 178-80), and thus a writhing under injustice produces special kinds of 'law and order' problems. The propensities of traditional tribalism and cargoism, however, are more wavering. On the one hand, violence and crime could be explained in terms of the erosion of older sources of moral guidance, including the custodians of traditional class solidarity or the cargo cult creators of new group loyalties. But on the other hand, general violence and theft can be justifiably viewed as extensions of that ethos in which inter-tribal hostilities pertain, and, with talk of the new commodities falling wrongly or unjustly into expatriate 6

In international politics one talks of nations with a strong rhetorical defence of global justice or security always preferring to occupy the 'high moral ground'; we are discussing here the forms of local equivalents, but in the mixing of traditionalist and modern spheres the relativities are much greater.

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hands (chapter 4), one logical concomitant to cargoism is legitimate theft from the rich. Orienting an approach to 'lawlessness' around value-sets is not to deny the effects of adverse socioeconomic conditions. Social change, after all, has brought glaring inequalities, most noticeably in the towns. In Papua New Guinea poor housing conditions and dim employment prospects help breed resentment toward expatriates and the moneyed elite (cf., e.g., Moulik 1977: 162-64; Stretton 1979: 33). Migrants to cities may have paid bonafide earnings to get there, yet with no provision to return; their failure to find a job opportunity among the 'bright lights' can bring a great strain on the wantoks housing or supporting them, poor diet and health, and a sense of powerlessness (C. Smith 1978; Norwood 1979; Gegera 1983; Chao 1986, cf. also Reddy 1976 on Suva). Such situations of despair give birth to criminal offences, mostly at the hands of agile young men who leave nuclear families in the villages to join older members of their lineages in towns, or at the hands of teenagers who inherit the depressed conditions of their squatter parents and do not succeed in the white-introduced school systems. Migrant labourers without wives and no access to women of their own culture-complex, moreover, rarely countenance the possibility of steady liaisons with females from other groups and can thus be frustrated into sexual molesting and rape (cf. Sturgess in Bu Jan. 1981:84). The availability of alcohol, sexually suggestive advertising and films, as well as ad hoc prostitution (known in pidgin as the tu kina meris) all contribute to this urban destabilization (Martin and Trompf fieldnotes 1983-85). Leftists put all these side-effects down to colonialism and capitalism as oppressive 'systems' which produce either a lumpen-proletariat or recurrently unsuccessful segments of the proletariat's standing 'industrial army' (Marx 1890: vol.1, 424, cf. Stevenson 1978; Good 1986). On the other hand, senses of oppression and alienation are relative states of consciousness, analysable in distinction from concrete realities, and too much stress on downtroddenness or signs of 'class warfare' will not do justice to the complexity of the Melanesian situation. Urban squatters, for a start, consider hours of work under the blazing sun for cash is preferable to more pleasant unpaid exertion back in the village (Martin and Trompf fieldnotes 1983, cf. PIM Oct. 1972: 53-55). Our field research actually confirms that there are very few places where economic relations and class antagonisms constitute the paramount causal factor behind patterns of violence (yet cf. Amarshi et al. 1979:123-30,152-61). In terms of productivity roles, perhaps, miners (on New Caledonia, Bougainville, Misima, etc) or wharf labourers (at Port Moresby or Suva) amount to 'proletarian' groups of long standing; and it is hardly insignificant that the rebellions on New Caledonia and Bougainville, and the powerful labour movement on Fiji, emerged where the perceived dichotomy between 'exploited

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labour' and 'oppressor capitalists' was sharpest (cf. Dornoy 1984: 225-38; Waqanivalu 1983: 37-50). But, to date, 'class consciousness' is barely forthcoming in what is a largely pro-capitalist ethos.7 Anything approaching 'class warfare' is more the persistence of anti-colonialism, more the indigenes' ill-feeling toward those particular clusters of Europeans or Asians thought to take from Melanesia without giving anything back in return, than clear-cut articulations of common economic interests. Even then, it is remarkable how many Melanesians are still prepared at least to adopt roles of strict subservience, even to the most unbenign of foreigners; and how many, too, state their preference for an increased number of whites in their nations, not just to bring technical expertise or more cargo (thus, e.g. Conroy 1973; Carrier 1981; 1985; Swatridge 1985), but to preserve a power balance between potentially hostile indigenous groups in the community. Any analysis of violence and crime in modern Melanesia must wrestle with such complications. What, then, of secularizing tendencies? Can one tell if social change is producing expressions of retributive violence which reflect the 'diminishing significance' of religion, whether as 'primordial phenomenon' or introduced ideology? (cf. Durkheim [1915] 1965; Konig 1976: 29-42). It is hard to say. In general terms we would have to be able to measure the disintegration of prior religious value-sets to provide an answer, and available social thermometers are scarce. One possible measuring-rod is through gauging the effects of alcohol consumption, especially in or near towns, since the time access to drink was permitted to indigenes in the 1960s (e.g. Wolfers 1975: 39-40, 53, 13637, cf. Inglis 1974 for background). If alcohol intake increases the likelihood of violence, however, we should note that its consumption in Melanesia is rarely privatized; so, most brawling erupting from its use typically reflects prior group hostilities and, thus, the tradition-affected sense of solidarity pertaining to lineages, clans, and so forth. But a few examples are necessary for particulars. One comes from the Mount Hagen Hotel, which stands mid-way between the two worlds of urbanism and tribal war. A tradition has arisen whereby 'stubbies' (smallsized beer bottles) are thrown and smashed against the bar wall after imbibing, an action often signalling conflict out in the hamlets. The hotel not only sells the medicine of added bravery to make challenges, but it is cross-tribally public, and thus safer for reflecting a power balance among 7

Not that peasant economies have developed organically in Melanesia either, but only by imposition upon indentured non-indigenes (as Fiji's Indians, Mayer 1967). Yet cf. Good in Amarshi et al. (1981: 1-15) for newer emphases on the development of Melanesian peasantries. For background specific to the region Belshaw 1950; Salisbury 1970; Meggitt 1971; Howlett 1973; Moulik 1977: 158-59; Ward 1982; Dornoy 1984: 225-36; and for theoretical background Wittfogel 1957; Wolf 1966: 92-93; Friedman 1975.

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Hageners. It is a scene almost exclusively for men with shirts and pants, however, not axe-bearing, laplap-weaiing traditionalists (who prefer drinking parties back in the village), and so, the town drinking-place provides a situation in which men between the modern money-earning style and tradition (man namel) can mix with members of enemy groups through a quasi-ritualized containment of violence (Trompf, fieldnotes 1976-77). For a second example, turn to the Rigo area (Papuan hinterland east of Port Moresby, and connected by road). Here truckloads of wage-earning males return to the village for the weekend after a solid pay-day's drinking— with a vengeance. With a number of them solid rugby players and others regularly training in boxing or kung fu groups, they descend on the 'inferior' village-boys begging for a fight, and think ahead to the Violation' of their own wives. In one village: The motives of the workers ... were as follows: we like to fight; it was our fortnight's happy time; so-and-so said 'Let's go home and belt our wives and sex them'; the village boys won't do what we say; they are always begging us for money; they waste the money on the church contribution;... we are workboys and they are village boys; they don't look after the children properly; they didn't look after the truck;... so-and-so killed my father by sorcery;... a woman told me my wife was seen talking to so-and-so in the garden last week. (Iani 1978:68)

The admiration of treachery and ambush, the horror of cowardice and the hard-fisted beating of women were deep-rooted in tradition, and under the pax Australiana the Violent way of life' came to manifest itself as much within each village as between them. Rather than being its cause, alcohol has simply made it worse. Non-traditionalist ideas have been appropriated to reinforce it, less educated Christians shelving the apparently 'cowardly Jesus' for examples of treachery, 'might is right' and seduction in the Old Testament, with 'some students' bringing home stories of the fighter 'Mahomet' (Muhammed Ali) to excite interest in 'the "brave" prophet' (Iani 1978: 69, 71, cf. 70-77). This rather pathogenic situation might seem to reflect secularizing tendencies because of the severe erosion of older values. In terms of alcohol's effects, it is quite different from complexes elsewhere. In Taiora villages (eastern highlands), for instance, internal clan cohesion remains strong, but during the coffee season, when drinking goes on for weeks and with great intensity after the reimbursements, it can be hard to find one sober person in a hamlet among the disarray of prone and staggering bodies (Trompf fieldnotes 1977). In neither the Rigo nor the Taiora cases, though, is alcohol really an agent of secularization; it only reinforces Rigo attempts to clutch at justifying values, for the one, or the Taiora sense of 'letting go' with a new type of feast, for the other. The presence of internal violence in the former case does not make it any the more secular.

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Vis-a-vis the whites, moreover, the blacks' conspicuous alcohol consumption carries with it a religious dimension for enhancing power (paua) (cf. Ahrens 1977). On the more 'positive' side this may mean a sense of 'mateship' or solidarity with fellow drinkers (black or other); but, on the 'negative' side, alcohol commonly unlatches the tongue of anti-white resentments, and in drinking at the bar in 'the white man's way'—perhaps with 'furtively puffed fag', legs 'crossed . . . white style', even 'with kneehigh white socks of good colonial standard' (Trompf 1977b: 219-20)—can lie the statement that 'we can outmatch the so-called mastas' (cf. Ogan 1966: 186). In both excessive drinking and language at the bar, certainly, white (stereotypically missionary) 'wowserism' is often being openly rejected; yet, less as a 'secular' act than by the discovery of what mystery is discovered at the bottom of the bottle—which is also a non-traditional item of cargo. Along with alcohol, 'modern' economic disparities, as well as the racial tensions associated with them, provide adverse conditions under which violence and crime are generated. Assessments of secularization and valuedisorientation in connection with this behaviour would do well to take these conditions into account. Given the vulnerability of once isolated villages to the international vagaries of price indexing and inflation, reasons to resent the lack of progress in living conditions commonly fester at the village level. High aspirations are not met; potential capital is drained away by wantoks on non-renewable commodities like beer; the running costs of some new-fangled piece of equipment (such as a gas stove depleted of gas) cannot be met; fights and thefts result. Along the arteries of commerce—roads—organized highway robberies and assaults sometimes develop. With truckload after truckload of wares pushing past them on the Lae-Hagen Highlands Highway, for instance, many Chuave have tried to make up for their own area's lack of development, or their own sense of being 'road victims' in more than one sense, by indulging in a 'pragmatic cargoism' (cf. Anon. Enga 1985). Accoutrements of civilization have been taken from the loads of semi-trailers—office chairs, tables, and so on—as well as commodities which will bring a nontraditional diet of money from the sell-off (PC 13,14 May 1976). The backing of clan solidarity for those caught is very strong; substitutes will be sent in to do gaol sentences for those considered indispensable to village activities. A Chuave man once hurled a rock at a passing truck, to take an example to do with vindictive violence more than theft, yet the driver and his company turned back and 'arrested' him, standing on his body to keep him secure until arriving at the Chuave police station. At the subsequent court hearing, however, a man other than the true culprit appeared, claiming himself responsible. The police set the true felon free, while clansmen were happy to pay another (apparently dispensable) man

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to live out a two-month prison sentence, less and less stigma being attached to those behind bars (OT: Flannery 1980, cf. TP 30 Jan. 1981: 14). In urban centres, of course, economic (including black/expatriate social) disparities are at their most glaring. There, as we shall see, gangs are now common, and the sense of a justified theft from the rich strongest (Narokobi 1983: 180-83, cf. Davis et al. 1941 for comparative material). That urban behaviour in reaction to these disparities is increasingly secular is impossible to deduce, as it is with changes in the pattern of domestic violence and conflict. On the evidence of Papua New Guinea the level of domestic violence is clearly higher in towns than in the villages (LRC 1987). Some of the forms of violent behaviour are also distinctly connected to modern developments, with wives of public servants being known to smash the family car, for instance, even with large hammers, because they are jealous of the 'freedom' and possible infidelity their husbands have in it (OT: A. and A. Wilkinson 1983); while urban suicide attempts are becoming more frequent, most are seeking to make others aware of peculiarly urban problems and thus to 'feel sorry for them' (TP 6 May 1983: 24). However, with or without the involvement of drink, cargo, or town conditions, the reasons for marital and family quarrelling—jealousy, suspicion, fear (of pollution, et cetera), anxiety (of not being able to pay the brideprice, et cetera), frustration, and so forth—can usually be related back to traditional principles and values. In the rural areas, of course, many of the old pretexts for domestic acts of violence persist but the responses have been curtailed or 'modernized'. Should a wife insult her husband's uncle among the coastal Arapesh, to illustrate, perhaps by referring to his private parts, the uncle retains the traditional right to remove the family's wealth (by cutting the coconut trees, or whatever), but today would probably sue in court (OT: Berry 1983). The new method of compensation, though, does not secularize the issues involved. Even where secular attitudes are consciously harboured, as among a select minority of tertiary-trained intellectuals, those who hold them cannot disengage themselves from traditional bases of violence, if and when they become involved in physical conflict. At the University of Papua New Guinea, for instance, regional (wantok) groupings have steadily become the basis of student clubs during the 1980s, to the numerical detriment of more idealistic interest groups and, to a lesser extent, denominationalist meetings (Latukefu 1983:4). If in 1975 Bougainvillean students' dormitories were burnt by other students in the name of national unity, and in hatred of separatism (OTs: Dillon; Ruhan), nasty inter-regional student riots erupted in 1978-79 (PNG 1979: 80-83). Well-known graduates bringing their new values to the villages have also sometimes failed to evade complicity in rural patterns of violence. Philip Kaman, for one, a Wahgi renowned for his encouragement of local

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handicraft industry and for seeking to bring the 'light' of (secular) education to the 'darkness' of his people's (religious) ignorance (OT: Kaman 1978, cf. Reay 1978), eventually found himself embroiled in a tribal death feud (from 1980). After warriors of the Konumbka axed the rubber pipeline connected to his project, Kaman found himself embarrassingly committed to the Kogika, his own tribe, who had killed Konumbka men (Reay 1987a: 89, 102). On the Trobriands the famous poet John Kasaipwalova dared to initiate the Kabisawali People's Government before the system of provincial government was installed. For his anti-colonial rhetoric he was labelled a 'student communist' by the more seasoned politician, Lepani Watson MHA, who also deemed him a 'law breaker' for setting up alternative rule with the paramount chief of Kiriwina as 'king' and a separate 'Supreme Court' in the making (Somare 1975: 123). When Kasaipwalova was gaoled for allegedly making a grab at a policeman's holster, an angry crowd descended on the government station, some people hurling modern versions of traditional throwing-sticks, but with metal rather than stone at both ends (Leach 1982: 270-73, cf. Somare 1975: 123-27; Kasaipwalova 1983). Eased from power, Kasaipwalova later went into the artifacts business at Port Moresby, ostentatiously bent on 'beating the white man at his own game' and driving the largest car in the city (OT: Kasaipwalova 1983). Homo saecularis is, thus, making an appearance, and Melanesia is not without its 'hollow men' who have fallen rootless, or succumbed to a 'sweet and poisonous disenchantment' (Baldwin 1963:116, cf. T. S. Eliot), but they act and look odd in a theatre which does not match their guises. Gangs and rebels The emergence of groups which are mobilized for physical action against 'established authorities' constitutes the central problematic for societies in Melanesia today. The eruptions tend to fall into two main categories: first, the activities of gangs, or bands of young males who engage in assaults on property and persons in their locales, and who also do battle with each other over territorial rights or actions inciting revenge; and second, armed rebellions or violent acts of dissidence against prevailing authority structures (whether colonial or 'new national'). In this section we limit our attention to the motivations of gang members and rebels, particularly the impetus to get back at a 'hated system'. The gang phenomenon, most prominent in Papua New Guinea, is not confined to urban centres. The attractions of corporate excitement with peers, and of activities such as theft and vandalism which partly evoke the traditional spirit of proving one's manhood, substantially explain why bands of youths live out a separate, arduous and often mischievous existence in certain highland areas, where parental and clan control might be

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expected to dictate otherwise. In the Wahgi area, for example, 'rascals' (as they are now somewhat ambiguously called throughout Papua New Guinea) formed a distinct 'pseudo-clan' grouping in the Jimi mountains, made up especially of school drop-outs from various tribes. In what is probably the wealthiest highland region, with its famous tea and coffee plantations, their exercises in troublemaking (1975-79) included the removal of galvanized iron walls from the local government council coffee factory, and a severe fire in the largest trade store at Banz township (Reay 1983, cf. OTs: Ramsay, Topo 1982, cf. Morauta 1981a: 81-83 on other societies). Yet it is obviously in towns that gangs have wreaked their havoc, especially in Port Moresby. Detailed analyses of the causes and phase developments of the capital's gangs emphasize social causes (such as migration, squatter settlements, greater opportunities for crime, police inefficiency, juvenile failures with irrelevant schooling, unemployment) (Gemo 1982: 40-48; Utulurea 1980; Morauta 1981b: 183, Houghton 1985, cf. Dom 1973:25-30,38-41; 1979; Levine 1979,0'Collins 1980:107-111,1984: 22-23), and the tendency of gangs since the 1970s to have coalesced into a smaller number of (larger) units 'more fully engaged in crime' (Gemo 1982: 39, cf. Parry 1972: 30; Po'o 1975: 34; Harris 1988: 35-43, the latter documenting a reduction from twenty-five to six). That a more organized network of gang organizations has been congealing into hierarchic-looking relations, and thus collaborating to make an incipient 'underworld' (Clifford et al. 1984: vol.1, 43-65; Harris 1988: 40-43), may suggest that the complexes of motivation for leading and joining them have shifted. If the original 'rascals' (of 1968) were 'merely vandals' (cf. PIM March 1969: 32), however, who heralded forms of social protest in the next decade that in turn now leans toward 'harder-line, organized criminality' (Harris 1988:25-29,44-50), some underlying themes remain. Gangs have always contained representations of regions ('Hulas', 'Goilalas', 'Kairukus', 'Keremas', to take Papuan groups), even if they have sometimes coalesced, and that is a clue to their 'neo-tribal' nature—their 'desire to create yet another society' that can repel the new fragmentedness and reinvoke old senses of solidarity (Po'o 1975: 33, 34, cf. Martin and Trompf [forthcoming]. New principles of allegiance are capable of holding in more than one urban setting, the well known Mafia, Goipex 105 and Kipsco, for instance, possessing branches outside Moresby (Gemo 1982: 38; Trompf in PC 7 March 1980: 17; cf. 21 June 1983). In a religion-oriented analysis, Melanesian gangs are of great interest as quests for personal and group identity in a world they believe has taken away their worthwhileness and sense of purpose. As one young Unggai (Asaro) 'rascal' admitted at Goroka, as he gave himself up with sixty others who had been implicated in an attack on the town's high school, life seemed to offer no future, but the vacuum was filled by a new comradeship

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(Giddings 1982a: 12, cf. PC 22 April 1982). In gangs we discover initiation rites for new members; marks of common allegiance (such as the tattoo of the rising sun on the foreheads of members of the *J aP s Gang' later 'Laddies' of Hohola, Port Moresby); a common slang and whistle identification; a shared sense of pride in their achievements; focus on a folk hero (such as the boxer Martin Beni); an identification with the 'baddies' in the film world; a common agreement about the special agenda or roles of the group; a pledge not to reveal the identity of other gang members, especially if one is caught, and so on (Po'o 1975: 31-33; Sturgess in TB Jan. 1981: 72-74, cf. Trompf and Martin, fieldnotes 1983; 1985). Thus, these coteries bear structures of religion, which goes a good way toward explaining why, especially during the 1980s, gang members, including whole clusters of them following their leaders' initiatives, converted to versions of Christianity that emphasize total commitment (e.g. NY 1981: 11; OTs: Mennis 1980; Lapa 1985, cf. Knudten [1970s]; PC 26 July 1984: 5, etc.)

'Japs Gang' rising sun tattoo What evidence there is available reveals some important parallels to traditional revenge syndromes. A top priority in gang consciousness during the 1970-90 period, quite apart from varying degrees of closeness to 'the criminal underworld', has been the willingness to scrap with other gangs, and to defend given suburban territories (cf. TP 28 April 1985: 22-23 with caution). More important are individual member and group responses to insults or bitter disappointments considered unfair. Pretexts for taking some sort of revenge vary. Attacks on educational institutions usually reflect dropout bitterness (OTs: e.g. Gadiki 1976-77; Martin 1983). One vivid example is provided by a boy who was expelled from the Mount Diamond SDA School outside Port Moresby in 1974 'for poor progress and bad behaviour'. After his expulsion he came to Kaugere [a Moresby suburb], and organized a group made up of members of the Devils gang [mainly 'Keremas']. They stole a car and went to the High School and stole $2000 cash. The rest of his friends got their share of the money and went to their villages in the Gulf, but he was caught in his home at Kaugere ... That [robbery] was his revenge. (Po'o 1975:35-36)

On taking to a life of troublemaking, Unggai and Kama youths from among the Asaro near Goroka turned their backs on schools unopen to

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them, and also on their parents, who were either not prepared to pay school fees set by the government, or punished their unsuccessful children by refusing to release land to them (Anon. 1982: 2). The revenge factor, however, is above all reflected in the general resentment of under-privileged youths from squatter settlements toward those, whether expatriate or not, whom they consider better off than themselves. Specific reasons for recriminating actions, however, vary considerably. Some are intensely personal, such as a gang member's intense hatred of his father (Okona 1983); others are group projections of various 'unwantables'. When the Mafia and Kipsco divided Moresby between them for vigilante purposes (1977-80), for example, they were two Papuan gangs expressing suspicion of the New Guinean police, dedicating themselves 'to protect the innocent . . . from the ruthless and dangerous, more particularly drunkards' (OT: Anon, leader of Mafia 1979),8 and preparing themselves to scrap fiercely with highland gangs (especially the Bomai) (OT: Houghton 1985). In recent years, furthermore, politicians have only been too happy to pay gang members to beat up or damage the property of some opponent (from a region taken as 'enemy' by the gang selected) (Harris 1988: vi, 48-50). The most prevalently enunciated rationale for 'gang rascalism', however, is the feeling of bitterness toward those who have too much and who give back too little to others in return, and towards those who apparently belong to a system, or side with a government, which offers nothing satisfying to disadvantaged adolescents. Sometimes hunger itself and squatter families' need for food are points emphasized, but paramount among all sentiments voiced by leaders and members alike is 'lack of satisfaction' (no gat satisfakshan or i gat bel hevi) (Trompf and Martin fieldnotes 1983, 1985, with special help by [unnamed] Kipsco leaders; cf. also PC 11 Nov. 1983: 3; AB 14 Jan. 1983: 4) There is surely no better way to capture some of the quality of this payback temperament than to focus on an individual group, or better still on the consciousness of a gang leader and on the group ethos he sought to create. Elsewhere I tell the story of Tapei Martin, former leader of Goipex 105, a large gang from the Moresby squatter settlement of Morata. Although a child exposed to primary education and Lutheran Sunday School in Moresby, Tapei's father insisted he should be initiated traditionally, back among their people, the Mumeng (Morobe highlands), and at puberty he was flown back to the village (in 1967). Now, initiates in the Mumeng male cult are carefully painted with wawe, the red, greasy anointments of the war-god who is said to make young warriors impervious to enemy assault (cf. Weiner 1983 for a comparable motif among the Foi). Undergoing wawe 8

This aim was inspired by a young American James 'Arthur' (?) Malcolm, who was actually leader of the Mafia in the mid-1970s (OT: Turner 1985).

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left upon Tapei the deepest impression. On returning to the city, in fact, he took himself to be divinely protected, and after a short spell with the Apex gang (1969-70), formed his own organization with a group of teenage 'Goilalas' as a confident 'urban warrior'. Watching adventure films—particularly 'cowboy' and 'secret agent' sequences—gave the gang members inspiration for their nightly escapades, through concentrating on scenes of robbery, rape and arson without concern for the 'moral message' of the overall plot! Many of the films they viewed were shown at the Waigani Catholic Church (close to Morata), and put on as free entertainment for social evenings, without the organizers realizing the incentives they gave—for the theft of R6000 from the (Chineserun) Cathay Club, for one, and Martin's impudent entry into the grand new house built for the prime minister on Parliament Hill, Waigani, for another. The exploits of the gang—consisting mainly of break-and-entries, theft and rape—were many, although largely concentrated on nearby communities, and particularly the university, which at that time was only partly fenced. The successes contributed to the rapid growth of the gang, and an aura surrounded its leader as one who was magically protected from harm. Tapei's prestige rose, moreover, with money and gifts filtering through the emergent Morata community from the house of his parents, who were among the settlement's first occupants. A narrow escape from the police enhanced claims of his invulnerability; his eventual gaoling in maximum security broke the spell (in 1977), however, and a series of newer religious experiences, including the effects of the evangelistic film A Time to Run (on American teenage gangsters), turned Tapei to Christianity. The continual supportive role of the family in this and many other lives of gang members, incidentally, counters any conclusion that these acts arise from 'the death of the family' (cf. Cooper 1980), or some process whereby youths are forced to fend for themselves through 'a general socialization' away from the bosom of family life. The Goipex story, in fact, is interesting for involving 'extended squatter families', that is, biologically unrelated protector adults, who both received and resold stolen goods from the gang and hid members during police search efforts (OTs: Anon. 1985). What of rebels? At times they are harder to define sociologically. Certainly, gangs are capable of becoming (or joining) rebels. Individual 'criminals' are also capable of being heroicized as rebels; the Goipex gang, for instance, being inspired by the notorious Peter Ivoro, who seemed to have actualized a cowboy film (in 1959) by stealing a horse, galloping to Bomana cemetery and there promptly killing two white visitors (OT: Martin 1983). In a continuing colonial situation, that of New Caledonia, such a political 'trouble maker' as Eloi Machoro, shot by French paramilitary marksmen in 1985, might also be called a rebel (cf. Chesneaux 1988: 60, 79). In the most obvious sense, however, rebels form bands which are better armed than gangs, with guns, and perhaps some traditional

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weaponry such as spears, bows and arrows, rather than the typical gang arsenal of knives, staves and screwdrivers (yet cf. L. Giddings 1986b; 1987: [iii, xi, xxii]; R. Giddings 1991, on a few heavily armed highland gangs). Rebels form groups larger in number, with a wider age-range, and a commitment to a more sustained, demanding and politically serious programme of action. The object of their recriminatory assaults—their rebellions—is an unwanted political regime. Sporadic outbreaks of anti-colonial rebellion have already been noted (chapter 4). Here it suffices to note that, since the mid-1980s, Melanesia has been witness to rebel activity on a larger and more widely publicized scale. We thus have to affirm their place in the history of Melanesian payback, and to reckon in this study with their religious background. The three great Melanesian rebellions of modern times are those of the West Papuan Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM); the New Caledonian Kanak independence movement (especially as spearheaded by Jean-Marie Tjibaou's Front de liberation nationale kanake et socialiste [FLNKS]); and the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA). Ideologues of all three have appealed to the values of tribal solidarity—but across tribes (e.g. Tjibaou in LTM March 1985: 1601; Trompf 1991: 233)—and in all three Biblical notions of justice have been evoked as the basis for removing oppression (e.g. Ireeuw 1987: 178-82; Ataba 1984: 177-78). All three merit brief analysis as movements of retribution. The longest-lasting rebellion in Melanesia is that of the OPM, which rejects Indonesian control over Irian Jaya. While the OPM is much more than a military movement, its guerilla fronts consist of poorly equipped rebel bands which now hide out mainly in dense jungle areas near the Papua New Guinea border. Instigating at least three significant sets of uprisings against Indonesian control since 1965 (which each met with severe reprisals) (Osborne 1985: 34-76), the OPM have confined recent actions to ambushing Indonesian installations and camps, although they also partly orchestrated the influx of over 10 000 asylum seekers into Papua New Guinea in 1984, to publicize West Papua's plight on the world stage (Smith et al. 1985: 7-8; Smith 1990; 1991; Frendo 1987; Trompf 1992a). During its history the OPM has been divided over strategies—some groups advocating active pacificism with others accepting the inevitability of armed struggle, some being reconciled to an autonomous West Papua within an Indonesian confederacy and others wanting independence without compromise (OT: Ireeuw 1984). Additionally, until reconciliation in 1985, the two main military groups (under Jacob Prai and Seth Rumkorem) were often at loggerheads (Blaskett 1993, cf. [MA] 1985; TAPOL 1985). Military factionalism has been conditioned by prior regionalist tendencies; at times OPM forces will raid the gardens of villages unrelated to their rank and file (e.g. Hughes 1980: 2). Activists' religious backgrounds include both traditionalists and Christians, with a variety of

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cargoist views represented as well; in 1976-77, for instance, highland Dani members shared the hope that goods necessary for a military effort could be found in an underground cave known to missionaries, or might come by underground road from Jayapura (Groves 1989: 7 cf. Tucker 1988). The binding focus, however, is the desire to get back at the Jakarta government, which has executed militants and such famous intellectual agitators as Arnold Ap, which now maintains a strong military presence in Irian Jaya, and, until its failure was made apparent in 1987, was pushing the transmigration of non-Melanesians to the same province (IG 1982, cf. 1987). We find obvious rebel elements in New Caledonian kanaky with those participants in demonstrations and other acts of anti-French noncooperation immediately before, but especially after, the formation of the radical FLNKS in 1984 (cf. Connell 1987: 312, 317-334).9 The entry of proindependence demonstrations into the Noumean Hall of Deputies in 1979 had early symbolic significance in heralding the insurrectionary activity to come, although the caldoches (French ranchers who inherited the benefits of France's land alienation policies from the last century) proved quite capable of comparable ploys to state their anti-independence claims (as in 1982) (Chesneaux 1988: 72, cf. Connell 1987: 194-240). The more recent mobilizations of kanak militancy, in return, have drawn an ever-widening degree of black support (even from among the more conciliatory Union Caledonienne), and produced a successful boycott in 1984, only to be marred by the massacre of sixteen independantistes by settlers the following year (Connell 1984:321-335 for the issues). Bitterness over French manipulations of the island's political future reached a pitch in September 1988, when seven gendarmes were taken as hostages to an isolated cave on Uvea Island (in the Loyalties) by FLNKS rebels, the latter soon succumbing to a government punitive reaction (with twenty-one dying) (thus Ag 7 May 1988). Like the OPM, New Caledonian kanaky, including the FLNKS itself and the Front national from which it emerged, is fraught with factionalism born out of long term tribal conflict and differences over strategy and leadership (Connell 1987: 299-316, 344). The recent factionalist assassinations of Tjibaou and his second-in-command Yeiwene (for compromising with French plans?) indicate this through tragedy (A May 13-4 1989: 18). On an island complex of twenty-eight highly colonized cultures, however, appeals to the claims of custom—to the regaining of land, and the principles of tribal solidity—are continually being related to Biblical (more often Old Testament) insights (e.g. Tjibaou in LTM March 1985: 1599, cf. Chesneaux 1988:61,65). Tjibaou himself was formerly a Catholic priest, 9

The reminiscence of the FLN (Front de liberation nationale) of Algeria (1954-) is too obvious to miss.

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and what is perhaps more interesting than cross-tribal opposition to French hegemony is the cooperation between radical Catholic and Protestant elements (cf. Tjibaou and Missotte 1985; Qaeze 1987). Contributing to a radicalism that has spilled over into rebel action are Marxist ideas, although if there are signs of secular and anti-religious influences (especially with the Front de liberation kanake) (K 12 Nov. 1983: 2), socialism has been characteristically tailored by kanaky to reinforce traditional patterns of social cooperation (e.g. Tjibaou, in L 31 Jan. 1986). These various factors all considered, in any case, the overriding principle governing the kanak spirit of the barricades is payback against the French. The third, and most recent of the great Melanesian rebellions, which rocked the island of Bougainville between late 1988 and early 1990, produced an outright war between the BRA and the Papua New Guinea Defence Force. The initial object of rebel vindictiveness was the giant Panguna copper mine, and it was a series of Luddite-looking acts of sabotage (against pylons, power installations and machinery) at the instigation of former Bougainville Copper Ltd employee Francis Ona which resulted in the first loss of life (Trompf 1990f). What began rather like a week-byweek vendetta between police and armed saboteurs hiding in the bush around Panguna ended in Melanesia's first 'payback war'. The mine was brought to a standstill (April 1989) and the Papua New Guinea government moved to save one of its crucial sources of national income. The conflict retained a tit-for-tat quality until an all-out offensive in January 1990 by the army and the riot squad ([Filer] 1989). Ill-equipped to handle very difficult (slippery and leech-ridden) terrain, the operation failed, and trigger-happy soldiers and police only succeeded in alienating the civilian population (Mclntosh 1990). Whatever gangs of unemployed youths were at large ran to fill the ranks of the rebels, and by mid-March 1990 all Papua New Guinea forces deployed to handle the emergency were removed from the North Solomons Province and the rebels promptly occupied Panguna. Within three months the Papua New Guinea government began an economic blockade, but as a sharp retort came Ona's confident would-be 'presidential' Declaration of Independence (15 May). Peace talks on New Zealand warships looked promising until disaffected BRA rebels on Buka (allegedly) invited back Papua New Guinea military presence, standby troops from the Nissan Island base re-entering Buka and eventually north Bougainville, so that negotiations had to be opened in mid-1991 (Lafitte 1993). Fighting resumed, however, and by October 1992, the rebels were largely confined to the Panguna-Arawa area after the change in Papua New Guinea's government that year. The Bougainville rebellion has been fed by an ideology centred on the mysterious Damien Damen, who had initiated a cargo cult among the central Bougainvillean Nasioi in 1962, in the wake of John Teosin's

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movement on Buka. Damen's followers, including Ona, were encouraged to maintain a Catholic 'front' but they were to preserve traditionalist principles in secret, including a strong belief in 'empowerment by the ancestors' (OT: Sipari 1990). Intrinsic to Damen's teaching was the notion of Bougainville as a 'sacred land' (Mekamui), a concept lending itself to secessionism and one which, if it did not catch on during Bougainville's first pretensions to autonomy in 1975 (see cf. Mamak et al. 1974: 17-20; Moulik 1977: 131-138), certainly did produce wide vocalization and cultic impressions during hot moments of the recent conflict (Trompf 1990f: 233; Fathers in / 21 July 1991: 10). A crucial justification of this rebellion, to be sure, was the desecration of sacred land, more specifically the literal removal of the sacred mountain Panguna, and the environmental destruction of soils along the polluted Jaba river, for which a younger generation of landowners had received no compensation (Lafitte 1993; Filer 1992). Carefully planned sabotage was no more or less payback against both the capitalist culprit at hand and a neo-colonial government too distant to tackle the mine's inimical consequences. The willingness to fight back has also been reinforced by a sense of Bougainvillean 'blackness' (Ifeka 1986: 134-36). A sense of cultural and bodily commonality with the Solomonese has drawn in unpoliced support from the east, individual Malaitans more than other Solomonese being motor-canoed over hundreds of kilometres to join with their black brothers against the oppressors (Steley 1992). These rebellions, we conclude, are movements of religiously charged retribution. That may seem trite, but it is derived from the simple axiom that most actions of governments and ruling groups give cause for some of their 'subjects' to get back at them. Those rebelling will naturally draw on the cultural, characteristically 'non-secular' repertoires and resources at their disposal; and to survive, or to avoid rebellions, rulers will have to find the values which produce non-reactive conditions, or else other sources of national wealth—mines at the very least—will be 'Bougainvilled' (see Filer 1992).10 Vindictiveness without violence? Some illusions of modernization For revenge to be 'sweet', shows of physical violence are not necessary. Means of 'spiritual revenge', especially the techniques of sorcery, have not disappeared with the colonial impact on Melanesia (chapter 1), and there 10

One already hears bits and pieces about local protests aginst the Ok Tedi mine and its effects in far western Papua New Guinea (eg. A 2 Jan. 1991: 14; GL 1 April 1992: 13); and of armed gangs raiding the Mount Kare gold mine (BRW 31 Jan. 1992: 13). The Porgera 1990-91 'gold rush' was a special case of local (mainly Ipili Enga) warriors getting in ahead of a mining company to stake claims and guard them with traditional weaponry; but through it the same warning is sounded. On avoidance of war, and Australia's possible contributions to peace-making, King 1990.

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are other 'sublimations' of violence (sport, literature, politics) to be considered. The desired upshot of sorcery and its abetting, of course, is some severely physical consequence, while the newer 'arts of civilization' (or 'modernization') have been fostered in the region to curtail such severities — with varying degrees of success, as we shall see. Sorcery: new masks The history of sorcery in modern Melanesia is one of both survival and transformation. Some of the pre-contact institutions of inter-group invisible warfare have persisted. In the Wahgi Valley, where the possibility of tribal conflict re-erupting still stands, the war-magicians have not faded away (chapter 1), and even over the long periods of peace they have given particular attention to the tabued house (in the past partly a weapon store) which remains in place between each Kongar, and they continue to place protective items of their enchantment at the tree-fern stumps marking each tribe's territory (Reay 1987a: 88-90, and OT: 1983). In long-pacified Papua, most Mekeo villages remain laid out along an axis from the house of the domestic sorcerer to that of the war-magician, the latter still remaining a symbol of security against extreme threat (OT: Mopio 1973, cf. Hau'ofa 1981: 77-109). As maintained earlier, however, the colonial and contemporary periods have seen a shift away from the very high proportion of 'externally directed' sorcery, known before contact, to a more 'mixed' situation, with new reasons to fear that sorcerers are close at hand, even in the heart of one's own (sometimes artificially formed) village community. In a somewhat illusory way, we can actually conclude, 'the amount of sorcery' has increased (proportionately) in modern Melanesia, in that its new unstructuredness has become a widespread social problem and source of angst. The number of sorcery accusations appears to have increased since contact because the number of potential culprits has increased, and the techniques deemed most effective in divining sorcerers have noticeably migrated across cultural boundaries. The illusions in the situation are, of course, that we lack all the necessary documentation from the last one-and-half centuries to make anything more than the most cautious assessment, and that an increase in sorcery does not necessarily mean 'actual attempts at sorcery', let alone 'effective sorcery' so much as allegations of such (with most village claims about 'realities' of sorcery being 'empirically false' for being fed by anxieties) (cf. Young 1971: 128). The apparent worsening of sorcery as a cause of social and individual distress, moreover, is compounded by its very satisfactoriness as both retributive device and explanation. Sorcery is often conceived as the best means of preserving 'traditional justice' when the newer legal penalties

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(by fining, gaoling, and so forth) are too anaemic (Todd 1935: 447; Chowning 1974: 186-87 for relevant issues), while at the same time a sense of sorcery's greater prevalence gives all the more reason to take more drastic action against sorcerers than accepting a mere gaol sentence (Fortune 1932: 288; PNG 1981). There is remarkable intellectual satisfaction to be found in appealing to sorcery as causal principle, in any case, even in a Christianizing world. If, upon contact, missionaries were sometimes lumped with other whites as dangerous sorcerers and, so, worth killing (Ta'unga [1846] 1982:97-98 on New Caledonia; Shineberg 1967:175 on Vanuatu), preaching in the region often contrasted God's kingdom with the realm of the Devil, of the minor 'satans' and of the sorcerer's evil terror (Lawrence 1964a: 79-84; Cruttwell 1985). Admittedly, some missionary appeals to 'commonsense' contained warnings against 'native' propensities to superstition and credulity about sorcery, but with limited success; for, explaining troubles in terms of sorcery can be very easily incorporated into an emergent Christian worldview. When Lieutenant Governor Sir William McGregor forbade the Papuan practice of sorcery in 1893, what is more, his official recognition of the problem tended to widen rather than diminish it (Joyce 1971: 187-89, cf. Wolfers 1975: 27, 33). The churches did have initial success in getting their new converts to 'put away their sorcery implements', but after a time even Christians 'began using them again' (AA 1956: 6), and until now, despite local and regional rhetoric against it, sorcery is generally approached with ambivalence, so that nothing comparable to African mass movements to extirpate it has occurred in Melanesia, but only sporadic revivalist activities seeking to purge it from the Christian way (e.g. White 1991: 246 on Santa Isabel). Generalizations will only make good sense if one illustrates the nature and degree of sorcery's survival and transformations from a variety of specific settings, both rural and urban, and between town and country. We commence with a rural example, from among the Gadsup (Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands), a people who traditionally held all sorcery to be punishable by death. Today, however, 'open hostility and acts of vengeance are forbidden', Christian (mainly Lutheran) influences have permeated the culture-area, and residence patterns have become more flexible (du Toit 1975: 133, cf. 19-26, 89-99, 119). Before missionization and the availability of modern medical services (at Kainantu hospital), most deathbearing sicknesses were attributed to enemy sorcery, but sorcery is now particularly associated with deaths from unusual illnesses, when doctors admit they can do nothing and offer no alternative 'modern' explanation (when the patient is brought in too late for successful treatment, or basic sanitation neglected). During the 1960s such special sicknesses came to evoke a ceremonial reaction, yet one suiting post-pacification conditions by

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diffusing retaliatory feelings away from actual revenge. Toward the end of the two-day lamentations, the bereaving close male kin (often including a widower) would start walking around the house containing the corpse. They did not talk but with painted bodies formed a single file circling the house while wailing and shaking. In their hands in front of their bodies they held drawn bows and occasionally shot an arrow into the ground. Off to the right there was a wide plank split from a tree trunk . . . Nearly every time the men approached it they would call out the name of the deceased and let fly with their arrows piercing the plank . . . This plank, it seemed, was symbolic of the sorcerer who had caused the death . . . It was also a way in which pent up hostilities and feelings of aggression for an unknown murderer . . . could be released, and deep sorrow expressed by cutting off spent arrows to allow room for more. (du Toil 1975:134)

Divination procedures over the bloated corpse were also carried out, as if bereaved clansmen should look to revenge the sorcery, yet without their action. That scores were being kept, however, meant that any significant death in the other and suspected community could be counted as squaring the matter, an attitude which raised the importance and fear of sorcery as against violence, and ensured that members of different communities became very wary of possible sorcery retaliation whenever any death among the Gadsup occurred (du Toit 1975: 135). In another highland case, that of the Mae Enga, most fatal illnesses used to be ascribed to the malice of 'domestic ghosts' (mainly those whose deaths went unavenged), and only rarely to sorcery or other causes (Meggitt 1965: 128-29; 1977: 28). What may be termed 'war sorcery' (or 'weapon magic'), along with 'putatively lethal sorcery' for taking revenge (and usually 'imported from other regions'), were nonetheless part of the old Mae Enga repertoire, and at least three basic types of sickness-producing sorcery were deployed, normally on outsiders (Brennan 1977: 45-47, cf. Meggitt 1977: 39-40, 59-60). Since the 1960s, though, sorcery has come to figure far more prominently both as practice and explanation because the Mae have been drawn into contact with other Enga groups—the Kyaka, Sau, Laiapu, Ipili—for whom sorcery possessed an everyday significance. Techniques for the use of tomakae, for example—an ostensibly fatal brand of sorcery known to the Kyaka—were formerly only available to the Mae through a hired intermediary, but the road connection to Wapenamanda now enabled them to procure it, and thus 'supplement the overt physical violence that marked the great resurgence of inter-clan conflicts in the 1960s and 1970s' (Meggitt 1981: 35, cf. 1977: 156-65). Certain Mae seemed predisposed to obtain tomakae because of the 'empirical verification' of its effectiveness, its symptoms being those of malaria (a disease resurgent among the Mae in the 1950s) (Meggitt 1981: 36, cf. Ewers and Jeffery 1971: 95; Kondwal and Trompf 1982: 93 on highland malaria).

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Roads into the highlands eventually brought more than neighbouring sorceries into contact with each other; they have also borne both new adaptations to traditional procedures and new forms of sorcery from far-distant places. Among the Wahgi groups, to illustrate, hum became tied up with certain road accidents (cf. chapter 1). In November 1976, a man and woman were gaoled after admitting to death by sorcery (or witchcraft) of one Kwi Kupel (of the Adpang tribe). The woman, because she had not been given a lift back home from Mount Hagen on the tribe's truck—toward which she had earlier contributed K200— was said to have sent a snake from her body into the line of the truck as it passed her by some days later. The snake's tail hit the vehicle loudly yet only temporarily affected the driver, the intended victim, but its head hit Kwi and he unfortunately fell ill with dysentery and died in hospital (OTs: Walep, Kaipal 1976). In the pre-contact past, workers of kum often used genuine poisons (kong) or the marrow of corpses' bones sucked out by a bamboo tube; now there is also bateri, acid extracted from car batteries, which is freely available even to non-specialists who have a bad enough grudge. Botol (pidgin: bottle) is the name given to a new form of subtler sorcery. Botoltom (or botol specialists) are able to put pieces of glass or bone into another's body, or take them out, for prices ranging between ten toea and one kina during the 1970s. Botol is understood to have originated from Bundi country (Madang Province, New Guinea) and reached the Wahgi Valley via the Chimbu (OTs: Wandel, Nolia, etc. 1976, cf. Frazer 1922: vol.1, 207, for the fear of treading on glass in earlier colonial times). Botol has reached the southern highlands (Papua) further along the Highlands Highway. For the Mendi, moreover, because botol derives from the north (east) rather than the south (whence came traditional sorcery), it 'represents a redefinition of perceptual boundaries which includes the urban setting, the government', as well as 'the new unbalanced exchanges engendered by the new economy' (Zelenietz 1981: 7). As 'European' things replace forest products, botol sorcery has taken on the strength of the new order, glass splinters substituting for slivers of bamboo, and put in tinned corned beef rather than marsupial meat for the victim. The worker of botol, whether as harm-dealers or curers, is usually young and 'somewhat Westernized himself, and the likely targets are those who work for wages or engage in bisnis, and who either fail to share their wealth to the ruralists' satisfaction or fail to participate fully in the traditional exchanges. Botol, along with other newly named types of sorcery, seems to be as commonly employed within as between each Mendi tribe, giving the impression that sorcery in general has proliferated, and producing a 'qualitatively new character of... social disruption' (Lederman 1981:16,20,24, cf. Westermark 1981 on the eastern highland Agarabi).

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Two Mekeo sorcerers standing on the fringe of a local celebration, Yule Island, 1985. Both sorcerers (at rear of crowd) are dressed in black and carry wooden rods, (photo: Trompf) One of the threats posed by new trends is the undermining of community leadership and its long-inured association with good order. Even in hierarchically structured Mekeo society, for instance, both the fear and real influence of sorcerers, whether domestic or military, seems to have increased with the relative waning of chiefly power vis-a-vis the administration. Dread of sorcerers rose rapidly in the 1890s, for a start, when the government required villagers to bury their dead in cemeteries rather than under the rafters and protection of their own houses, sorcerers being imagined to open up graves to procure their accoutrements (Haddon 1932: 127). Since then, domestic sorcerers have had more chances to become 'their own men', in a special 'private sphere' set apart from chiefly control, and thus posing a threat to traditional leadership (cf. Holtker 1975b: 70; Metais 1967: 135 for comparable developments elsewhere). Our closer inspection of the Filo cult reflected this same tendency (chapter 4). Even the first Mekeo Catholic priest, Louis Vangeke, who inherited the role of domestic sorcerer, played on this heightened power, although by calling himself 'God's sorcerer' he was stressing a healing role and rejecting harm-dealing power (OTs: Hau'ofa 1972; Vangeke 1974). With continuing shifts in favour of social status based on money, though, resulting from the thriving betel nut market in Moresby, the hiring of sorcerers has steadily and worryingly become more

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diffuse, and the old structured use of sorcery as social control—the chiefs acting as its siphons—has been seriously impaired (cf. plate 9). Mekeo villages currently remain noticeably undeveloped and somewhat run down because so much money is spent on paying off sorcerers (as threats or allies) and also on alcohol (here an index to social malaise) (Trompf, fieldnotes 1983-85). A variety of comparable problems has arisen in other coastal and island societies with relatively long histories of contact. During the pre-war years on southeast Ambrym (Vanuatu), for example, there arose a realization that sorcery was no longer the privilege of the chiefs—as it was in former times when strict loyalty and strong defences against enemies were top priorities— but was available in new forms to returning labour migrants and to anybody with a strong enough grudge. A struggle between Christians and traditionalists has ensued. The Christians have insisted on sorcery's unChristianness and loss of legitimacy, those resorting to it being noted for their 'sickly looks, poor hygiene, absenteeism from church, night prowling and a propensity' to make Veiled threats when angered'; while certain chiefs have gamely preserved the lingering conviction that sorcery holds the society together when in 'the right hands' (Tonkinson 1981: 81-83). On Ambrym, then, there is a contest between two competing notions of sorcery: one rating it as an insidious vehicle of revenge now open to all, and with even the chiefs likely to use it for their own aggrandizement, and one trying to salvage it as a useful form of punition. In other societies which lack chieftainship structures, comparable problems still arise. Among the Kove and Sengseng on New Britain, for example, 'people other than big men' have been able to 'build up large personal supplies' of shell money, pacification having rendered the shells more accessible. The increased competitiveness in augmenting these resources, however, and maintaining them in an ever-expanding system of exchanges, marriage and funerary payments, has increased evocations of sorcery threats as a means of ensuring that debts are paid (Chowning 1974:172). Here an over-concern with economic transactions substitutes for warfare, yet requires more and more reliance on intra-lineage or interagnatic sorcery, with traditional respect for elders and their specialized knowledge being weakened 'by a steady importation of new techniques for killing' (Chowning 1987, at least on the Kove). New techniques can put old-style leaders under threat (botol being applied against traditional Mendi bigmen, for instance), while the colonial sponsorship of larger settlement sizes meant both more strains on leaders and more preoccupation with the sorcery issue. Not that we should over-labour 'in-group' sorcery without also discussing newer patterns of 'out-group' sorcery as affected by modern fashions (cf. Patterson 1974; Stephen 1987b: 261-62). Unequal access to the new items and fashions of the new order, after all, could provoke the disadvantaged

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to direct their resentments outwards towards a neighbouring (and former enemy) group which was placed near the novel facilities 'by chance'. The Bimim-Kuskusmin (of the west Sepik hinterland), to illustrate, were once locked in a relatively equal power contest with their 'major enemy' the Oksapmin. With a mission station and patrol post erected in the latter's territory (1960s), however, the Oksapmin became unwitting victims of change. They benefited little from the new medical care and education, and lost ground in the trade system in which both groups participated, both because they lacked opportunities to earn money, and because the economically more secure Bimim-Kuskusmin could partly opt out of the exchange network. Since pacification, however, the two groups had done what they formerly had not been doing before contact—intermarrying. As tensions flowing from the new inequalities were mounting, the Oksapmin were able to redress the balance through a device previously unavailable to them in their relations with the other group—tamam witchcraft. Tamam was conventionally attributed to the presence of 'evil alien wives', or in other words, to the results of exogamous marriage arrangements; and with that applying to these two enemy groups the fear of tamam entered into their relationships. The more the traditionalist Oksapmin played on their tamam strengths to get their own back, while the more the Christian Bimim-Kuskusmin tried hard (yet generally failed) to believe that tamam rites were not efficacious, the more relationships became unsettled (Poole 1981). What about the effects of urbanism? Coastal Papua is a test case here; for, to a large extent its 'sorcery problems' reflect other problems related to town-country tensions, and to the widening cross-cultural awareness of sorcery that town-country interactions make possible. The tensions are nicely exemplifed by the Gabadi villages (40 kilometres west of Port Moresby), where there was a depletion of young men with primary school education and beyond during the 1960s and 1970s. They had migrated to the capital in search of jobs. The villages, on unhealthy swampy land, were boringly over-reliant on fishing, with most of the crocodiles shot out of the Aroa River and its tributaries, and the villagers having earlier combined with neighbours to burn down a nearby expatriate-owned plantation. At Pinu in particular, the older generation remained divided into partisans of the lotu (with LMS origins) and an embittered minority sticking by 'tradition'. The latter had recourse to sorcery to requite families not fulfilling their obligations—whose far-off sons allegedly no longer thought of the community, and who did not return to marry local village girls. By 1977, fortunately, there were enough strains in urban existence to drive several young men back to the village to establish a successful chickenfarm and market-gardens project. With material benefits accruing to the village, Christian elements were re-strengthened (OT: Apa 1973; 1975; and for comparable materials elsewhere, e.g., Mennis 1982a: 33 on the Bilbil; Barker 1983; 1990b; on the Maisin; Josephides 1982: 43 on the highlands; McDonald 1981 more generally).

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As for widening awareness of others' sorceries, a very serious problem in coastal Papua, especially in villages near or connected by road to Port Moresby, is the new facility to bring harmful techniques from distant places, and the tendency for them to gravitate towards the capital. Coastal Papuans will usually concede that, while the churches—and particularly the United Church and its antecedents—have broken the barriers preventing genuine inter-territorial cooperation and so paved the way for national unity, one unnerving side-effect has been the migration of lethal sorceries. In the villages closest to the capital, such as those of the Motu and AromaVelerupu peoples, the sorcery most feared is that which is relatively distant—from Kerema and the Elema area to the west, and from Dobu, Ferguson, Misima Islands, and so on, to the east. Although such sorcery fears have been subsiding very slowly since the 1980s, this slight shift has probably more to do with anti-traditionalist sentiments of better educated younger people, and not older mainstays of the United Church, most pastors 'believing in and knowing the effects of sorcery' (OTs: Lahua, Kopi 1979-80, cf. Fortune 1932: 287; Young 1971: 128). Thus, specialists from previously isolated neighbouring peoples have come to make their appearance as agents of harm. Motuans, for instance, pay off Nara sorcerers to scourge other Motuans. When cars drive down the road from nearby Port Moresby to Pari village in the middle of the night, so its Motuan inhabitants will often claim, Koiari 'workers of evil sorcery' (vadataudia) are making their unwanted visits by modern, easy means (OT: Maddox 1983). And villages nestling close to turbulent Moresby feel vulnerable before an indefinite number of potential enemy forces, especially associated with the large numbers of migrants from the Gulf (OT: Chatterton 1979, cf. Parratt 1970). It is small wonder that leaders and families in most of the ostensibly Christian villages of coastal Papua have had to shore up their defences by either a good knowledge (if not occasional effective use) of sorcery or an ability to hold it as a subtle threat over others when necessary (Young 1971:126-27; Kahn 1983). In Melanesia, it is known, even the strongest Christians and opponents of evil forces can die by sorcery (Ferea 1984: 30-31), which is why many Christian Papuans compromise with it for self- or family-protection, or are reconciled to it as a regulative mechanism, so that arrogance, greed or the failure to meet obligations— even in the new cash economy—can reap appropriate punishments from the 'system' (Kopi 1979: 20-30, cf. Kanasa 1983: 4-6 on the Waria). And what of the urban centres proper? Perhaps in these both the fear and activation of sorcery are stronger than in rural areas, but no documentation thus far adequately confirms this. Mounting opposition to sorcery in the Yangoru area during the 1970s, interestingly, was partly in reaction against the increase of 'long-distance sicknesses' which had befallen those who had moved away from the region.

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In the foreign environments of the towns, Rabaul, Madang and Wau, people found that the bonds of kinship had a potential for unreliability that they had not suspected. (Gesch 1980) But if these people succumbed to homegrown varieties, others could fall before genuinely alien terrors. Take the case of Sukulu Wakoli, a young Engan who came to train at the Papuan Medical College, Port Moresby, in 1969, and the pride of his clan. He suffered a breakdown in his new environment, and his cycles of manic excitement and depression were put down by his relatives to a coastal bush spirit, or masalai, which entered him through a type of Papuan sorcery used against threatening or go-ahead highlanders. Only a Tolai familiar with such inter-regional problems was able to bring him back to normalcy (Meggitt 1981: 36-39). The urban insecurity this last story implies is a common phenomenon. It is very difficult to be sure who might be getting at you in the social entanglements of the town; whereas sorcery accusations might produce admissions back in the village, they are rarely forthcoming in the different world of 'workmates' and 'business rivals'. Office life reflects these uncertainties. Public servants, especially when moving offices, or even just slipping out for lunch, have to think about their 'leavings'. It is dangerous to leave behind items which have some intimate contact with one's body— clothes, nail clippings or nose pickings, hair, handkerchiefs and food scraps—although pencils, papers, books, and the like, fortunately do not belong to the sorcery 'complex'. Certain deaths and instances of insanity among senior public servants in Port Moresby have even been attributed to sorcery by the broad consensus view of their national colleagues (OTs: Lahua, Kopi, etc. 1979-80). A not uncommon supposition among secretaries or female office workers, too, is that a few weeks of debilitation and headaches can mean somebody dangerous 'has your hair'. The very anonymity which sorcerers can use to their advantage in towns worsens the possible anxiety; but then such fears among people who were posted to work among strangers are known from earlier colonial contexts (e.g. Chinnery in AAB Aug.-Sept. 1938: 16; Keesing 1942: 233). No wonder Melanesian cities are witnesses to practices, fears and reactions to sorcery which reflect a melting-pot of cultures and psychologies. Out of this complexity, a few snippets must suffice. As recently as October 1983, a Bundi couple (from Madang highlands) were isolated as sorcerers by the group method of holding a large bamboo 'divining rod' at Sabama squatter settlement in Port Moresby (cf. Trompf 1991: 94). The woman was strung up in torture, once by her legs, because it was held by Bundi and Chimbu city-dwelling clansmen that she had 'poisoned' a Bundi man's son and refused to pay K12 000 compensation (TP 14 Oct. 1983: 5, 28 Oct: 4). The use of the bamboo in this case (or pulim mambu as it is often called) indicates in itself how information about both sorcery and sorcery-detecting

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techniques have been commonly diffused among labourers from different regions (though not only in urban centres, but on plantation and mining sites as well; Kapini 1976). In contexts much further east, by comparison, in Fiji, we find the special complication of foreign, Indian sorcery (Indarjal) tending to reinforce local Melanesian presumptions about the whole matter (OT: Maharaj 1983), and in Fijian sorcery lore it is common to hear of suspected practitioners visiting and sacrificing to European women, and being trailed by black dogs (rather than black cats), these motifs having the more recent stamp of urban interactions upon them (Tuwere 1983: 3). As expected, it is sometimes hard for professionals and chief protagonists of modernity to elude the trials of the sorcery world. Melanesian doctors unable to save a life, for instance, fall susceptible to the charge of sorcery, although most young graduates from the University of Papua New Guinea's medical school are generally readier to face that charge than work in turbulent highland areas, where a mistake or a failure could bring outright physical revenge (OT: Cleazey 1980). Politicians have also had to contend personally with 'the sorcery problem'. Some have felt themselves victimized by harm-dealers at home, as did Yaliwan, when he resigned his national parliamentary seat in October 1972 and returned to Yangoru (cf. Rai 1977); some fall paranoid through modernity itself, as in the case of a southern highlands politician, who sought psychiatric help because he thought someone was 'getting at' him with sorcery through computers (OT: Moi 1985) Others who have abetted the cause of national unity, especially by sponsoring visits or job transfers from one region to another, have suddenly found themselves accused when things go wrong. As Papua New Guinea's minister for Domestic Affairs, for instance, Stephen Tago magnanimously offered an unemployed Asaro highlander the chance to see Popondetta, in Tago's own province of Oro, to celebrate the anniversary of Independence Day on 16 September 1979. Not long after the visit, the man fell sick and subsequently died. In November the minister flew to Goroka to explain to the relevant Asaro clan what had happened, to express his sorrow, and to pay for the corpse and three relatives to be transported back to the highlands. The gesture, however, was taken as a sign of weakness and of trying to compensate for some ill deed. The Asaro surmised the dead man had been the victim of sorcery, so that a large group of them angrily descended on Goroka airport and only a large contingent of police prevented them from requiting Tago in full measure (OT: Corr 1979). The arts of civilization There are certain spheres of human activity in which vindictiveness can be loudly present, but where it is supposed to be contained (unless or until the nature of a particular negativity provokes a reaction which dissolves

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a working recognition of the pre-supposed bonds of restraint). I refer here to politics, sport and art. Each are components of traditional Melanesian civilizations, where power-play, competitive games and rhetorical sting have their place. During the colonial period, Melanesians steadily acquired the skills in which they could 'beat the whites at their own (political, field and communicative) games'. This is also a history of positivities, perhaps, in that blacks acquired skills, widening their share of social pressure, decision-taking and profit-making (cf. Amarshi et al, 1979; Dixon 1980; Trebilcock 1983, etc.), and putting the lie to old paternalist claims that Melanesians could not be educated beyond a level below that attainable by Europeans (Dickson 1976:21-24). But it is also partly the history of learnt 'destructive competitiveness' (cf. McConaughty 1968: 101-02), and this is constantly evoking vacillations between admiration and cynicism from those who observe the acting in the new civilization's arenas. What follows will perforcedly be limited to the contemporary scene. Politics In the new politics, especially in the national and provincial assemblies of Melanesia, the forces on either side of such conflicts are characteristically played off against each other in logomachy (or a 'war of words') rather than through physical combat, before decisions are made. And, the exceptions recognized, it is remarkable how the introduced political institutions of cross-cultural debate have become widely and rather unquestioningly accepted—even before the Melanesians have been able to use them effectively themselves—as superior agencies of power-broking and of getting things done over a wide territory and the wider world. The store set by these institutions has admittedly had much to do with an inevitable imperial 'hangover', for there has been little time to gauge the effects of any radical departures from parliamentary systems introduced by the British, Dutch and French. On the other hand, competitive rhetoric has been a characteristic of the small-scale 'relatively democratic' traditional societies of Melanesia, and this probably relates to the favourable black reception of ceremonial and ritualistic features in high-level European-style politics—the royal or supreme personages and their representatives, parades of soldiers, special flag-raisings and unveilings, the procedural formalities around the speaker's chair, and so forth. In the respect that it is a 'glorified committee', furthermore, in an island world becoming quickly familiar with both church and local government committees, a parliament brings 'socioreligious' and 'apparently secular' goals into a potential harmony, and there has been a not unnatural tendency for churchmen or religious leaders to gain election to national and regional assemblies (cf. Momis 1975; Lini 1980: 19; Dambui [forthcoming], etc.). Surprisingly, then, struggles for nationhood in Melanesia cannot be reduced to anti-colonialism tout simple (cf. Breuilly

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1982 on Africa) when acceptance of parliamentary representation as an apparently 'superior instrument of civilization' is so widespread. Even radical New Caledonian kanaks do not turn their backs on this part of their French inheritance, and some make ironically incisive use of Republican principles to embarrass conservative colons (Chesneaux 1988: 59-60, cf. Ounei 1985; Hill [forthcoming]). Despite the recent Fijian coups, too, the preservation of constitutionality and a Westminster system remains a top priority for the black leadership (cf., e.g., PIM Sept. 1989; and see below), while OPM thinkers show a clear respect for the Dutch parliamentary institutions set up in 1960 by contrasting them with present Indonesian 'tyranny' (Trompf, fieldnotes among refugees 1984-85, cf. van Kampen 1961: [92]). Parliamentary politics, however, is an arena of conflict, played out in group dynamics which reflect the older tensions of inter-regional suspicions and the newer (usually friendlier) struggle for high positions of power among representatives of new elites (cf. Young 1975; Weeks 1976 for background). Modern politics hardly eliminates payback; in fact, the government/opposition dichotomy might be said to engender it. However, legislatures and political committees can only operate as such with the sublimation of violence, and it is remarkable how little political zealotry there is in Melanesia, of the kind whereby established power-holders dispense with due process in favour of force, as is often the case in Africa.11 The negative payback predominating in modern Melanesian politics is logomachy or vilification. The object in campaign and debate is to discredit the arguments, if possible the integrity, of one's opponent(s) by word power. Political speech acts are followed by voting, normally on policy and legislation which purport to actualize what has been passed by the majority (but which constantly remain open to the criticism of undesirability or ineffectiveness). In this new forum, then, chairmanship and 'house rules' impose restraints on the nature and consequences of conduct. It is still important to ask, though, whether parliaments, even political meetings in general, have tended to attract verbally aggressive types who are adept at demoralizing opponents, even if they combine an accusative tone, innuendo, vocal power, filibustering and an indifference to interjections with the skill to organize one's thoughts (cf. Hughes 1975). In the multiparty situation in Papua New Guinea's national parliament, shifting alliances (especially during the 1980s, when No Confidence votes taken against the government came to be an all too frequent phenomenon) made 11

Here I refer specifically to party or faction politics, realizing that military crises have produced different patterns (Papua New Guinea Defence Force military acting independently of the parliamentary directives, as in 1992; and see also Amnesty International 1991). A few politicians' use of paid henchmen and gangs to block exposes of their practices is also well known to me, though for obvious reasons I have declined to document these.

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for a high level of ruthlessness, deviousness, 'back-stabbing' and abandoned loyalties. The complex mix of local, regional, denominational, ethnic, class and party pressures on Melanesian politicians, in any case, entails the occasional breaking of the 'civilized bounds' which the modern institutions are supposed to preserve. To illustrate the less civilized edges of payback in the new politics, a few examples from Papua New Guinea will help. Michael Somare (1975: 70-71) willingly quotes himself from Hansard as once having let loose verbally at Tei Abal, then minister for Agriculture, that he was a 'stooge ..., puppet ..., bloody rock ape' and 'rubbish', to the background pleas of 'Order! Order!' from the Speaker. The odd scuffle has erupted between members in Papua New Guinea's legislatures; the Pangu party opposition member Sir Pita Lus, for instance, then Commerce minister but former Police minister and hardliner on law and order, swung a blow in the national parliament at honourable member Nugints (Nov. 1979), just missing his mark (PC 5 Dec. 1979). That political parties can take their own special type of revenge, interestingly, is reflected in the change of government after Somare's, and Pangu's, removal from power in 1980. Much to the chagrin of the successful coalition, the outgoing executive members of the Somare regime took with them all the office equipment, including telephones, with the houses they had to vacate being divested of furniture (OT: Corr 1979). This can be put down to reprisal rather than fear of sorcery! It should also provide a clue to the widely held silent assumption that the acquisition of political power brings with it cargo, as well as those corrupting opportunities to feather the nest of one's own favoured group by diverting of funds and equipment to their benefit and, obviously, to the detriment of political or traditional opponents (Kilage 1983a, cf. OC 1980: 10-15). The apparent spite of the Somare team in 1980, moreover, was something of a foretaste of the stormy Iambakey Okuk's well-known reaction to his unexpected defeat at the 1982 elections. Okuk, who combined a Chimbu and eastern highlands power base, showed himself to be the most aggressive 'man of influence in power' in national politics thus far, a Transport minister of grandiose schemes and big spending, with disproportionate influence over Prime Minister Sir Julius Chan, during the 1980-82 government (TP 31 Oct. 1981:5). Okuk's political 'belligerency' strongly reflected his anti-Pangu bitterness, after he 'was sacked from the Somare Government in 1976', and his intimations of national collapse—when he was ousted in the 1982 elections—compare well with the 'political curses' of Arafat (after the Palestinian expulsion from Beirut), for 'he was determined to have payback on Mr Somare' and would not forget his defeat (TP 16 July 1982: 4). In Papua New Guinea, interestingly, political cut-and-thrust, especially allegations by public figures that their political 'enemies' are trying to 'get

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back at them' has reinforced the neologism 'payback' (cf., e.g., NN 2 April 1983:3; PC 21 June 1983:9,11 April 1985; TP20 Sept. 1984:54, cf. AW23 Oct. 1984: 4, etc.), which hails from earlier descriptions of tribal war. Payback is invoked in politics in a variety of other circumstances. When bigman Okuk died in 1986, for instance, highlanders (and opportunist gangs) went on a rampage of sorrow and compensation through the streets of Moresby (SMH 22 Nov. 1986; 22, cf. Standish 1982; Luzbetak 1988: 288 and see chapter 1 on payback against things, for general background). When the Defence Force failed to secure its pay rise, soldiers from Murray Barracks wreaked retributive damage on the parliament buildings (PC 9 Feb. 1989), and in the history of Papua New Guinea's laborization and the trade union movement, there have been both arrests by officials and damage to property to 'pay back the bosses' (see Amarshi et al. 1979:138-142, cf. also Daly 1983; Kuluah 1989). Payback as term and concept also now has possible usage in international relations—in verbal interchanges between Papua New Guinea and Indonesia over border issues (NT 8-14 Aug. 1982: 5; PC Oct. 1984, etc.), or between Vanuatu and the United States over the visits of nuclear warships. It spills over into such actions as the economic and services sanctions against Bougainville (SMH 19 April 1990:30), or the Namaliu government's secret breaking of the 1990 treaty with the BRA (PIM Sept. 1990: 43-44)— treachery possessing its own traditional, if rather understudied, background (cf. Richardson 1974; Mennis 1982a: 214-17). Politics, it is readily seen, can educe retributive actions with the most serious consequences. I know of no 'modern' Melanesian Lermontov likening sharp words to murder ([1837] 1958: 126), but political decisiontaking and electoral competition can endanger lives. Selecting cases of more religious significance, those who moderate between factions can easily risk their necks. When the Oro Provincial Government was being established in Papua, for instance, the Speaker Goviro Gosada cast a deciding vote in a deadlock over the choice of premier. Although Orokaiva, he voted for the person, not for the candidate of his own cultural group, only to find it necessary to have police protection in his own house—against the threats of his own embittered people (OT: Corr 1979). Tempers simmered, but the episode took place in a rather fearful world of 'political sorcery', in which ambitious candidates have worn plastic tubes under their shirts, pressing poison drops from a rubber squeezer at their chests down the tubes under their sleeves into competitors' glasses (OT: Waiko 1983). Gosada's case brings to mind of the death of John Bika, provincial minister for Commerce in the North Solomons, who was shot by rebels for compromising with Bougainville Copper Ltd (A 12 Sept. 1989), and of a few other deaths (for example, that of former PNG Police Commissioner, Pius Kerepia in 1990) and various attacks which are touched with a 'political' character (e.g. FEER 18 April 1991: 23).

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That political payback can have dire results yet still put constraints on violence, however, is nowhere better illustrated than by the two bloodless coups in Fiji (May and September 1987). Feelings boiled over with another case of compromise. In April 1987, when Fiji voted in its first Labour-led government, the prime ministership went to Dr Timothy Bavadra, a black who had worked for the coalescence of worker and reformist elements among both indigenes and Indians, and who in securing victory ended the seventeen-year-old conservative premiership of Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara. But Bavadra only remained in power thirty days. He was removed from parliament, together with his cabinet ministers and Labour-National Federation supporters, and placed in detention by the military. His unexpected assailant was Lieutenant-Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, then the third-ranking officer in the Royal Fiji Military Forces, who has since raised his own status to general and temporarily ruled Fiji as a de facto Republican president until becoming prime minister after the 1992 elections. Rabuka's first coup was a quite independent move, intended to forestall what he saw as the dangerous polarization of Fijian society between Fijians and Indians—with the latter demographically outnumbering the former by 1986—and to ensure black political hegemony against the ever-increasing power of the Indians in public life (SMH 16 May 1987: 41, cf. Dean and Ritova 1988: 44-78; Seth 1990). Not openly articulating it, moreover, he wanted this Fijian hegemony to be based in the eastern (and northern) islands, not with Bavadra or the chiefs of the west (OT: Ferea 1993). The cultivation of power support making the first coup successful came from the vocal anti-Indian Taukei movement, started by Sakeasi Butadroka during the 1972 elections and running on the slogan 'Fiji for the Fijians!' (Ali 1982: 142, 144-48; and for long-term background Vuniyaro 1991). If Rabuka could count on the groundswell of Fijian resentment, especially given Indian domination of business (and thus access to the cargo) in centres such as Suva, Nadi, and Lautoka, he found the Taukei movement a nuisance by July 1987. The second coup was primarily to cut the ground under the Taukei movement's feet, create a republican constitution which safeguarded Fijian interests further (as if the 1970 constitution had not done this enough!) and to recover ground for the usable conservatives, especially Ratu Kamisese Mara (SMH 30 Sept., 1987; cf. FS 29 July 1987; FT 22 Aug. 1987: 5; 26 Aug. 1987). A propos religious aspects of the coup, Rabuka's fears of an inter-confessional civil war, as he himself had experienced it with the UN peace-keeping force in the Lebanon, were of initial relevance, while his branding of Indians as friends of Russia appears as a later rationalization (Dean and Ritova 1989). It is of less significance that Rabuka is a Methodist lay preacher— one among hundreds, actually, from the Nambua circuit on Vanua Levu (OT: Rogermuri 1987)—than that the Taukei movement can count on a 90 per cent Methodist Fijian support for a rigidly anti-Indian stance

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(OT: Latukefu 1990, cf. Garrett 1988; Yabaki 1991: 15-16). This has meant that Rabuka, who has moved to distance himself from extremists, still sometimes has to bow to their effects on the majority of black opinion. Against his better judgement, for example, in 1989 he was unable to relax his new Sunday observances, the key conservative churchman Reverend Manasa Lasaro insisting that the heathens, and especially Indian shopkeepers, should conform to God's Sabbath laws (PIM 16 June 1989: 14; cf. GW 2 April 1989: 22; SMH 14 Aug. 1989: 10). Politically marooned by both coups and the general lack of compromise, Dr Bavadra died of a heart-attack, leaving his widow preaching the not unjustifiable message to surrounding nations that Fiji was 'another South Africa' (e.g. ABC TV 24 May 1990). Ironically, Rabuka's 'legitimate' prime ministership, after the 1992 elections, came about only through his unexpected alliance with the very same Labour party interests Bavadra had successfully cultivated! (T-M 3 June 1992; SMH 3 June 1992: 15). But this was not inconsistent for him when one considers that the eastern rather than the western chiefs had maintained supremacy. Bavadra was arrested during the first Fijian coup for being an unwanted victor. Other Melanesian politicians have been known to face gaol for illegalities (ministers Naha Runi, John Kaputin and Ted Diro in Papua New Guinea, for three and Barak Sope on Vanuatu), but not to be paid back with allegations of treason for consummate success in a democratic election. But by (mis)using the 'new warriorhood'—the modern army— the rules of politics can always be changed! (Harder 1988; Lai 1988; Vakatora 1988; Crocombe 1993, and on problems of the army in politics elsewhere, Sundhausen 1973; Shears 1980: 118-134; Macintosh 1990). Sport Like politics, sports have both a sublimatory and religious dimension. Sporting events can be transformed into moments of intense exhilaration and despair, jubilation and anger, of hero worship and strong feelings of identification with the group for which one plays or barracks (cf. Glasner 1977: 21-22). And, as with politics, experiments with sport in Melanesia— different styles of football being played across the region, and also cricket especially in Fiji and along the Papuan coast—have helped concentrate physical energies on heavily 'ritualized' mock battles, which are highly regulated by umpires and the agreed rules of the game. From the early competitions between Christian and 'pagan', mission organization of games and provision of equipment have a history of cumulative importance, through the peaceful intermixing of peoples from mutually suspicious areas, and fostering a sense of membership in wider social unities (see above on kikim kros, cf. Kituai in TP, 26 Aug. 1983: 30 on PNG; OT: van Baal 1984 on West Irian, cf. Connell 1987:286-317; Fraser 1990:95-100 on New Caledonia).

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On the other hand, it is facile to assume that sport uniformly dissipates aggression, since a great deal of violence can be stimulated by games, particularly football matches, which are reminiscent of field battles. It should not be forgotten how an international soccer match led to a small war in Latin America (Fromm 1973: 29, cf. Tatz 1982: 9-12), and both the strongly competitive character and growing commercialization of football in Melanesia bring potentially hostile crowds into concentrated rallyingpoints. As one who has found himself running away shoulder to shoulder with the umpire—until I decided it was time we separated—while the drunken barracker with a spear was bearing down on us, I can vouch for the unpredictability of violent outbursts at public sporting events. In 1972, when Papua met New Guinea in Port Moresby for the annual rugby playoff, there was hardly a black face among the players themselves, yet an offhand remark by a Papuan woman among the spectators sparked off an at first isolated scuffle, which quickly escalated into one of the worst riots of Papua New Guinea's history (Standish in NT, 30 July-4 Aug. 1973: 8). Rugby in particular is a game full of very rough physical contact, and since some major teams in Papua New Guinea have grown up representing major regional interests—'Gulf (later 'Wests'), 'Easts' (east Central Province), 'Brothers' (= highlanders), and so on—one will not be surprised to learn of many 'offensive and illegal tackles' (which some believe should be fined on a 'life for a life' basis) (TP 6-12 Nov. 1981: 30), or of occasions when 'bottles, rocks flew' as the most fanatical supporters of the losers or the penalized blindly vented their fury on crowds or property (PC 10 Aug. 1981: 24). At odd times, fist-fights between single contestants among the spectators proceed during the course of a game and, where police are absent, are usually accepted by the crowds as a ritual side-show of the conflict on the field. The teams themselves, after all, make sure that the connection between traditional religion and combat is not left out of football. Most of them employ sorcerers to specially 'prepare' goal posts at one end—in other words, the most dangerous points on the turf—and if a captain, on winning the toss, is tipped off which goal area has been tampered with, he will normally opt to kick off in the opposite direction (OT: Matiabe). Sports commentators also naturally dwell on the connection, referring to 'daring raids made into . . . solid defence', and employing such terms as 'attack' and 'aggressive' (e.g. UT 19 July 1985: 12). Certain sports, then, have so far proved better equipped than politics in keeping alive revenge attitudes (or the 'kill them!' mentality) even if these are focused on newer, more-than-local objects of enmity. Considering past rioting at Papua vs. New Guinea rugby matches (just mentioned), sport has engendered more violence over that particular macro-regional issue than the existence of the separatist Papua Besena movement, which, now dissipating, was always avowedly 'non-violent' (cf. Premdas 1977: 280, 285, OT: Abaijah 1985).

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The disturbing side-effects aside, though, most Melanesians experience sporting events as manifestations of the 'New Time'; to the new national leadership they are symbols both of desired development and of happy leisure pursuits coming with the 'general Christianization' (not 'Westernization') of highly religious peoples (OT: esp. Armini 1972). Yet this is hardly to deny the persisting pull of tradition. There is a nice illustration of the continuing conflict, at least as far as sport is concerned, in the events at the Baisu (short term) Corrective Institute at Mount Hagen in 1982. When the warders went out to play their annual (September) soccer match (September 1982), the Melpa inmates of the gaol took the opportunity to stage a mass break-out, so that they could make a timely return to their homes for the next bout of tribal fighting (ABC Sept. 1982). Art and literature It is with the arts that the issue of the sublimating of revenge becomes most enthralling. One of the most fascinating processes in the creation of a higher unity of civilization—a state, confederacy, nation, call it what one will—is the invocation of a people's violent (for some heroic) past, yet through an artistry which distances them from aggression rather than serving to spur it on, and which leads them as the audience to question traditional attitudes, laugh at themselves or appreciate and celebrate the past without being foolish enough to return to it. In the making and sustaining of many civilizations, of course, musical, iconic, theatrical and literary appeal to the 'noble qualities' of warriorhood, or to grand exploits of the past, has offered stimulus to military victories in the present; but bellicosity and chauvinism in art has not been fashionable in Melanesia thus far. We here refer to art in its newer guises, of course, largely aimed at a developing elite, but also deliberately keeping expatriate and tourist expectations and audiences very much in mind. One should note how polysemous artistic creativity can be, and how one act of creation can have consequences for members of a very mixed audience. The traditional, the Christian and modern secular mentalites can be allowed to compete for some voice in the open society by dint of harmless, ostensibly non-magical modes of persuasion, and they can appear sideby-side or integrated into each other in some 'moment of consciousness' conjured up by artistic invention. Take theatre, for a start. Church pageants in the villages naturally tend to sharpen disparities between an undesirable past and the new order. Most years in the Bwaidoka village of Wailuga (Massim), to illustrate, there is a colourful re-enactment of the Methodist missionaries' arrival at Goodenough Island. Men dressed as armed and fully regaled warriors run down to the shore, feigning hostility at the arrival of a small motor vessel from the direction of Dobu, a boat bearing those who have been chosen to act the parts of God's messenger, W. H. Bromilow

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and his Dobuan companions (Young 1977: 152-53). In modern urban theatre, by contrast, the psychology of warriorhood can be objectified— as in A View from the Ridge by Karma Kerpi (1974), the Wahgi playwright from Kup—yet with the audience only being expected to experience admiration and sympathy for perpetuators of the old values, not the urge to revitalize them (cf. also Degoba 1971:4). Modern theatre can communicate that something has been lost—perhaps by laughing at the stereotypical missionary figure, with his protruding belly and pontifical manner, as presented by the Papua New Guinea's national Raunraun theatre (Murphy 1983), or by common secondary school attempts at theatrical war dances and revenge scenarios which maintain 'absolute authenticity of dress, song and dance' (Vaughton 1976: 30-31): but this is Melanesian culture 'domesticated' and adapted to modern nationhood. Few respond to this peaceable play acting of revenge, however, as a vehicle to turn back the cultural clock, or to encourage the continuation of 'the real thing'. Nationally minded Melanesians, though, have a natural concern to throw off the image of their nations as islands inhabited by headhunters, cannibals and savages, and a good deal of resentment is getting expressed, not the least by black journalists, about the racist or patronizing bowdlerization of Melanesia's cultural complexities in the foreign press (e.g. SMH 28 April 1981: 6). It has been almost inevitable, however, that the art forms created by Melanesians which most captivate international readership, audiences, connoisseurs and tourists are those reflecting the excitement and turbulences of pre-pacified times. Thus, we see the 'touristicization' of the revenge theme, perhaps most visible in the hotel trade in Fiji, where 'Hula type' dances of friendship are mixed in with those of great strength, threat and aggression, and where tradition has become a slave to the rich travellers' circuits. In Papua New Guinea, one of the country's most original and versatile bands has branded itself with a name evoking the fears of sorcery— Sanguma (cf. chapter 1)—thus transforming what is still a persistent fear in certain rural sectors into internationally saleable musical mystery. It is small wonder that, given these developments, highly reflective Melanesians have turned to the pen as an implement mightier than the spear for retaliation against colonialism, against the Western undermining of traditional values, and even against pitiful fellow Melanesians blinded and made subservient by white paternalism and cargo. In the works of such Papua New Guinean writers as John Kasaipwalova, Leo Hannett and John Waiko, for instance, we find highly political speech acts, arresting retributive challenges of literature, which ask universal yet historically rooted questions for the whole world to ponder, and which never go away (Powell 1978). 'What have you whites done to my people?' is the biting question summarizing Trobriander Kasaipwalova's powerful long poem Reluctant Flame (1971). When a kiap orders his Papuan sergeant to burn down a

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village, shouting 'to hell with their bloody ancestors!' in the Orokaivan Waiko's play The Unexpected Hawk, the curse of the old man over the event at the end of the play hangs over the future and cannot be shifted: O ancestors and spirits, Kill, revenge, hit, punish our enemies who descend like sweeping water to claim our land. (1971:29,31) At odd times such articulations of resentment look like fuel to the fires of some black nationalist war. One thinks here of Kasaipwalova's My Enemy, My Brother, a play supporting the OPM (1980), and Bougainvillean Leo Hannett's tell-tale phrases in The Ungrateful Daughter that nothing good comes out of Konedobu (Port Moresby's old administrative centre) (1971: 39). And then there is the unusual speculation by Solomonese litterateur John Saunana that Melanesian 'payback' provided a paradigm for that future time in history when black peoples would dominate the globe (1972). But, on the whole, the arts have had the same general effects as politics and sport; they tame and sublimate the beast called revenge, even if one can never be sure that, through any or all of them, the energies of primal retribution, in age-old or newly acquired garb, shall return as their unexpected products.

CHAPTER 8

Making Money and Modernizing Reciprocities

The heart beat of traditional Melanesian religion, we reaffirm, has been the constant round of give-and-take, and this includes positive and concessive reciprocities, not just the means and methods of enacting recrimination. It is not necessary to over-labour Melanesia's problems, considering how well the annual death toll of the region compares with other trouble-spots on the globe, and how patterns of friendly exchange and group security have already provided attractive paradigms for supra-tribal cooperation and nation building (Belshaw 1956, cf. Suter 1981 on Papua New Guinea; Taukei 1983: 11-12 on Fiji [albeit before the coups]). Principles of community care in local traditions have been steadily universalized (in some cases so radically that particular village values seem to have disappeared, as on Fiji; Cato 1956), and these neo-traditional values stand together with the Christian message of mercy and goodwill, and the international humanistic values of United Nations charters and healthy development, as platforms for less conflict-ridden and juster societies (Trompf 1986, cf. also Tanja 1982 on Islam's limited impact in the region's west). In this section we gauge the relative effects of newer insights about 'the better life' especially the extraordinary impact of Christianity. In our analysis, of course, which lies under the broad rubric of 'modernization' we cannot forget the constant subverting of ideals. Talk of nationhood, for a start, can be twisted into neo-tribal nationalism that rejects multiethnicity (Sharpe 1981; Trompf 1992b, and note Fiji); while the complexification of economic networks, especially with money, threatens the hold of archaic corporateness by producing unprecedented inequities, individual greed and a new materialism. A great hope among cargo cultists, we have already argued (chapter 5), is the repairing of damage done to idealized 375

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social harmonies and stable exchange networks of the past by an introduced political economy. Thus, under headings appropriately reflecting the other side of payback's coin, we shall have to assess the effects of both 'idealistic' and 'realistic' forces, or of altruism and self-interest, in Melanesia's contemporary religious scene. Peace-making and compensation Where tribal (or clan) warfare is in evidence, the traditional machinery for peace-making is not necessarily intact. Fighting can all too easily re-erupt after a long break, but the ritual procedures for ceasing hostilities can be forgotten with social change. Where the techniques have been preserved, in any case, they are not normally conceived capable of bringing about a firm, unbreakable stoppage. On my arrival in the Wahgi-Chimbu fight zone at Kup in 1976, for instance, I was under no illusion that the Kumai warriors' eagerness to partake of consecrated bananas and scented water appropriate to peace, or to replace their weapons in the rafters of the men's clubhouse, was conditioned by group interests. I knew their actions were neither likely to be duplicated by the enemy Endugla nor culminate in a joint settlement (chapters 2 and 7), and I already suspected that the Kumai hoped my witnessing of their ceremonies might favourably impress the official authorities. What has become palpable, though, is that drawn-out tribal wars are very difficult to bring to a genuine closure if both sides are left to their own devices and if the sacrosanct guidelines of traditional peace-making have disintegrated. There have evolved various ad hoc or interim means of placation, however, rarely without some precedence in tradition, whereby a party can forestall outbreaks of hostilities through compensatory gifts. Compensation has become the increasingly common method for abating tension in the Papua New Guinea highlands,, where government(s) and churches have encouraged it as the civilized alternative to outright vengeance. Traditional highland compensation, as maintained earlier, was usually applied within security circles and between allied groups, but it has now been projected as one handy exemplar of compromise, indicative of the '(neo-)Melanesian Way'. It has been money, though, which has helped generate the incentive and innovative character of many contemporary transactions. Shallow or secular the pursuit of cash may seem here, money bears religious significance as a symbol of access into the new order of hope and prosperity. One of the drawbacks of the compensation model, in fact, is that a death—perhaps of a new kind brought by a car accident—may evoke cargoist-looking claims for thousands of kina in compensation, far in excess of what could reasonably be expected from {hose responsible (and from the whole support group expected to back the offenders) (e.g. PC 23 Jan. 1974: 3; 24 Feb. 1977: 3; 14 Dec. 1978: 3; TP July 1988: 8). Protracted negotiations usually bring the aggrieved party back to reality,

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and provincial government representatives have had to work at setting levels appropriate for different incidents and contexts (see Koiam 1980: 2-3; Strathern 1981: 17-19, cf. PC. 5 Oct. 1979: 2, 5; 25 Sept. 1979: 5, etc.). The ceremonial character of compensation presentations should not pass unnoticed. Banknotes (and, with far less frequency, traditional items of wealth) are normally attached to banners and borne to the mourners by a parade of unarmed warriors. In the Chimbu such a move or response has been preceded since 1979 by the procession of the corpse from its home tribal ground to that of the offenders, with its bearers thus lodging a formalized request for recompense (= bairn bodi) (OT: B. Polume 1980). In the eastern highlands, some court officials have become convinced that money held high on banners in enough quantities now genuinely satisfies for the loss of a life among the Taiora, Kamano and other neighbouring cultures, and brings issues to a close without vendetta scores constantly being tallied (OT: Vogusang 1977). Certainly, the commercial advantages accruing from a death are more likely to be seized in areas, as around Kainantu, where there is inter-tribal competition to purchase land, set up trade stores and run pay-as-you-enter singsing centres (with liquor supplied) (see below); but one must be cautious about the future. A great chasm still exists in highland societies between a consciousness which evaluates rights or wrongs in terms of the in-group's priorities and one which knows compassion, or a 'beneficent release of will' for the common good of all the humans in view (cf. Rank 1932: 80-85, cf. also 1945: 245). Some bridges of this gulf, however, are beginning to show in more 'Christianized' compensation ceremonies. In Huliland (southern highlands, Papua), for example, where the different tribes had a stronger traditional sense of being part of a wider unity than elsewhere in the highlands (Arabagali, 1985, with care), there has emerged a ritualized convention for saying sori for killings, which reflects Protestant mission influence. Sometimes supplementing, at other times quite supplanting, compensation arrangements, the manslayer is accompanied by kin to the aggrieved party's hamlet, where they visibly show their remorse for the deed, expressing emotionally how sorry they are, and how the killer acted too quickly and could not control his anger. Emphasis on being sori, and thus on a concept (let alone a word) which is foreign to virtually all Melanesian traditions, appeals to the Christian notion of granting forgiveness once genuine repentance has been made evident (OT: B. Allen 1979). In largescale Christian revival movements around Koroba (the western section of Huli country), and also among Baiyer River Kyaka Enga and western Engan groups, members of previously hostile groups have quenched the remaining heat of their differences in cathartic collective experiences— involving trembling, groaning and glossolalic phenomena en masse. The 'signs' are taken to be the Holy Spirit's new way, which entirely excludes

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the revenge patterns and sorcery of the past (as well as the new evils of gambling, drunkenness and smoking) (Matiabe 1983; Kale 1985; Teske 1983), although these promising developments were recently offset in the Baiyer River area by new fringe Melpa-Kyaka Enga fighting, and by highway assaults on the Mount Hagen-Baiyer River road. Across most of the region, war and violence are viewed as sins and tabus totally inappropriate to the new Christian order (though some denominations, such as the SDA church, are better at preventing 'backsliding' into payback syndromes than others). Clearly, the role of church leaders in condemning physical conflict is crucial for the prospects of conciliation in turbulent areas, because it is they who combine religious and pragmatic insights to convince warrior cultures that there must be 'a totally better way' of solving problems than by revenge (Kamiali 1984). To a noticeable extent, the rhetoric of these leaders—with missionaries occasionally shouting from a loudhailer between two armed bands—resonates with avowed national goals and with humanistic values imbibed at schools. This accord showed up dramatically when pupils from a local community school turned up to demonstrate at a pre-Christmas weapon-burning ceremony, staged outside the Nebilyer Police Station by the Ulga-Ugabuga alliance and the Kulga tribe (Melpa) in 1981. The pupils sported headbands branded 'love and peace to everyone', and bore the placard: We should learn better things than fighting all days [sic]. As young people of this country we feel that God has given us life and soul, so we should make use of this rather than fighting against the body as an enemy. But he is the Christ... Education is for living. fNN 31 Oct. 1981:16-17) In the great many areas where tribal fighting is an extravagance of the past, it goes without saying, the practice of peace-making has not thereby lost its raison d'etre, and it is not difficult to discover patterns of behaviour to foster group harmony that bear the marks of Christian influence, even if a local or characteristic Pacific flavour is sensed as well. Along the Papuan coast in United Church villages, for example, there is a strong tradition of making guests from distant areas welcome with joyful expressions of hospitality—in (Polynesian-style) dance, peroveta songs, and in the spread of tea and food upon plaited mats. To merit such a reception, mind you, at least one among the visitors would normally have to hold some position in the church, and be a person who could convey the promise of a reciprocal welcome in his area—should visitors pass through—and carry some official letter or message from his home place. The appearance of strangers 'without connection', such as a single unofficial New Guinean arriving in a coastal Papuan village, let us say, would more than likely produce suspicion and temporary consternation, unless the visitor could be 'placed' in the wider Christian community (and then relations would be cemented by betel-nut chewing, or, as in far eastern Papua, kava drinking).

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Where physical revenge killing is virtually unknown, of course, the problem of healing wounds created by sorcery still remains. Christian and traditional values can coalesce, interestingly, when it comes to eliciting confessions of hatred at times of crisis. In cultures as wide apart as the Papuan Motu and the Negrie-Yangoru peoples in the east Sepik hinterland, the relatives of a sick person will be quick to find out whether the sufferer has deliberately offended anyone, and thus provoked a sorcery attack (Kopi 1979: 46-52; Gesch 1985: 190-92). Thus, the patient is forced to examine the total compass of his dealings, as to which actions were right or wrong (in Christian terms loving or sinful), before he or she can be assured of getting better. If it is some breakdown in relationships which the patient recognizes, this often leads the concerned kin to locate the likely sorcerer (or his sponsor), thus challenging him to a confession or to refrain from ill-intent. At the village level, significantly, resolving tensions in such a way is now widely accepted as a part of Christian living, and it is common for the local pastor to be called in to combine prayer with the quest for the accepted non-physical basis of certain diseases (OTs: e.g. Maddox, Kopi 1982 on the Motu). In and around towns the tensions which arise when total foreigners find themselves so close in the same neighbourhood, and when marital life begins to fray in the absence of supportive relatives, call for relief which it is hard for churches and government alike to provide. In these areas expatriate missionaries still generally predominate as crucial go-betweens, though few have been like Father Gui Cloutier in actually residing in the squatter settlements where the problems are greatest. In Taraka West (Lae), Father Gui found the most basic task of the family welfare meetings, women's sewing groups, and so forth, he organized to be the slow dissipation of suspicion—of highland fear towards Madang sorcery and Tolai sophistication, or of coastal worry over the threat of highland sanguma (Cloutier on ABC 27 Sept. 1982). Dr James Ferguson, foundation director of Lifeline and a one-time resident of Morata settlement, handled comparable problems (OT: 1985). Such work seems endless, though obviously crucial for an urban peace. In Lae and other New Guinea towns, we find impressive attempts to use the principles of forgiveness and constructive work opportunities rather than punitive measures for raskol youth offenders. In recent years Lutheran pastor Emasangke Munuap, for one, supervised youths on a section of Melahang Plantation in a non-oppressive project to impress the value of work (W 10 Oct. 1981: 5), and in Wewak Father W. Liebert set up a 'Boys Town' project (OT: 1985). In 1982 Papua New Guinea's Deputy Chief Justice Kapi remitted the gaol sentences of Unggai (Asaro) gang members into good behaviour bonds, after they gave themselves up to the police at Goroka. The justice took his cue from rascal surrender placards which

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pleaded convincingly: 'forgive us for all our wrong doings', and also from the newly formed Eastern Highlands Provincial Rehabilitation Committee, which felt there was 'a place for forgiveness . . . in a Christian country', and an obligation on society's part to give these youths 'a chance to try something more creative' (Giddings 1982:2a; 1982b: 5, cf. PC 22 April 1982). In more recent years highland gang members have given themselves up, arms included, with the promise of rewards (Giddings 1986b; 1987 [p.xx]). The more idealistic hopes of Christian pastoral workers to get across some message of 'complete change'—or a 'movement of the whole self as the theologian John Henry Newman put it—often gets tempered by official realism, or the view that people only concede when their interests are met. When it comes to 'peace-making' with troublemakers and 'criminal elements', in any case, especially in the cities, there is bound to be some conflict over strategies. These have certainly arisen in Papua New Guinea between official law enforcers who wish to make sure that individual lawbreakers are brought to justice, and a newer, increasingly experienced breed of 'negotiators' and social analysts who maintain that whole gangs should be shown how to redirect their energies for good en bloc, and be allowed by the police to remain more or less intact during those processes of transference they may have been persuaded to accept (esp. Houghton 1985). During the 1985 State of Emergency in Port Moresby, however, declared after a high incidence of pack rapes, gang rampages and gaol breakouts, it was seen how little the softer, temporizing approaches counted in the heat of the day. The Emergency controller, Commissioner David Tasion, organized a massive search-and-enter programme, involving dawn raids on squatter settlements, even with army reinforcements. Counter-productive detentions of innocent people, violations of rights and the confiscation of legally acquired goods were some of the unfortunate side-effects (Trompf and Peutalo 1985, cf. PC 1 and 2 July 1985; 12 Aug. 1985:3; NN 2 July 1985:3; 20 July 1985: 3; TP 23 June 1985: 44). This heavy-handed approach, however, was widely accepted as an effective crime deterrent, at least in the short term. A most unfortunate consequence of the 1985 State of Emergency was that community-spirited, less punitive attempts to handle 'rascalism' which were already under way were placed in jeopardy. On the eve of the Emergency, for instance, community leaders at Morata settlement led a compensatory march to the University of Papua New Guinea, organized to return stolen money, present food of contrition and general peace, and to confess wrongs (tok sori), after a pack rape and subsequent clashes between Morata gangs and university security men brought tensions between the two communities to a high pitch (see plate 10). The university responded by providing Morata's biggest gang with the constructive, paid job of establishing a nature reserve, but only to find that the Emergency removed the immunity of reforming youths in the project by making it easier for them to be found and questioned (Trompf and Martin, fieldnotes 1985).

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Morata settlers organizing compensation and tok sori to the University of Papua New Guinea in 1985. The chairman of the village court is at the left and Tapei Martin, former leader of Goipex 105 gang, is second from the right. The branch with banknotes attached (centre) is a money tree, a feature of such compensation marches, (photo: Niugini Nius)

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In bringing social peace in a situation of increasing criminality, then, particularly among disaffected youth, Papua New Guineans are pressed to heed two competing strategies: on the one hand, the punitive policy of stamping out crime by investigation and search, arrest, sentencing and imprisonment (cf. plate 11); and on the other, the concern for a restructuring of relations by more hospitable negotiations and, thus, for longer-term solutions. In both, perhaps, we see two perennial naiveties; on the one side, the questionable supposition that the effective punishment of offenders will bring an eventual amelioration of social problems; and on the other, the belief that one can carry on sensitive negotiations without the official executors of punishment (and also sensationalizing media agencies) getting in the way (cf. Fattah 1989). In both we also discover something of the perpetuation of state-church differences from colonial times: in the one case the police's application of a 'heavy hand' so reminiscent of kiapery, and on the other the (informed) Christian tone of 'caring' and of the concern to avoid brutalization. Elsewhere this tension is more muted (for example, Vanuatu), or is one-sidedly in favour of direct police action (for example, in un-decolonized New Caledonia). And if all these trends provide any index to modernity, and also secularization, one best finds it in the rather impersonal operations of government instrumentalities, which are supposedly effective means of securing social redress but which bypass potentialities found in smaller community and spiritually oriented units.

A cartoonist's satirical view of police attempts to contain urban violence in Port Moresby in 1978. (PNG Post-Courier)

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Compensation, for its part, is now apt to be transformed into an agenda of business and politics in those areas affected by urbanism or industry. The trouble with paying compensation for land alienation—to the Koiari clan traditionally owning Port Moresby's Sirinumu Dam, let us say—is that later generations can become dissatisfied with what they alleged to be inadequate pay-offs to their forebears. The Bougainville rebellion, indeed, originated from second-generation Nasioi with precisely those dissatisfactions, with a feeling of despair about their recently polluted arable land. Early compensatory claims are for money and, thus, the community's better bisnis; unmet claims can result in sabotage. At Port Vila unmet claims brought on a national crisis in Vanuatu's very capital. A very weighty claim opposition leader Barak Sope felt he had for taking the reins of government from Prime Minister Walter Lini in 1988, one must realize, was that Sope's people owned the land on which Vila has emerged (OT: Chambers 1989). His claims failed, and (along with Vanuatu's president who supported him), he was temporarily gaoled for sedition (SMH 23 Dec. 1988: 8); but his people's sores still fester. 'Monetarizing' and 'modernizing' primal exchange patterns Money systems have 'the structure of religion' as one neo-Freudian philosopher has aptly put it (Brown 1959: 240). Thus, associations of sacredness and mystery surrounding traditional currencies—as tokens of prestige and life's energies, as objects which have the extraordinary power to effect important changes in human affairs over and above truck in kind—not unexpectedly cling to modern money. Few Melanesians have seen coinage and banknotes manufactured, and thus the source of these remains as mysterious to many as the origin of the kina shells did to landlocked Papua New Guinea highlanders; and money, an innovation brought by the whites, is susceptible to being enshrouded with the aura and magic of expatriate power. Far from being treated cynically as dross, money is a main gateway in the 'road bilong Cargo', and has rapidly overtaken all other competing species as the symbolic miniature of the new prosperity and of getting things done. We must examine first its consequences for traditional exchange patterns, however, to see whether modern money brings in its wake qualitative and not merely quantitative differences to socioeconomic existence in the villages. There is no better field of inquiry to return to here than to the impressive ceremonies of reciprocity in the highlands, where many traditional forms have so far been preserved intact, yet where one can plot changes now taking place under the influence of the developing money economy. The rapidity of modification to ceremonial life appears to be as easily related causally to the increased circulation of money as it can be to the

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deflection away from traditional beliefs toward Christianity. In fact, money has probably wrought more changes than religion in the whole complex of positive reciprocity, since missionaries tended to leave alone the activities of traditional trade, brideprice payments and post-mortem distributions of wealth as 'worthy' (if not 'secular') aspects of culture, once it was clear that acts of ancestor or spirit worship were minimized. To sharpen our perspective, one could examine shifts at work among the Kamano, in the eastern highlands, between 1965 and 1975. The Kamano lie close to the arterial route that takes cash crops down the Highlands Highway to the coast, and money has quickly gained increased significance for them. In the late 1960s, it was contended, 'money just supplemented the real payments of traditional wealth', with a man's respect in the community being secured 'according to the number of pigs he owned' (Brown 1969: 62). And such a generalization applied to most highland regions of the New Guinea island at the time. On surveying Kamano country in the early 1970s, one discovered phenomena betokening the ever-increasing attractiveness of the newer exchange items of money and beer, especially the common erection of money-making singsing grounds. As distinct from presentations of wealth at marriages, or for alliance negotiations, or in acts of compensation, visitors from outside tribes would pay at the one (heavily monitored!) entrance of a circular dance floor, walled in by a continuous shelter of bush materials. With earnings from cash crops, the host tribe (or its aspiring representatives) would have bought liquor and paid off the dancers in advance, but now the rationale behind the dance and song shifted to entertainment, and an exercise of profitable bisnis useful in years when coffee prices slumped (SDF 1970-71; Trompf fieldnotes 1973-80). The fad virtually died in the late 1970s, admittedly, owing to brawls and financial squandering, but the impetus it gave to liquor consumption was fundamental in establishing beer as the new competitor to pigs, with claims to be the most prized exchange item in kind. Liquor generated a new fashion of reciprocity, the pati (party), which was only sometimes occasioned by traditional pretexts, but above all revealed the rural dwellers' somewhat ritualistic imitation of urban and whiteman's patterns and their naive embracing of the exciting 'new order'. From declining bisnis bilong singsing, also, there later came the incentive for harder-headed individualist entrepreneurs to manage small liquor outlets or 'clubs', the kind of enterprise which now is hardly confined to the Kamano, but rampantly popular throughout most of Papua New Guinea. What of the bigger demonstrations of reciprocity, such as the Wahgi Kongar or the Engan Tel Away from roads and towns they have barely felt the effects of the money economy, but near them a breaking of the seams is evident. A trade store businessman may send money rather than pigs along the line of the Te exchange; in a rich Wahgi area which has migrant

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tenants, there will be pressure by the tenants to buy their way into the Kongar through the money they have earned from land not traditionally theirs. In the Kulaga tribal area, to illustrate, a Kongar ceremony held early in 1977 did not arise out of the usual network of pig exchanges between sub-clans or clans, for pigs were killed only if they were already paid for in cash by clan contributors and by Chimbu immigrants now living on Kulaga land (Weymouth, pers. comm. 22 March 1977). Elsewhere in the Wahgi Valley and certainly in the Chimbu, the intricacies of reciprocities leading up to the great ceremonies are still kept resilient through the cumulative effect of social pressure, and it is arguable that the Chimbu and the Mendi show an interest in cash-cropping only as a means of taking up 'the slack existing in rural production at a low point in the pig cycle', for, they usually neglect coffee plots if festival-related work and obligations are pressing (Brookfield 1973: 127-35, cf. Lederman 1983a for the Mendi). But money is now definitely a supplementary part of the great highland exchange systems, and there is a point of view (which I found best articulated by the weather-worn coastal Lutheran evangelists watching on the sidelines), that expense and inflation will eventually catch up on these culminating ceremonial events, with the younger, school-educated generation being less and less likely to 'invest' their money in splendid acts of group generosity if they become unsure other groups will perpetuate them, and if they are not convinced these ceremonies contribute to national or provincial 'development' (OT: Biten 1976, cf. Trompf 1978: 126). Most Protestant church leaders actually prefer the big festivals to subside as the last, albeit magnificent, expressions of old religions; while Catholics look to the time when the festivals, though hopefully persisting, receive a change of meaning (as a kind of Christmas). What will happen on the religious side is difficult to predict, for revivalist mentalites may take their course right across the highlands. As for economics, it is clearly wrong to conclude that the great ceremonies cannot occur without several years of onerous preparation and thus without serious competition against rural modernization projects. In fact, research has shown how the Mendi, Chimbu and Wahgi peoples can 'build their herds up rapidly' and readily maintain them at relatively high levels for long periods (Hide 1974; Lederman 1983: 8), so highlanders seem capable of combining custom with diverse participation in the new 'mixed capitalist' system in the future. One should hardly neglect another variable which can affect traditional reciprocities at all levels—alcohol. Unexpected violent consequences of drunkenness in a non-individualistic society can suddenly take on widespread repercussions (especially in situations, like the Kongar, where different groups mass together). Where liquor intrudes into minor reciprocities— as a means of patching up breakdowns between exogamously related families, for instance, or between families of people involved in car

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accidents—it can bring more harm than help, and only add to pre-existing 'distance' between tribal identities (cf. Reay 1982: 171). Beer after the effort at reconciliation we reported earlier (chapter 3), for example, only brought the aggrieved parties to blows in the night, after a successful evening's sharing of pork. The last case is symptomatic of the extent to which beer has intruded into the web of (already adapting) 'neo-traditional' reciprocities in less isolated rural areas. Take the culmination of a recent prestation by a father to maternal and affinal relations in honour of his five-year-old son among the Chuave. It consisted of an untraditional pile of beer cartons and cigarette packets placed in the centre of the men's clubhouse, together with a series of competitive games to be played during the drinking. The pork distribution, as of old, was a matter for daylight; the pati, with its protracted preliminaries as to how the beer should be divided, and the 'punishing' games, in which chosen competitors have to down huge quantities of salt pork or drink up three small bottles of beer in a great hurry, were very much nocturnal affairs. Thus, much excitement attaches to the party's exchange element, the human interaction it involves, and (considering certain reminiscences of European drinking party behaviour) its touch of entree into the new world (Warry 1982:84-90). Over in Irian Jaya, admittedly, most cultures remain virtually unaffected by this kind of development, Islam and Protestant puritanism working against its possibility (OT: van Baal 1984); but quick reflection on Papua New Guinea highlands beer consumption (over Kl million being spent on alcohol in and around Goroka in 1978), and on adverse reactions to liquor restrictions (given the large 1980 Chimbu demonstration), shows what marked social changes and unpredictabilities are associated with drinking bouts on the eastern side of the border (PC 4 Dec. 1978; NN 15 Nov. 1980; Hatch 1982; Piau-Lynch 1982). Rejections of this high level of liquor consumption are naturally to be found, and alternative exchange procedures posited which favour money out of the two new media. Around Goroka, indeed, women have been so disturbed by male misuse of strong drink as to establish their own alternative system of reciprocity (called wok meri). From the Siane in the Chuave area (where the movement started ca. 1960) through to hamlets on the upper Bena River (northwest of Goroka), groups of as many as thirty-five women come together to pool money they earn from selling vegetables, coffee or their own labour. One such group conducts initiations for another, with the 'mother group' mimicking the giving away of a bride at a marriage, while by far the biggest ritual takes place in front of a Western-looking grandstand, at which the different groups from a wide area come together to celebrate each club's savings. At this event all the wealth acquired is duly displayed, and loans are then transacted through an open 'bank' which even enables borrowers to purchase Public Motor Vehicles (PMVs) for

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business purposes. Male wastage of money through strong drink is often bemoaned, and sometimes demonstrated against publicly, the only concession to alcohol's use being made at funerals. The foundation of this new system of reciprocity, as might be expected, was religious. It grew out of a milieu of Lutheran women's groups, in which two widows are said to have prayed to God for sustenance, and another woman, sick of men misspending the earnings from her labour as a coffee picker, pleaded to God that money she put under a hearth stone would increase. A cross-cultural women's movement resulted (Sexton 1980; 1982). And in this movement, significantly, money is paramount. If in the past one could not eat one's own pigs at the highland festival, however, or marry someone from one's own people, in wok meri one does not spend one's own money at the great gatherings, but draws from a pool of it. In another context related to women, money now sits very prominently side by side with traditional valuables in brideprice transactions of the Papua New Guinea highlands, with officials often on hand to ensure that statutory limits are not passed and an inflationary spiral set in train (Salisbury 1962: 27-28, 96; Trompf fieldnotes 1973-80). (Elsewhere in the country, incidentally, roadforging to an isolated area can quickly take brideprices beyond reasonable bounds, payments in the Wassisi area of the west Sepik, for instance, skyrocketing from K5 to K250 in a matter of a year, as in 1976, for this very reason [van Hees 1979: 86-88; and his OT: 1978]). Beer cartons as part of the bridepayment is quite uncharacteristic in the highlands; its appearance usually comes with the nocturnal celebration after the actual marriage ceremony, and is shared mainly between male guests and the bridegroom, who is not expected to go to bed with his bride on such occasions. If there are signs of female opposition to drink, Melanesian rural women have nonetheless built up as much a reputation for being notorious gamblers as men. Card playing for (relatively small) stakes, in fact, has become a widely accepted means of circulating money between different families within hamlets or villages. The coins used tend to go around and around in a closed system (thus explaining why so many coins over twenty years old were brought in bags to Papua New Guinea at the time of the currency changeover in 1975 (PC 19 April 1975). An egalitarianism can be detected here, women of families having a greater access to a supply of money from outside sources frequently being challenged by wives who have only their Vernacular economic base' but are adept at the games. Among the Roro and the Mekeo (coastal Papua), I have seen these women's games continue deep into the night; on the less used highland roads around Goroka after a successful coffee season, one is just as likely to be held up by a crowd surrounding a card game in the very middle of the carriageway, those (of either sex) who have made little from the season risking some of their earnings to better their lot. Religious dimensions to such gaming

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have already been noted (Trompf 1988b: 226-27, cf. Sexton 1987; Rubinstein 1987 for comparable Melanesian materials, and also Huizinga 1949; Fuller 1974 for relevant non-Melanesian materials). They are also there in the invention of new card games, like laki and las kat ('last card'), which are played in the villages within a ritualized pattern and sequence. In gambling one obvious fascination concerns luck' (which to most is not luck at all, but entails the workings of the spirit realm). Recent adjustments to traditional reciprocity, it will now be obvious, have a great deal to do with religious issues and ritual situations, a connection confirmed by the symbolic significance endowed upon the new exchange media of money, beer or even cards, as tokens of prestige and more-than-ordinary power befitting the 'new time'. If Western-style commodities, such as axe-heads or tinned meat, once played a limited role as media of exchange, money came to prove its supremacy over these and the traditional currencies alike—as the light and easy-to-handle key to the everwidening horizon of markets. Beer, as a changer of consciousness, and as an item to which blacks have only relatively recently gained access from the whites, still holds its own as a still newer exchange medium, yet with a much more uncertain future. The impact and modifying effects of these recent means of exchange, however, vary from context to context, often in proportion to the length or extent of contact, and it is not possible to affirm that they disturb every aspect of a given culture's reciprocity in a uniform way. Funerals, for instance, constitute one part of a cultural repertoire which is less likely to entail prestations of modern money as against traditional currency, kind and property (Trompf fieldnotes 1971-85; Chowning 1983). Among the more traditionally minded Tolai, to be sure, it is at a death when the sacred tambu proves its resilience, because if a sufficient amount of this shell money has been collected by the deceased it will persuade those to whom it is distributed that he has attained to a comfortable place in the spirit world. When a Loniu woman (from Manus) dies in childbirth or of childbearing age, to take another example, her widower is expected to send all the items of wealth they possessed together back to her parents, although money need not be included (and I have seen a young public servant living in a house noticeably denuded of stereogram, refrigerator, and so on, under such conditions). To use the degree of acceptance of the new exchange media as an index to relative secularization, moreover, is rather hazardous if these media can be so often surrounded with the aura of new spiritual paua. Among the Wahgi, for instance, there is a new development whereby an elderly man's relatives will put on a pati—for which large quantities of beer are bought by his nearest kin—before the man's death. This is a new fashion so that he can enjoy the celebration (including his family's acclaimed generosity and partial discharge of debts) while he is still alive,

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but it is misguided to interpret this as a plain piece of 'this-worldliness' when the old person's happiness is meant to be carried with him to the other side of death (OT: Tongil 1980). That these new exchange media have engendered more misery than social benefits, further, is hard to assess when their usage adds colour to cultures now deprived of military excitation and provides some means of levelling inequities or satisfying current wants on the village floor (yet cf. de Romafia 1989: 80-96). In and around urban areas, however, these new media put serious strains on old norms. Most urban dwellers hail from villages and feel pressurized to fulfil traditional obligations back there. A town labourer may be expected to send (or bring) part of his earnings back to his family or in-laws, for example (indeed this has been a long-standing rural understanding about the benefits of temporarily losing village manpower to the far-off labour market), but inflation and delayed wage adjustments can easily catch up to the man who earns only K105 per fortnight and is then expected to pay K20 'for the armshells to the family of (his) bride' each pay-day (WN 25 May 1979: 6). As for bigger wage-earners in towns, they will often find a small line of needy wantoks at the house on pay-day, claiming 'a cut' as part of ongoing transactions in the village, or expressing dependence on the well-established earner to help them survive in the city (on the understanding that their village kin back home will make good any debts). One must remember that the 'wantok system' though, as it is called in Papua New Guinea, and comparable systems elsewhere, such as Fiji's Matagali, can bring people in towns who speak the same language into new networks of reciprocity which do not correspond with situations back in the local area. People from traditionally hostile groupings, indeed, can discover their mutual dependence on each other in an urban or foreign setting, sinking hidebound differences by acknowledging their common tongue and special needs in a totally 'alien' environment (Stevenson 1979; D. Shaw 1981; Kajumba 1983; Kajumba and Sukwianomb [forthcoming]). When it comes to traditional activities in the city, however, such as dancing at an Agricultural Show, these new concessions often drop away. Meanwhile tribes with readier access to towns, money and the new goods find even their traditional allies applying extraordinary pressure to effect very expensive transactions. Motuan brideprices in and near Port Moresby, for example, have risen so high that a groom's clan sometimes has to find resources for an Isuzu truck full of bags of rice, along with thousands of kina. The willingness to pay such a price is often spiritualized in Christian terms as a great act of self-giving for the person one loves (OT: Guilliam 1977), yet one of the side-effects to this sort of inflation, which appertains more but not exclusively to the urban situation, is the decrease of marriages within linguistic groupings, so to preserve a distance from the constant round of transactions and so circumvent tradition (Parratt 1971 for background).

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The temptation is naturally increasing for the town dweller or successful money-maker, moreover, to bring his family's economic life a good measure of independence from the equalizing effects of village and rural reciprocity networks. The attractions of consumer goods—from cars to refrigerators— which are marketed in expatriate-owned stores as the ideal appurtenances for nuclear family life, result in personal ownership of many items which set the lucky possessors wider apart from relatives and others in the village, and which are not readily injected into micro-patterns of exchange (funerals usually excepted). A worried Stephen Tago, once Papua New Guinea's minister for Domestic Affairs, complained that the creation of a new 'economic elite' or 'national bourgeoisie', the members of which were often set on 'putting high fences' for protection around their houses, and 'getting richer' while 'the poor are relatively poorer', indicated that so-called modernization could amount to the backward step of being 'sucked into tempting affluence and consumerism', rather than a deepening of 'human fulfilment' (PNG 1979: 6-9). Despite such a recognition in the national corridors of power that reciprocity is a welfare system, however, and of precious ethico-religious value; despite the ease with which the drive to fulfil obligations can be wedded with Christian notions of responsibility towards others; despite the constant reminder among the young educated elite that they must somehow meet the collective hopes pinned on them back in the village (and discover the key to the new wealth for the benefit of the home community); despite the special checks against permanent private property which sometimes apply (a Motuan nephew, for instance, being able to take whatever he wishes—a radio, watch, et cetera—from the house of his paternal uncle) (OTs: Kidu 1975; Kopi 1982); in fact, despite all the pressures to perpetuate archaic reciprocations, the prospect remains that older social values underlying economic interchange will be slowly, yet steadily eroded by the individual pursuit of cash and commodity, the relative nuclearization of the family, and the disengagement from both traditional and Christian demands for selflessness, especially in urban quarters. The expatriate nuclear family model, celebrated in modern (largely imported) mass media, provides an image for the new elite's increasingly modernized future. In towns, further, there are other, new styles of circulating wealth throughout the complex community—such as Papua New Guinea's lotteries Win Moni and Laki (cf. W 10 Oct. 1981: 3), and for that matter taxation, now borne by wage-earning nationals along with expatriates (Jinks 1967 for background)—but these are superficial in their claims to a sense of social obligation. As secular addenda outside organically developed reciprocations, the former phenomena have tended to become part of the tinsel and excitement of mass, more impersonal economic life, and the other seen as the result of an officialdom which expatriate acquaintances assert is well worth trying to circumvent. With all its multitudinous

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transactions, in fact, the modern town has virtually nothing economically within itself to replace the spiritual comforts which inhere to the familiar circuits of wealth transference, let alone the collective effervescence of the great prestations known to traditional Melanesia. During the 1980s, moreover, economic disruptions in the region (such as the closure of Bougainville's copper mine, and decreases of overseas aid) give even the wealthier Melanesians a sense of hardship and discontent in the midst of nontraditional affluence (cf. Lafitte 1993, cf. Linden 1979 for background issues). Up to half the populations of most towns, however, are people who have come from the countryside and try to make sense of urban and nationallevel complexities in terms of village paradigms. With the interests of their wantoks ingenuously in mind, and their own opportunities for prestige among them, they can end up in gaol for what they did not fully realize was the illicit handling of money. One young man I interviewed in the Goroka prison, for instance, claimed he took an open bag of money from the back of a mail truck outside the town's post office (in 1977) because he 'liked the colour of it'. Taking it back to Liorofa (see chapter 5), he walked up the village's main piazza scattering the money to the right and left. In so benefiting his people he immediately acquired inordinate prestige—before being caught. Another extraordinary case in point comes from a Port Moresby squatter settlement, at Six Mile, on the very outskirts of the city, opposite a rubbish dump. There, from 1977 to 1985, a Koko(da) man Miki Simoga perpetrated a money-making fraud among the Fuyughe squatters (of both Six Mile and Morata), with a minimum of scruple. Both unemployed and confined to a wheelchair, and thus on two accounts unable to be physically productive, he was drawn in by a Reader's Digest scheme for making money. The scheme was entitled 'A$ 100.00 A Month For Life', and one learnt about it by receiving a passbook with instructions. A Reader's Digest salesperson made sure Miki's name was printed on it, and on page 1 of the sample book it read in computerized letters: You and you alone have been sent the Giveaway Numbers enclosed which give you six chances to win $100.00 a month for life. Simoga was quick to interest the many impoverished residents around him, and over eight years received over K5000. Among those making payments were Fuyughe women like Terupe Minaru of Six Mile, who scrimped and saved K260 for the purpose, and Kilum Kerau of Morata, who got together K100 while bringing up a large, struggling family. They all trusted Simoga to be regularly sending money south to Australia to earn interest, so that much larger sums—'prizes' or confirmations of a fixed income of K100 per month—would be sent. As a veritable siphon, however, Simoga sent only some sums in the mail while keeping many others for his own purposes.

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Apart from the less certain business of waiting on unknown sources from a long way off, at any rate, he had something else in mind: consuming the money and passing it on to his wantoks to keep himself alive and acquire clout as a successful entrepreneur. It was a case of kaikai moni (eating money, as theft), and when the time came to be caught, it was astounding how bland and unremorseful were his confessions about his technique to 'work money' (Trompf fieldnotes 1985). Even in modern politics something of the same transferences from tribal thought patterning to the new parliamentary settings is going on, considering that most members are from largely rural electorates. If bargaining for coalitions and party alliances reflects it, so-called 'corruption' certainly does. Politicians are forever concerned to consolidate prestige among their own people, the hard-core of their own electorates, back home. When Papua New Guinea's one-time minister for Commerce and Industry, Opai Kanangl, a Wahgi from the Kuma tribe, diverted funds earmarked for a highlands development project into the bank account of his two wives, we see so starkly how, ex-Lutheran seminarian and hospital social worker though the man may have been, the call to be a prestigious bigman and to dominate the reciprocities of his home-base can remain the paramount goal of higher level politics (OTs: Kanangl 1973-1977; Kilage 1983, cf. his 1983a; 1983b). But then, the settling down of foreign-initiated institutions has slowly produced the practice of deal-making to suit party and thus super-tribal needs. Political parties congeal around the prospect that, should their protagonists be successful in procuring sufficient seats in the legislature, immense benefits of power (and profit) would accrue to the participants of this common (ostensibly national) cause. As the stormy Iambakey Okuk was once moved to remark, while organizing a challenge to the Somare government in its first phase: 'This is not killing pigs—it's Europeanstyle politics' (NT 25 Nov. 1978: 36). This only states half the truth; for, Melanesian politics is a complex mixture of old and new impetuses. In Papua New Guinea, certainly, one also has to expect 'threats by politicians of murder and mayhem' if their electorates are badly done by or their pet schemes thwarted (as top journalist Frank Senge has written to suggest some New Year resolutions [for PC 1 Jan. 1991]). In some areas election supporters are only too willing to riot and loot to get their way (e.g. SMH 10 April 1991: 11). That goes to indicate how easily playing the 'mixed game' of modern politics, and experiencing the working of muchgreater-than-traditional authority, the reciprocal side of action can be quickly flipped to its negative face. Politicians, esspecially ministers, are granted immense responsibility—that can be misused through arrant partisanship.

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Loyalty to 'the State' is a concept which takes time to grow, and while it is growing the sanctions of the State's laws are imperfect; many people break them with no profound sense of guilt, and endure their punishments with no deep (Wraith and Simpkins 1963:184) feelings of stigma. How speeedily lack of value-integration lends itself to 'naive corruption'— especially to that large 'gift-giving' for services that is 'part of PNG political culture' (Namaliu in A 30 March 1991)—and then to the general Venality' of the elite (Lafitte 1993). On it can go to 'the crimes of the powerful' and thus to an inequitable system in which cunning, covert criminality and structural violence are less well checked at the top, whereas cargo cultists, rascals and rebels, whose desperate acts are perhaps more understandable, and more symptomatic of socio-political mismanagement, are punished in gaol as deviants (Pearce 1976). Only a persistent concern for justice among the powerful themselves—as when former deputy prime minister of Papua New Guinea Ted Diro was charged with eighty-one counts of corruption (SMH 19 Oct. 1991: 22)—can make a difference to this worrying process. New sacrifice, new communio Any discussion of the modifications and deterioration of traditional Melanesian reciprocities cannot avoid considering Christianity's role in shaping attitudes toward giving, the exchange of economic resources and the discharging of social obligations. It has already been suggested that Christian stances toward deep-rooted reciprocities have been decidedly more accepting than towards the negative payback of revenge killing, sorcery and other forms of recrimination. But this acceptance has not been without ambivalences (varying yet again according to the areas and denominations concerned). On the one hand, it is palpable that traditional values of group loyalty, of unresented sharing, relative egalitarianism, generosity and hospitality provide fertile ground to implant the principles of highly supportive Christian communities. Such principles, drawn from the examples of mutual aid and communalism found in the New Testament koinonia (e.g. Acts 2:43-47, 4:32-35), are all clearly actualizable in a Melanesia which still retains so many socio-religious parallels with the Biblical world (Schroeder 1973; McGregor 1974), and in ways virtually unachievable by most local churches in the pluralist, materialist West. On the other hand, the Christians, both indigenous and expatriate, have rarely allowed cartes blanches to traditional reciprocity systems, as if they required no change. They have preferred to see ceremonial exchange or prestations thoroughly disengaged from the sacred objects and oblations in the old religions. Even the

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Catholic orders, certainly the most tolerant of mission agencies toward such traditional ceremonies, expect of Catholic participants that the activities be blessed by a priest, so that before the grand pig-kill festivities of the Chimbu and Wahgi, for instance, mass is said on the singsing ground for those wanting it, and in many of these grounds large crosses have been planted—to signal the new Recipient of worship when whole clan majorities recognize themselves to be Christian (Trompf 1975d: 9). Over many other scores, moreover, Christian pressures have curbed or altered the traditional forms of reciprocation, sometimes not just opposing specific components, such as transactions to take more than one wife, but also (especially in the case of conservative Protestant missions) insisting on a life of separation from the old contaminations, thereby sometimes fostering extremist forms of pious, untarnished individualism vis-a-vis traditional group loyalties (cf. chapter 7). Where, then, are we to place Christianity in the context of the modernization of non-violent, ostensibly well-intentioned payback in Melanesia? Space allows only general answers, which can best be oriented around two issues vital for positive reciprocity: sacrifice and community. Sacrifices, offerings and ritual scruples to please spiritual powers, as we have seen in chapter 2, constitute a concessive, repairing side to Melanesian traditions (even though also often a device to gain the upper hand against enemies). But pre-Christian sacrifices, from the offering of human victims to the reserving of food for spirit visitors, have steadily been eliminated, with churches rising instead of dubu houses and the masses and communions within them replacing archaic blood rites. Not that the traditional religions lack die-hard features in this respect. Sacrificial and worshipful actions to please the dead—the cleaning of cemeteries, the customary act of leaving some food out for the departed (as among the Trobrianders or Orokaiva), the quiet leaving of gifts (such as cigarettes) at grave-sites and special nocturnal requests in cemeteries (as persisting with Motu and Aroma-Velerupu (Trompf fieldnotes 1972, 1974)—amply prove resilience here. There is also some accommodation of such a concern for the departed in Christianity—liturgically for the Catholics (masses for the dead) and Biblically for the Protestants (Heb. 12: 1 at least on the saints). But Christian leaders can become suspicious that the church can be 'used' as the offshoot of an ancestor cult, so that some stalwart believers (among Chimbu Lutherans, for instance) insist that there should be Christian cemeteries separate from traditionalist ones to avoid a false mixture (Tomasetti 1976: 33-50, yet cf. Nilles 1977). Where the greater ceremonies of exchange and prestige-building generosity still more or less take their course, the performance of rituals on behalf, and in placation of the ancestors usually remains side-by-side with Christianity. It is interesting that the continuance of these ceremonies, though now losing all association with old deities, can become a forum

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of healthy dialogue between tradition and evangelistic zealots who would prefer to see such ritual occasions done away with altogether. Among the Atzera in the Morobe plains, to illustrate, huge quantities of bananas and yams were strung up along the side of a tripodal framework, a gracious festive bestowal of a host tribe to visiting groups within a macro-complex of such reciprocities. The Lutheran missionary resident in the 1950s feared compromising himself by being present at such events, which were put on in part for the ancestors' pleasure. When a delegation of participants offered him pork butchered for one such kras, however, insisting that it was no different from the pig meat he was happy to partake at other times, and arguing that their ceremonial generosity acted out the sermons about love and fellowship he had been preaching all along, the missionary succumbed (OT: Ison 1977). What, though, is distinctive about Christian attitudes towards giving to the 'spirit order' in any case? Above all, surely, that individual and group lives should be dedicated to the one God (a point shared with Islam, though developed in orthodox Christianity along Trinitarian lines). It is expected of Christians that those objects of their old worship, which would distract them from the giving up of their lives to the one Lord, should be relinquished. Public ceremonies have sometimes been organized for this. Highland clans have been asked to give up their sacred stones, and to deposit them in a specially dug hole or pile ready for a 'ceremonial' smashing on the part of the missionary and clan leaders, an event marking a conversion-point (OT: Spycher 1977 on the Swiss Brethren, and see chapter 9 on Catholic evidence, cf. White 1991: 201 for Anglicans on Santa Isabel). The maintenance of this gift of human existence to God tends to focus on the church service. It is crucial to realize—with differences between Catholic and Protestant, 'high' and 'low' liturgical forms accounted for— how relatively wnritualistic Christian worship services are. There is singing, but people stand or sit and very rarely dance and move about (except in those independent churches or pentecostalist congregations where spontaneous movement is an accepted response of praise). There is a consecration, presentation and partaking of bread and wine (at least in the mainline, most influential churches), but although Catholics may acknowledge the mass as a sacrifice (the term being used twice in the Divine Office), there is certainly no slaughtering of animals typical of primal religions, and Protestant leaders are likely to labour the point that no other sacrifice is now necessary, since Christ's death has more than sufficiently paid the price expected of all pre-Christian sacrifices (cf. Heb. 10:5-26), and that the only sacrifice necessary is one of dedicated (including generous!) service to God (cf. Rom. 12:1). A church service may be followed by a murnu, food being cooked for the congregation to mark a special occasion in the church calendar, for example (with the animal usually being slaughtered some

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distance off!), but with food only rarely distributed and eaten within the church building. Certainly, there are very many expressions of traditional (or neo-traditional) culture—in dance, self-decoration, feasting, general body movement, even sporting or special events—within the context of church life, but they generally stop short outside the church entrance itself. There is a capacity for the church service to continue its hold, admittedly, while it is still considered part of the new styles brought by the expatriate newcomers, but it is predominantly an occasion of the non-traditional 'Sunday best', Western-influenced architecture (if not seating arrangements), and of reproduced litanies from Western churches barely affected by indigenous Melanesian ways of responding to the divine. Some iconographic developments certainly counter this general impression (Aerts 1984), yet one often detects a relative lack of excitation in giving one's all, including one's physically energetic totality, to God, and a tapering off of interest in church attendances in various well established mission areas (Taruna 1981). The actual abandonment of blood rites in human societies is, upon reflection, a momentous and revolutionary step, but one problematic resultant, and that experienced by most churches in Melanesia, is the limitation put upon 'radical drama', especially the spectacle of dramatic violence, and thus a relative quashing of colourfulness. In Catholic circles the vernacularization of the mass has exacerbated the problem, even if the aura of magic Melanesians placed on unintelligible Latin invocations was also a cause for worry. In their own way cargo cultists have tried to recapture the colour and mystique of the past (with sacrificial destruction, church altars being used to multiply money, and so forth), but the concern to re-inject vitality, drama, spontaneity and colour back into worship is most noticeable in recent charismatic and spiritistic phenomena (J. Barr 1983a; 1983b for the rural scene; K. Barr 1983 for urban developments, and Tippett 1967:233-47 for background). Though often expatriateinspired and theologically narrow, the enthusiasm of pentecostaliststyle worship services—even just the impact of raising one's arms (and symbolically one's whole being) to God in the air—has become increasingly magnetic. In these so-called 'Holy Spirit movements' mass gatherings experience tanim bel (pidgin: 'turning at the stomach' = 'whole conversion'), along with phenomena interpreted as the reception of the Holy Spirit (esp. J. Barr 1983c). Sometimes, their number engage in the drama of a new physically oriented enterprise (such as with the building of a stage-by-stage system of open-air temple courtyards up a mountainside, by the Kyaka Enga of Baiyer River, an exercise specifically designed to follow steps of spiritual sacrifice or purification enjoined by the Bible) (Cramb and Kolo 1983). These signs for the need of emotionally charged collective worship recall the black African situation (Sundkler 1948: 187-220; Hollenweger 1972: 111-75).

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Worship, on the other hand, is only one element in the compound of Christian giving, and insofar as missions and churches, especially longerestablished ones, have come to terms with socioeconomic dimensions, we must assess their more mundane engagement in reciprocities. For obvious first consideration, and as bridge between 'worship and the world', are the concrete acts of giving in the day-to-day life of the church that are expressed in the Offering, to which congregations contribute during worship. As one would expect in a Third World context, however, most Sunday services yield little but coins, and it is now customary for mainline churches (who do not tithe like the Adventists) to organize annual days or special 'drives' to build up their financial resources. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the yearly Bobo ceremony of the United Church, involving Papuan coastal congregations on either side of Port Moresby during August, and held in an open space ringed by makeshift shelters. Since the congregations represent different villages, cultural groupings and some suburbs, the element of competition is strong. Prestige accrues to the congregation making the greatest contribution, large sums of money being conducted by decorated dancers, and under bright banners to identify each group, to the official dais. The funds collected are then apportioned for clergy salaries and special projects throughout the church's central (formerly Papuan) region. There is a special Bobo for Hanuabada (the 'big village' nestling close to Port Moresby city), in which clans compete with extraordinary intensity to raise the highest sum. With the increasing numbers of Motuan public servants and wage-earners between 1965 and 1992, significantly, the total offerings to the church rose from A£9000 to K259 300, a testimony to the way the traditional quest for prestige-through-generosity and an act of appreciation and dedication toward the church have been impressively combined (Trompf fieldnotes 1975; OT: Gadiki 1975). The Bobo does not stand alone; there are other such annual occasions of charity—the Tolai Wartaba (Great Thanksgiving) among the Methodist (now United Church) congregations being of comparative magnitude (OT: Tokilala 1973-75)— and more research is needed to show how these ceremonies replaced or supplemented cycles of inter-tribal liberality in longer contacted cultures. It would have to be admitted that these collections, though impressive acts of sacrificial giving (Gregory 1981:627), turn out to be very locally oriented. At a national level there is still heavy dependence on overseas generosities to make up for the failure to pool resources more truly (UCN 1982: 1, 4, and see Peutalo 1987 for the Catholic scene). It would not be out of place here to comment on the rather poorly studied historical connections between the emergent churches of Melanesia and traditional trade linkages (the LMS, for instance, using the Motu-Gulf Hiri link to expand their work, Brown et al. 1974: 8-10, cf. chapter 2). The church connection laid the basis of expanding coastal trade, which became

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progressively safer and without incidences of raiding. In time (between the wars), money collections organized by church or religiously inspired leaders centred on the purchase of vessels as sizeable as those used along the coast by the missions (Brown 1956: 201-20; Maher 1961: 66). With the common motorization of small-scale water traffic after the last war, too, it was widely expected of local LMS pastors—the 'petty kings' of Papuan villages, and often outstanding seamen—that they captain canoes and foster trade, along with social and spiritual liaisons, between coastal communities (OTs: e.g. Pat 1972; Apa 1973; La'a 1974). That Christianity was linked in local perceptions with 'the new trade'—as the history of the well-known Anglican vessel The Southern Cross in Solomonese and Vanuatuan waters will testify (Hilliard 1978:21,34-40,250-51), or that of Lutheran Shipping Lines along New Guinea coastal routes (Reitz 1975: 16-18)—was a fitting extension of the virtual inseparability between traditional religion and reciprocity. This inseparability, however, has made for certain problems of adjustment. For all the distinctions which missionaries and locals made between 'good' and 'bad' traders in their areas, the fact that a great deal of the 'new trade' involved new commodities almost inevitably made for a 'cargo''religion' connection, and the association between Christianity and widening economic horizons reinforced the link (chapter 4). Another problem was the very competitive element hanging over from pre-contact tribalism, which we reported as affecting the Bobo (cf. also Parratt 1975: 182). Only in recent years has money been successfully raised for ecumenical churches, such as the 'Church of Reconciliation' (between Catholics and Liebenzell Lutherans) in the centre of Manus (OT: Pokawin 1981), or the new worship centre at the University of Papua New Guinea (UTW 14 Aug. 1987). Since churches and clergy have been mentioned, it is well to note the intertwining of Christian giving and characteristically Melanesian reciprocity in connection with church land and personnel. Some missions purchased or received land which lay between warring tribes or was considered to be inhabited by dangerous spirit powers, but in most cases they put down stations on apparently unproductive acreage. Once missionary technology made a difference (by reclaiming swampland for pastorage, for instance), a local grouping could consider the newcomers to inhabit their land and thus came to expect more exchange and labour opportunities (Momis 1975; Ulufa'afu 1979: 13-19, cf. PC 8 June 1972; 3 July 1973: 3,17 June 1977: 16, etc.). Once the resident clergy are indigenous, other related factors may come into play. The Papuan family of newly appointed United Church minister or pastor, for example, is likely to rise dramatically in status, and be the focus of an increasing amount of food exchange. This at the very least involves churchmen economically, even if debates are ongoing between advocates of otherworldliness and those who assert that Christianity also

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concerns 'the important aspects of physical needs' (Pokana 1981: 21). With the ordination of nationals as Catholic priests in the Wahgi Valley of the New Guinea highlands, to develop another point, the ceremony has been partly redesigned to locate such special persons and their role in the network of reciprocities. When Mark Worn became the second Wahgi appointee to Fatima Mission near Banz in 1976, his coming to the station (on land traditionally claimed by the Komblo and Zagaga tribes) was treated as the reception of a bride (being given away by Mark's [sub-]tribe, the Takepkanem). The two former tribes bought a cow and slaughtered it, offering it to the Takepkanem in exchange for Mark, an unmarried man who would be mainly working and living on Komblo and Zagaga land. This was an unprecedented arrangement, spontaneously generated by the tribes concerned to accommodate the special situation. On the day of the ordination itself, the Takepkanem brought in Mark to the grounds of the church, a decorated, plumed warrior among a flock of other warriors, with drums resounding. At a later point he disappeared to put on a white cassock—such a difference!—and lay prostrate before the (European) bishops of Mount Hagen and Mendi (cf. CL 1976; n.d.). Whatever interest and promise may lie in all these meeting-points between purveyors of Christianity and bearers of specific cultures, however, one must remember that many of the former, particularly those educated in seminaries and certainly expatriate missionaries, will not consider their work is being effective unless it inculcates attitudes which supersede clan or tribal mentalities. Communio, the second theme of this sub-section, implies the arrival of a new kind of community, not just a rite, though with Christian worship being the potent symbol of a wider social transformation. In most village churches, admittedly, the outsider might consider it strange that adults or the two sexes worship with a degree of separation, females on the left and males on the right side of the church. But both, and children included, are welcome to be there; Christianity is no male cult forbidden to the uninitiated with the threat of a death penalty (cf. chapter 1). It carries with it high standards and the development of conscience concerning childrearing, husband and wife relations, and the mentally handicapped and infirm, the lonely and the aged. It requires that, because God himself shows no partiality between humans (cf. Acts 10:34), all people as 'brothers' and 'sisters' can now sindaun gut (to use the pidgin expression for peace) in a spirit of amity, not recrimination. The uses of the lingue franche by the churches are vital in this general connection, for these transcultural vehicles are not simply secular data but barrier-breaking, humanizing instruments commensurate with Christian preaching about the basic equality of humanity under God. The pidgin Nupela Testamen—'the best seller of the South Pacific' which had the 40 000 copies of its first edition sold within a few months—corroborates this view (Mihalic 1971: xvi).

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The idea of a Christian society, however, is already in itself at odds with the fossilization of traditional cultures. It will be destructive of select particularist practices, deemed as some are to be inimical to the common good. In the twentieth century there is also borne along with Christian expansionism both the belief that no specific culture is inviolable to the judgements of God (as found in the Bible or church tradition) and the assumption that particular cultures can only benefit from an increasing contact with other cultures and the wider world. T. S. Eliot, for one, has teased this assumption into a theory by arguing that significant cultures are in any case amalgams of individual cultures—'British' to use his frame, not just 'English' or 'Welsh' (1948: 50-66). The search for what is generally 'Papua New Guinean', then, or 'Melanesian', has not surprisingly been an activity of Christian reflectors, who have consciously assumed that the outside catalyst has already come to modify specific traditions for the better (esp. Narokobi 1975; 1983). Collisions between Christianity and indigenous traditions are thus inevitable, and sometimes the superficial affinities between the two in terms of reciprocity, generosity, hospitality, and the like, are not enough to prevent them. In certain cases complex reciprocations are based on a caste-looking or unjust social system. We have already seen how cargoist Irakau was influenced enough by Christian (and other non-traditional) notions that he tried to undermine Manam Island's rigid tanepoa aristocracy (chapter 4). Other related examples can be cited. Significantly, it is the 'rubbish people', or those families lacking any status in the Melpa intricacy of transactions making up the Moka (chapter 2), who have shown the most willingness to embrace Christianity—as a road from dispossession to dignity (Strathern 1976: 6-7). Yet, despite the ever-deepening effects of Christianity, and the inordinate (sometimes abused) amount of power in church leaders' hands at the village level, it is very difficult to characterize Christianity as 'old Melanesia's' unmitigated disintegrator. Apart from disregarding how the great majority of Melanesians welcomed radical culturoreligious change, this view simply misses the point that Christianity's coming was interlocked with Western cultural expansionism in general. Missionaries might be accused of clothing people who were in a 'natural state', and 'never sought to hide their private parts from the eyes of the world' (Lesson, in Whittaker et al. 1975: 228), yet clothes were on the way in any case, bringing the strange, seemingly irrevocable side-effect of civilization that 'man becomes more drab, his dress more plain, his ornamentation reduced' (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1971: 227). Western missionaries might have brought the 'Anglo-Saxon doctrine of work' along with the Gospel (and Charles Abel's Mission, for one, can be accused of separating young people from their families to learn quite foreign technical skills, as well as Christian teachings, at the Kwato island station [Buluna

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n.d; Kaniku 1977b]), but it is manifestly a work mentality and technical knowledge which are now expected of town dwellers and constitute the best guarantee of a secure urban livelihood. Comparably, the greater uniformity of exchanges surrounding money, the building of shops (with rather too much sameness across the region when compared to the varied styles of traditional architecture!), and so forth, have undermined local colour as signs of more than specifically Christian change. And the towns, products of politico-economic forces more powerful than those in church hands, bring in train the momentous transition 'from individualized group to anonymous community' (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1971:11), or from tribes, which Christians consider too narrow for the good life, to cities, where Christians themselves can discover their neophyte communiones at risk in the melee of modernization's many 'bastard children'. In all this we are not to forget the appeals in much preaching to individual sacrifices as commitment, and the vital roles played by significant Melanesians who dedicated themselves to the new way. At times this self-giving has been translated into the notion of a 'new warriorhood'—of soldier-like 'obedience' in the 'offensive' against evil, and 'concentration' on 'objectives'—an approach reflected strongly by the Salvation Army (cf. Ephes. 6:10-17 and see Wilson 1967). In West Papua (Irian Jaya), indeed, there has grown up in some quarters a Christianoriented acceptance of martyrdom for the Melanesian cause against the allegedly genocidal policy of Indonesia, expressed anew during the 1984 border crisis when hundreds of refugees uttered their willingness to die at the hands of black brothers rather than return to an unliberated homeland (OTs: Frendo, Hall, Smith, Wilson 1984-85; Smith 1990: 193-214; 1991; yet cf. Hayward 1980, for another picture—of the Dani). In the main, however, the warrior paradigm among the consolidating churches of the whole Melanesian region is subdued, and even in new religious movements there has been little appeal to the war-abetting, fearsome Deity of the Old Testament venting his wrath on the intruders (as found, by comparison, in Maori movements [Elsmore 1985: 71-78, 158-68]). Portrayals of God as Judge and requiter of sins are certainly common, yet the preached antitype to warriorhood is faithful service and the exemplification of love in Christian work or the Church. There has also been recurrent proclaiming of God's gift of his Son, his sacrifice on the cross, and occasional recognition of the requital motif in the New Testament—that Christ 'gave himself as a payment for us to free us from all wickedness' (Titus 2:14). Even so, any characteristically Melanesian ways of working out of various payback themes in contextual or regional theologies, or at least ways which break out of hackneyed 'Bible-struck' discourse about atonement and shed blood, have only just begun to meld (cf. Richardson 1974; Young 1986: 19-21; Trompf 1987a).

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The acknowledgement of individual services impels one to ask whether there has been a macro-process in Melanesia from a so-called 'shame/ honour culture' (in which subscribing to group expectations is paramount) to a 'guilt culture' in which individuals respond to their own interior stirrings about the rightness or wrongness of their doings (see Benedict 1946: 222-32; Daube 1982, Malina 1981, cf. Brennan 1970). One wonders, too, whether Protestants are more advanced in developing the latter 'culture', since Protestant teaching sets comparably more store on individual interpretation and conscience and on inward contrition (cf. Weber 1963: 153-56; Burridge 1979: 219). To distinguish shame from guilt in each traditional culture, however, requires more refined hermeneutical skills than researchers have given to this task, so that an over-view of developments from 'the traditional' to 'the Christian' or 'modern' will be incomplete without such prior hack-work. Perhaps indigenous Melanesian literature, however, will slowly give us a better 'feel' for the issues here (cf., e.g., Kituai 1976; Baital 1976). A deeper analysis will help explain forms of self-inflicted payback, such as voluntary exile, acts of masochism or suicide (cf., e.g., Argyle and Beit-Hallalmi 1975: 99 for background). Conversely, one needs exploration of that paradox in Christian culture by which the awareness of guilt is heightened in converts only to be removed as a burden by the message of salvation (Trompf 1988a: 220-23; Lattas 1992: 50).l The general logic and individual psychology of these processes can be fairly easily explored (Fowler 1984), but the sociology of them in Melanesia defies plotting as yet. Bisnis na Wok ('Business and Work') Colonialism has meant that Melanesians have come late to the roles of proprietors and businessmen. Blacks seemed destined only for the drudgery of physical labour, if and when they were persuaded out of their villages for the pittance of a wage, or unless, as in Fiji, land laws turned them into landlords over peasant immigrants from Asia (cf. France 1969: 165-75; Anderson 1974). It was Asian groups actually—the Chinese, Vietnamese and, before long, Fiji's Indians—who first dominated the world of trade stores; while whites, for the most part, monopolized government administration, plantations and bigger business concerns (Neilson 1979; Amarshi et al. 1979: 58-59; Mayer 1967: 49-50; Fitzpatrick 1980; Winkler 1982: 23-30, etc.). It is precisely because Melanesians were outside the sphere of 1

Lattas's use of Foucault (1982) to say that 'Christianity with its notions of the Fall, of original sin, has always introduced divisions into the self, however, reflects an unfortunately all too common over-simplification of Christianity (a very complex phenomenon!) and a curious disregard for the self-dividing characteristics and structural parallels with Christian themes found in traditional religions themselves.

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'acquiring the new currency by selling the new commodities' that the frustration which breeds cargo cults festered, and missionaries were often the first to experience the effects of the resulting altercations. In relying on varying amounts of trade themselves (at the very least in giving matches, tools, lamps, and so on, in exchange for food), the latter could appear as counterfeit friends of the locals for not disclosing the secret of the Cargo. Even in establishing church-funded chains of stores to bring more foreign commodities to the people and thus more employment opportunities (in organizations such as the Lutheran NAMASEU and United Church SPAN), Christian denominations have not avoided similar criticisms or satisfied the thirst for economic independence (Lubett 1975, cf. Davidson 1982). Against this background, then, for a Melanesian to be in bisnis is to have begun actualizing what cargo cultists could only dream about. It is not my concern here to develop earlier discussions about the paying back, or even sabotaging of foreign business operations, or about the increase in black business-ownership as a means of 'getting even' with the expatriates (chapter 7, cf. Okuk in PC 2 Nov. 1981:13). At this point positive reciprocity is the issue at hand, and one key point to contemplate here is the experiment with bisnis as perpetuating the perennial Melanesian concern for prosperity, a concern only deceptively secular because it involves 'right relations' with the ancestors. Cargo cultists have tried business as one possibility (and one 'ritual') which may unlock the door to the kind of abundance that should flow from perfected reciprocations between the relevant human and spiritual agencies of the cosmos (cf. Harding and Lawrence 1971; Allen 1976b: 151-54; Gesch 1985: 133-36; 1990: 227-28). More generally local bisnis can betoken 'blessing' and group prestige. Coastal Cooperative Societies between the wars were often surrounded by an aura of religious ideals and hopes (many of these societies being initiated by missionaries in any case) (e.g. Jojoga 1983, cf. Snowden 1982), while in the postwar highlands bisnis appeared as a side-show (fads of cash cropping, trade stores and liquor outlets succeeding one another in cycles) to supplement the enduring concern for pig-killing festivals and shifting alliances (OT: B. Kaman 1980; Lederman 1983). Melanesian businesses are rarely the assets of single individuals. Although registered in the one or few names providing the initial capital, they are hedged around by 'wantokism', and this (along with failure to keep records) is the chief reason why so many locally owned enterprises have quickly collapsed (Mannan 1976: 6-11). Rather than 'rationalistically ploughing back' some of the profits into the business (cf. Weber 1958), sums earned have been typically drained away by relatives, who expect business proprietors) to discharge their ongoing, traditional obligations in either money or new commodities on their shelves. Common failures for these reasons between 1950 and 1970, however, were later offset in select areas

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by the growing number of lineage-, clan- (sometimes even tribally) owned ventures during the 1980s, the wantok seepage being better contained (even if there were more funds to be mishandled by the greedy) (OT: von Fleckenstein 1973-77). During the whole process some interesting innovations, or 'clubs of reciprocity', took shape. Take the village Drinking Groups springing up among the Hube in 1968. Each 'club' member in turn had a chance to buy thirty to forty cartons of beer and sell them to the others at a profit, with the understanding that each would set aside his savings for some later enterprise. This was what one might describe as a 'sub-religious' support group, or one of 'moral bonding', which arose from the common need twelve or so Hube men had for each other while struggling to make ends meet in Lae (Kaiku 1978: 7, cf. also Lienhardt 1975: 213 for the concepts). The strikingly conservative properties of local systems of reciprocity means that there are severe checks on economic individualism (genuinely independent capitalists being rare), along with competition between subsistence activity and non-traditional projects in the countryside. The 'bigmen in business' in and around Goroka, such as the well-known Sinake Giregire, have mixed 'the modern and the traditional' because their success as coffee growers, bus service owners, and so forth, has brought such prestige with it that, 'in the style of a traditional big-man', they can: recruit workers from among clansmen who by this time had become followers ... without having to pay regular wages [but rather] offering them... leadership and reciprocal gifts instead. (Finney 1973:99) An economic vulnerability lies here with the uncertainty as to the future of the business once the bigman has died, lost incentive, or lost the confidence of the villagers (who do not tolerate too much success). Perhaps there is strength in an operation possessing roots in tradition and in the familiar mould of bigman management, but it will forever have to contend with the breakdown of tradition and with more people wanting to get their 'cut of the proceeds' (e.g. Anderson and Connolly 1989). Businesses are more likely to succeed, we can see, when their operators are at a distance from their kin. Even state-run cooperatives, such as the one for copra marketing which started so well in Vanuatu (GV 1980a: 146-55), or the fresh fruit and vegetable outlet operated by the Central Provincial Government of Papua New Guinea (1976-83), too easily fall into hard times—because of the ways competing political-cum-group interests produce mismanagement. There may be Melanesian millionaires (nine in Papua New Guinea by 1984), but capitalism hardly grows readily in a world of time-inured solidarities. Local rural enterprises are always at the mercy of international pricing, in any case, and larger black businesses usually have limited market horizons to explore unless relying on

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non-indigenous 'middlemen' (cf. Rodman and Counts 1982, cf. Cowen 1981). The economics of 'squander' tends to pertain at all levels: villagers with large sums will spend it all in festivities, political bigmen will often outlay many gifts of money and drink to secure electoral support, while the temptation for those with business or political debts is to log patrimonial land—often illegally—to raise quick, interest-free capital (cf. also Beier 1978a). Even apparent idealists can be caught in this pattern. Professor John Waiko, for example, who lectured in the Ethics of Development at the University of Papua New Guinea, and published important papers on forest protection (e.g. 1981), organized for his kinsfolk's raw forest timber to be felled, using reimbursements by the Japanese to meet some of his pressing needs in the political arena (TP 12 Oct. 1989: 3).2 What we find as the dominant socioeconomic pattern throughout Melanesia is Vernacular' welfare systems (cf. de Romafia 1989: 89-91), informed by both traditional and Christian values. This has established the 'principle of permanence', that of local and inter-tribal reciprocity, which allows the region's peoples to be comparatively well fed and sheltered, so long as political disturbances do not relocate large masses of the population, or 'neotechnic' activity replace 'palaeotechnic' treatment of the land to the point of seriously impairing ecosystems (Clarke 1977: 372, 383). This principle implies underlying ethico-religious assumptions. These are most strongly traditional, because concerned with the preservation of local resources, but also largely befriended by Christianity (especially insofar as it has emphasized spiritual rather than economic goals, and not so much because ecological theologies have been framed, cf. Trompf 1991: 270; 1992b). The principle is forever vulnerable to the general pressure to make money and secure commodities, and to secular business interests, especially those of big investors. On occasions, as with the logging under Mount Giluwe (southern highlands Papua New Guinea), an outside concern can cunningly exploit the local people's own frames of reference by organizing prayers before work, and by claiming that their firm is a Christian one doing God's work!3 In general, though, can we say that modern business, commerce and industry are vehicles for the secularization of positive reciprocity, especially considering their rapid growth in towns? First, let us concede how difficult it is to determine if le don and la donnee are ever secularized, for 'the gift' 2

3

Astoundingly, this did not prevent him from being elected to the Papua New Guinea parliament in 1992! See also Owen 1991. Here I foreshadow a film expose produced by R. Hershey. A propos secular interests, there is also prior expropriation of land by colonizers, which can also make this 'permanent principle' very hard to apply (as on New Caledonia). A propos religion and business, there is also always the danger of genuinely exploiting people's sense of service in Christian operations (as with tithing).

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and 'that which is given' paradoxically, are intrinsically moral in their actualizations even though they may sometimes be offered grudgingly or out of some manipulative intention. The implications of giving, moreover, are always determined by context, and simply to be in the position of a donor may be a religious experience for some, just as the element of surprise and relief in being a receiver, even of some anticipated exchange settlement or pay cheque, may drench one in an exhilarating sense of well-being and lead one to sense the goodness of God or the tumbunas (Trompf 1980b: 1-2). One can justifiably speak of the secularization of reciprocity, however, in connection with the nuclearization of gain and generosity within narrower and narrower confines, away from the group, let us say, towards the Western-style family unit (of parents and children). So far, religion has hardly left even Melanesia's most bustling cities alone—with village obligations still being felt by town dwellers, urban churches being foci of the elite or 'middle class', church buildings erected 'without authority' by squatters seeking respectability (Norwood 1983: 89-90), and with many town activities, from the blessing of ships (e.g. W 10 Oct. 1981: 3) to thanking God for winning of sporting competitions (e.g. TP 6 Nov. 1981: 31), from the fear of sorcery to the solemnities of funerals, all blurring the presence of secularizing effects. But effects there are, and business, integrally linked with monetization, is a crucial agent of them. Even a village's involvement in a venture in its own environs can bring subtle yet important changes to traditional social relations. After four villages of the West Maringe district of Santa Isabel (in the Solomons) bought Holokama Plantation from expatriate ownership in 1973, for example, tabus surrounding in-law relationships in these matrilineal societies began to break down, son-in-law and mother-in-law sometimes being 'assigned to the same work detail on the plantation' (Whiteman 1982: 29). It was as labourers on plantations as much as anywhere, that Wahgi warriors in highland New Guinea were forced to break the tabu of not eating from the same cooking vessels as one's traditional enemies, for men from various tribes found themselves working for money together (Reay 1987: 84). These are cases of moral readjustment, however, rather than of secularization. But it is definitely more in the towns, or on the larger development (and resettlement) projects that the latter is more evident. In its expatriate garbs business affects most Melanesians by enticing them into an exchange of labour for wages, not one of the familiar, archaic equivalences known in the village. This is not to conclude that the selling of one's labour, or the alienation which derives from not seeing the fruit of one's work while in the service of bosses and machines, is the same as secularization; for, it is within the potentiality of alienation to breed religious hope (Fischer and Marek 1970: 15-17). But secularization is foreshadowed, and has already begun to be realized, through the image

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of business success provided by expatriate models. It is when Melanesians adopt these same models for themselves, rejecting old reciprocities for profits, taking a more impersonal, if not exploitative stance towards the labour they secure, that they have enfranchised secularization. For then they have begun to lose the meaning of ancestral obligations, let alone of new counsels to dedicate their lives to God, their fellows, and the vision of a Christian community, and thus embrace the orientation of a largely unconstrained self-interest now so prevalent in the modernized West (cf. esp. Rand 1961: 88-94, 117-58). Government bisnis is not to be forgotten here. In Melanesia it has been of special importance as a source of funds, with international grants-inaid behind it, and thus with the reception of the greatest gifts of all in 'the modern sector' (cf., e.g., A. Wilkinson 1976; Anere 1985). To the extent that aid in an unequal world is gratuitous, it is the realization of cargo cult, carrying with it, though, the expectation that the donor can count on the alliance and continuing reciprocations of the recipient (cf., e.g., Momis in SMH 14 Oct. 1988: 7). The gratuitousness of the Earth's riches, too, with Lihir and Porgera gold booms and oil near Lake Kutubu, comes like 'Gods of Cargo' (cf. SMH 21 Oct. 1991: 25; A 11 Nov. 1991: 23), mediated by government negotiations with foreign investors. Politics, we remember, entails an ethos in which a political economy can flourish or wither. In Melanesia capitalism (at least in a 'mixed' form) (cf., e.g., Clunies-Ross and Langmore 1973) has been tacitly welcomed by all governments; communism, despite the plethora of socialist-looking rural cultures (Himata 1985), has been loudly opposed in most parts of the region (see Noga in TP 7 Dec. 1989: 20 for a typical response in Papua New Guinea, cf. Robertson 1971). Sometimes communism has been opposed out of blatant self-interest; Highland politician Iambakey Okuk's vitriol, for instance, had a lot to do with his own landholdings, including a huge slice of the Port Moresby suburb of Gerehu (perhaps the British Commonwealth's largest suburban complex). In the main, however, conservative (especially Catholic) Christianity is the strongest force against it, even in such a place as New Caledonia, where there is more justice in evoking communism as a goal of perfect reciprocations (Qaeze 1987: 188-89). Government and private enterprise both bring work, and wages and cash payments in consequence. It is time to consider work as payback, and to ask whether work according to fixed hours and prearranged specializations carries either religious or secular values. One naturally begins by trying to compare 'traditional' and 'modern or Western' approaches to work. Lawrence once contrasted attitudes to 'Work and Reward' in 'Native and European Society' by maintaining that economics has been 'largely desacralized' in the Western world, while in traditional Melanesia work is the fulfilment of social obligations which must include a whole variety

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of distinctly religious activities, such as 'dancing and mourning' (1964b: 31). In pre-contact and pre-modern situations, human labour was not paid for in set instalments of currencies or valuables, with more earned by skilled workers and in accordance with fixed portions of time. Reward in traditional Melanesian societies, further, was not 'understood as individual material advancement' but benefits 'accruing to one's group and personal relationships' (p. 31). Unlike much factory and group work in the modern societies, besides, Melanesians value 'face-to-faceness' in the transactions for which they work, so that actually to give the products of their labour from their very own hands is vital for a sense of worthwhileness, of being identified with a 'line' of givers, and for the constant working out of equivalences (pp. 27-32). Work (or even simply 'activity') sessions which lack these socializing ingredients can soon lose attraction. When work has to be done, in many bureaucratic and office-bound quarters for no other apparent reason than because it is the 'work assigned', then the 'religious vitality' or 'more-thanmundane' sense of purpose inhering to action will dissipate (cf. also Burce 1983; Buck 1989). The integration of religion and economics comes to suffer from the subterfuges of alienation (cf. Kovesi 1969; Mandel and Novack 1973), and whatever little has been heard of Christian ideas about vocation, or about humans being co-creators with God (John Paul II 1981; Soella and Cloyes 1984, cf. Smith 1990) does not square with the drudgery or lack of 'completeness' at the workface. Employment in a commodity-oriented society, even a notion of full employment, can come to look bleak beside 'useful unemployment' back in the village or 'on the loose' in town (Illich 1978; cf. Ellul 1980). The individual can lose virtually all motivation to work other than for the procurement of the pay cheque. Compounding tedium and lack of interest is not seeing the fact or the fruits of one's labour at one's own hands. Even slashing with others in the Queensland canefields has its attractions over being reduced to a link in a chain of production, or a fragment in an interplay of forces. Initially in the Melanesian experience, perhaps, employment in a factory or new industry can amount to a numinous experience. In the long-run, in the protractedness of the 'slog' entailed, the incipient heaven can become a small hell of bad labour conditions, wages apparently ill-matched to the amount of one's physical labour, a common chasm opening between bossy management and disenchanted employees, and some uneasiness between labourers who are not from homogeneous ethnic groups. If a worker is not among the lucky ones to find liberation in the world of set tasks, or to form new friendships with fellow workers, one of the few threads left to link personal existence back to the spirit world is the fortnightly phenomenon of the pay-packet. The arrival or notification of this item carries that element of 'surprise' about it, being received with

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a sense of effervescent well-being or sudden relief suggestive of primal religious experience (Trompf 1980b: 2-5, cf. also TP 18 Nov. 1983: 30). Money, actually, is so replete with possible significance—in being both the dream of cargo cultists and the last consolation of disillusioned labourers, and in being the very epitome of modern magic-working and modern reciprocity—that we are bound to look to it as the means of summarizing payback in the contemporary Melanesian scene. As our usage of the money metaphor has already indicated, we shall look at both sides of the coin, and thus draw together themes from both these chapters so far in Part III, then moving on to modernity's modifications of retributive logics in their reflective mode.

CHAPTER 9

Money, Morals, Meaning: Old Logics, New Retributions?

In this, the last formal chapter, we test money as an index to modernity and to changing interrelationships between negative and positive reciprocities, before completing our analyses of the logic of retribution as explanation. Money as a payback medium: with special reference to Papua New Guinea Considered as neutral specie, quite 'clean of itself money is the 'most abstract and "impersonal" element that exists in human life' (thus Weber 1946: 331, cf. Marx [1857-58] 1973: 225). As abstraction, though, money is capable of being divinized and mythologized, on the one hand, and held up as the supreme symbol of secularity and this-worldly success, on the other. In Melanesia, on the one side, traditional currencies were never unendowed with some sacred character of association, and usage of them encompassed much more than 'plain' economics. When the new medium of exchange was infused into subsistence economics, it was bound to carry with it sacred qualities, partly transferred from old notions about currencies and partly arising from the whole miraculous overtone of the 'white phenomenon' (cf., e.g., Schwimmer 1973: 105-07). On the other side, while in the village setting local people might string holed coins together like shell money in prestations, display banknotes instead of kina shells in bridepayments, or tie notes to a branch as a money tree in compensation marches (see plate 10), we find that in the heat of the newer business transactions of a supra-local and largely urban kind, money becomes quickly detached into a mundane or profane sphere of its own. Constant and monotonous use transforms it into a 'mere thing' or convenience, thus 410

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being significant more for what it links than what it is als Solches. In this surreptitiously neutral guise it plays the role of potent secularizes It is the perfect replacement, actually, of magic; for, through it achievements are made which appear miraculous and supernatural but they are really done quite un-miraculously and without spiritual intervention (Trompf 1980b: 2). When one comes to realize, however, that it is not a god which has brought off these transactions, but universally accepted 'tokens' and 'abstractions of real commodities', then the processes of demystification have set in. The primal and archaic give way to the distinctly modern. What is fascinating about Melanesia, of course, is that the polarity of attitudes toward money is expressed there in such extremes. The cargo cultist, before all others, has endowed money with religious value, as a product of the spirit order. Fairly recently, when hundreds of villagers at Bambaip in the Simbai district of Madang were found trying to make their own one kina coins, this was not in their eyes a plain act of forgery, under the direction of the cult leader 'Mamma Dokta' Josephine (chapter 4), but a ritual act to bring prosperity to the movement (OT: Plutta 1980, cf. TP 23 June 1985: 5). At the other extreme, a certain species of hard-headed expatriates in the Melanesian region have left the impression that their ultimate goal in life is to make money, and plenty of it. Prima facie there could be no more extraordinary set of opposites in the one geographic matrix; yet, then again the two poles bear some extraordinary similarities, each camp the misted mirror image of the other, and both types are cargoist in a broad sense. Certainly, both reveal how money can become either so important as to become a key symbol of religious aspirations or so important as to become the perfect substitute for religion, or God qua Mammon. Most significantly, money is the catalyst for a universal payback system (paradoxically more universal than any particular religion, for nations negotiate more readily with their different currencies than their varying religious 'denominations'!). Now the money system can be viewed in terms of debits and credits, costs and benefits, losses and gains, deficits and profits, shortfall and surplus. It can be regarded, in abstraction from whatever feelings and personal judgements there may be about it, as a technical apparatus to be 'worked' effectively or otherwise. One can put savings in a bank and earn interest, buy shares and reap dividends, keep up superannuation payments and collect a fortnightly salary in retirement. The 'pay-back' in the system consists in the effects of following certain procedures properly. Outlaying enough capital, buying at the right price, keeping overheads down, avoiding costly labour-intensive programmes, ploughing back a sufficient amount of the profits into a business, and so on; these are all actions with money which have their consequences in a system which 'pays' or exacts—or requites.

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Many perceptive people there will be, however, who will be quick to point out that the system is rarely handled as a theoretical construct in social reality. The money system has become enmeshed in the interplay of ideas and feelings about the requirements and meanings of human activity. Thus, money's uses become readily absorbed into the endemic ethically oriented retributive thinking we have been analysing throughout this book. In the West, for instance, it can become a virtue to save or a sin to waste. A plethora of books about business have advised the necessity of hard-headedness and an embracing of 'healthy competition' along with the classic virtues of honesty, truthfulness and just dealings. The outcome of one's handling of money, indeed, can become an important index to the way individuals are summed up 'character-wise' by others—as having 'made it' or not in the game of life (Fromm 1955: 111-30), even though there are strong detractors of this trend. Western society is also 'acquisitive' (Tawney 1921), known in history for its hoarded treasures, and for the making and saving of money to acquire more and more things (e.g., Taylor 1975; Leiss 1976). Melanesian societies are not known for these proclivities. Take acquisitiveness for a start. The Tolai male certainly needed to accumulate a sufficient (and huge) amount of sacred tambu shells to die well (ToVaninara 1979). In transitional phases of economic history, too, there have been local rushes on particular new-style goods, which have been stored as 'capital' in premonetarized situations (as among the Moi, Irian Jaya, when in the 1950s men acquired status rapidly for possessing large quantities of clothes) (Kamma 1970), or else the stowing of money by clans at home in those isolated places where banks are not available or trusted (as among the Mendi in the southern highlands, during the 1960s) (Stock 1965: 9). But, generally, Melanesian economies are renowned for the very temporary nature of their personal acquisition—goods (so often perishables in any case) being quite speedily distributed, and virtue being perceived in an ordering of affairs which allows broad access to available resources. This is why, as argued earlier, Melanesia's materialism is not naturally capitalistic. As to the various uses to which money can be put, they are as many and varied in Melanesia as anywhere. Considering the intrusions of Western business mentalities along with indigenous social pressures, one might as well list some important possibilities of action with money (for socioreligious or 'total', not narrowly economic, analysis) (yet cf. Gregory 1982). 1 2 3 4

Acquire (and make more of it). Keep (and save more of it). Buy (or purchase commodities or things with it). Invest (and reinvest it with a view to making more of it at some time in the future).

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Draw (interest and dividends as a result of investing it). Compete (for it against others wanting it as much as you). Withhold (it when other people are expecting it to be released). Redirect (it along lines different than those which other people are expecting it to pass). Give (it qua gift to another [or others for sharing as in 11]). Pay (bills, etc., or pay out salaries for labour, pay back or return it for debts [cf. 13]). Share (by distribution to a group of recipients). Achieve (something significant, or get something extraordinary done because of the availability of it). Borrow (it from others, whether for larger ventures, fulfilment obligations, or even just to survive [perhaps without 10 being possible]). Bargain (with it to persuade someone to sell or relinquish what you want). Bribe (another with it to achieve or avoid something). Embezzle (it from others for one's own or fellows' purposes). Steal (it from others for one's own or fellows' purposes). Forge (it to make more of it [as in 1]). Lose (it in theft, disaster [such as fire], folly or misplacement).

All these actions are interpretable according to context and, thus, variably. Broadly speaking, the value-orientation of Western business places positive value on actions 1-8 as prerequisites for successful entrepreneurship; but by most traditional (and neo-traditional) Melanesian standards most or all of the actions 1-8 could be called into serious question if economic individualism is being cultivated, and an individual's enactment of any of them could be interpreted as negative payback (though 6 or 8 might be readily acceptable if they entail another cultural group's power, influence or project being checked). Actions 9-11, while someone competing in the Western business milieu may consider them as inevitable, even as edifying components of economic life, can easily be treated as liabilities to entrepreneurship, because money which could be used elsewhere (especially for 1-4) has to be paid out for other purposes. On traditional Melanesian bases of evaluation, however, 9 and 11 would be top priorities within a primary group or security circle. In Papua New Guinea they have been extolled politically as an insurance policy for the future (answering the Western businessman's concern for 4), because the indebtedness created by one's generosities requires others to service you and match your graciousness in the future (the Melanesian equivalent of 10), including the time in your old age when you lack productivity and need care and reward for previous labour (Olewale 1973). In the cases of both value orientations, of course, the nature of responses is very much going to depend on the extent to which types of actions are

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carried out, and also on the tone, quality and temperament carried with them by the enactor(s) (in the eyes of others or interpreters). To illustrate this simply, poor men (as in the history of Morata squatter settlement, Port Moresby) have gone so far as to prostitute their wives (salim meri) to acquire money—for small sums to supplement their small incomes (hence the term 2 kina meri)—and done this with a strange air of ingenuousness and survivalism rather than a concern to make big sums from an attractive temptation (Trompf and Martin fieldnotes 1983, 1985). In Port Moresby very many poor and wealthy Melanesians alike are attracted by the prospect that paying a small amount to a lottery operation (such as Laki) could land them a huge sum in return (the first prize was as much as KIO 000 in 1985) (NN 3 Aug. 1985:5). There is lessening pressure about this by conservative moralists because the procedures allow anyone in society to participate, and the acquisition of the money could be a means of helping a group, or perhaps paying off a brideprice to a group to secure economic independence. Even if such prize-money were used for some apparently more personal end—the purchase of a home or car, let us say—the social implications of such an action are often first judged as a remarkable achievement (see 12) and people will wait to assess consequences. Assessment is going to depend on whether the new owner will use his house and vehicle for his wantoks' benefit. We have already looked at Melanesian propensities to relinquish money, or to 'splurge' it on others (or gamble for more temporary acquisitions). Psychoanalytically speaking, Melanesians treat money far less 'analretentively' than most expatriates in the region (the latter willingly preying on local spendthrift tendencies for their own aggrandizement), and meanness or niggardliness are hardly prevalent vices among cultures in which everyday subsistence was so vital (cf. Bornemann 1976). And 'the Christian connection' reinforces and broadens the base of sharing, so that the needs of one's human brothers and sisters, not merely one's wantoks, must be answered—in charitable gifts for example, for refugees or disaster victims, for the projects of struggling churches, or even for 'longlong' street actors and the odd beggar. On the other hand, when it comes to relinquishing money which does not involve the intense give and taking of interpersonal relations (that is, when it comes to paying bills to companies with time payments, or to government institutions for services, and so on), Melanesians generally find themselves badly organized, and will have to borrow from various wantoks in an emergency (so setting in tow the networks of reciprocity or dependency all the more). To avoid too much dependency, borrowing from expatriates (but perhaps not returning money so much as some favour, or else simply assuming the foreigners can afford it) is one way out (cf. Newton 1978). The tactics of withholding or redirecting money is rarely found to reflect rationalistic saving in the money economy, even though institutional

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directives may have been given to 'tighten the belt'. In the Public Service sector pressures are always on for wantoks to pick up the perks, where choices allow. One vivid example I can select from the University of Papua New Guinea. When the first national dean of the Arts Faculty, John Waiko, received his decanal allowance it was expected that he would use it to help pay for teaching hours which his administrative duties disallowed him to cover. Instead he paid a wantok to translate his doctoral thesis into Binandera, a move he could justify to himself as of greater cultural, if not religious importance (UPNG 1985; OT: Waiko 1985). In the political arena, bitter feuds have erupted when members given funds choose to put in an improved road to their own tribal area instead of a badly needed new one into another tribe's (as with a notable squabble among southern highlands provincial politicians 1984-85), or when one road is opened in one province and not another (as with the row between ministers Michael Somare and Charles Stack, June 1990, over the east and west Sepik regions respectively). Such cases show how easily choices about the usage of money are very often between the servicing of one kind of 'public good' and another, if we take the public first as some general amorphous mass of intersecting interests and ethnic groups, and the second to be a wantok or homogeneous ethnic group. In Papua New Guinea a common tendency is for those nationals who have power over money to organize its spending in the name of the public, or as if the public at large is being served; but they do so while really seeking to keep as much money in the hands of those who can be trusted (wantoks), and with a paramount concern for the development of one's own group (or a trustworthy part thereof). This is the nub of the problem of public finance (actually the problem of all 'undetribalized societies' in the Third World): that tribal sectional interests are justifiably public interests—they are local public interests awaiting what they now 'justly deserve' from new national politicians after the years of relative deprivation under colonial rule. Under such circumstances, money redirected as much as possible to wantoks, or kept under their control, avoids the tag 'corruption' (in the general sense presumed under inherited European legal systems), although of course such 'network camouflaging' is hardly unique to this part of the world. But one can quickly perceive that the seeds of corruption are constantly being laid in this kind of fertile soil, for corruption is often the perpetuation of positive reciprocities, typically activated by the availability of large sums of money under nationals' controls and against a backcloth of cargoism, but taking on such an exaggerated form that it is rendered culpable as unjust by Christian and Western legal standards (or even selfish by traditional values themselves [Ballard 1976: 14-15]). In this analysis I maintain my concentration on Melanesians while not for one minute suggesting that corruption is confined to them alone! (cf. Scott 1969; Taylor et al. 1973: 259).

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Actual embezzlement, theft or forgery are still more patent expressions of corruption, of course, and there is a spectrum which may be drawn between thefts that can be readily explained away (as the redirection of funds, let us say, for recipients who allegedly need them more) to the direct removal of somebody else's cash from a purse. All shades of such shadiness exist in every country, including the strangest cases of collecting money, promising interest, but not having the slightest intention of paying anything back (cf. chapter 8). The tragedy is that in Melanesia, and in Papua New Guinea in particular, one finds the same old story about the pitfalls of modernization: that a sector of the well-paid elite unlearn the ethical discipline of the villages (and of preached Christianity emergent within them) and develop sophisticated techniques of dishonesty, inspired by hard-headed, postChristian expatriate realists and the persistence of tribal mentalites. And this while the poor, whose condition is not ameliorated by the machinations of the new sophisticants, breed a sector of new criminality, inspired by exciting new visual images of crime, sex and violence in the whiteman's world and by the old warrior religions, whose espousers once dared to snatch up miners' tools and run away with the missionary's spoon. Money, to conclude, is one of the great integrators of action and thought. Not alive, it is an agent; not acting alone, it tends to make us what we are and at the same time mould what we think. The 'god of this world', its procedures are like rituals, its capacity to make us dependent on it, like the claims of the Almighty, and its achievements in steel and concrete, speed and control, a surrogate for supernature. If modernization is a new faith, and secularization one of its new sects, money is its 'holy spirit' knitting the denizens of the earth together with traces of nickel and silver, and wielding such immense power over them that hardly a choice is left unaffected without some concern as to whether it can be afforded. Men and women die without it, and they can willingly die its martyrs in the desire to get a lot of it. The only trouble is—as Christians seeking liberation from its tentacles go on contending—from 'the love of money springs all evil' (1 Tim. 6:10), and in Melanesia, god as it is already becoming, it may turn out to be an uncontrollable masalai, or Master Mammon as the centre of the new fertility cult which rules unchecked by prophetic calls for righteousness. And while many of the more pious, constrained people will be prepared to 'cast their bread upon the waters' in acts of generosity, and give fair work for the reward of fair weekly wages, trusting that, behind the complex 'rat race' there lies God who will bless them with security, others there will be who, consciously or not, find no need of God or (overt) religion to get what they want materially and financially out of the most modern payback system of all (see Storkey 1979: 365-46, cf. Pia 1979 [?]). Here lies a central problem generated by Development and requiring exercises in the Ethics of Development (Trompf 1987b, cf. Stratigos et al. 1987-89) to cultivate common virtues and minimize private greed.

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Modifying meanings of life and death What is taken and given, what is exacted (even to the point of shedding of the enemy blood) and what is sacrificed (even to the extent of giving one's life for another or as a martyr for one's faith, cf. ToVaninara 1975: 30-32), has its reasons in the minds of the doers. As we have already explained, whether these reasons are only amply or convincingly articulated after the doing, and thus whether processes of rationalization follow actions, constitute only secondary problematics to the primary datum that people can almost unvariably claim to retaliate or concede, punish or reward, for reasons. An avenger and a gift-giver may admit they have acted on impulse; an observer may allege that both failed to think through the issues and acted for wrong or insufficient reasons; both doers and spectators may acknowledge the role of emotions; yet the world of motives remains, and it may be just as important for its analysis that desire, fear, anger or other emotions are given as reasons for acting by the agents as it would be if some long-established consensus or well-wrought theoretical explications, are brought forward. 'Actual' or 'real' motives, of course, will remain forever covert or beyond certain ascertainment; it is language which is all we have left to tell us about the connections between action and thought (including the knotted web from quick thoughts to prolonged pondering). It is how the motives are expressed that counts in uncovering the logic of action, further, however faulty the conceptual connections may be by preselected standards of logical truth. When it is obvious that expressed motives square (or perhaps react) to varying degrees with a collective, consensus or socially accepted understanding as to how one customarily behaves or ought to behave in certain circumstances, then motives become social, moral, and conscientized facts that bear some logical, usually intelligible relationship to the values and beliefs of a group. Logics of retribution, then, can be compared, to see whether individual views (and actions flowing from them) conform to group expectations; and these logics can be adapted and expanded to cater for new situations, even changed in outward form (though whether the 'archetypal logic' of payback, as an existential reality in the human being, can ever strictly speaking be changed, is highly debatable). Discussion of the effects of modernization on retributive logic in Melanesia must focus on consensus or 'commonly talked-about' reasons for recrimination and sufferance, hate and love, and so on, if it is not to deal with a morass of unmanageable variables and materials. Any attempts to gauge the role of emotions in taking revenge or giving gifts in a given Melanesian society can only be based on relatively general (ofttimes subjective) impressions, and the people concerned cannot (and should not) be taken into laboratory conditions to measure 'scientifically' whether one

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human type is more emotional than another. Any effort to disclose the 'true motives' of Melanesians, moreover, to decide whether given individuals (or groups taken as collections of individual psyches) are genuine in their group solidarity, let us say, or in their generosity, or change of religion, is overwhelmed by the problem of ultimate unverifiability. At best we are left with the language and thought by which people make sense of their own actions, and also make sense of events and affairs in their ken; these two senses almost always bearing an interpretable or logical (not necessarily sound logical) relationship. Thus, such statements as 'we always avenge the death of our kin because ...', or 'we give our own pigs to others outside our lineage because ...', in a given culture, can usually be quickly tied up in a frame of reference—whether the frame is actively and consciously present in the culture's own reflection, or has to be drawn into consciousness through probing and hermeneutics—with such assertions as 'he was killed or died because ...' or this 'person gets many good things because It is the multiplicity of meanings put upon the world which is the proper object of the study of logics of retribution, even if it has been in our purpose to avoid analysing thought or attitudes in isolation from the activity they accompany, and to remind readers of complicating non-rational factors. How, then, has modernization affected the logic of retribution in Melanesian religions?—that is, such logic conceived as an explanatory mode. Peter Lawrence had already made much of the idea that one of the great obstacles to nation-building (and so-called 'development') in Melanesia is the clash between traditional and Western epistemologies. For Lawrence the problem is basically this: modern science, so essential for the astounding achievements and higher standard of living in the West, is grounded on the assumption that virtually everything that happens in the world occurs through 'natural causes'; but in traditional (and many adapting) Melanesian systems of knowledge (certainly in the Ngaing, Garia and other Madang world views he has studied in depth), a host of events, from the appearance of bananas on banana trees to the sailing of a steel hulk upon the sea, are not explicable without reference to supernatural agencies (1974, and OT: 1978-82). To study logics of retribution in southwest Pacific religions is obviously to consider one major (I suspect the crucial) facet of this alleged problem, because all traditional Melanesian explanatory frameworks served above all to account for 'ups and downs', 'welcome and unwelcome things' in the life of a group, and only rarely to translate the cosmos for its own sake. If, as we have already suggested, the fundamental causal question was 'who (and not what) did it?' and a question put to a great number of events which most Westerners would assume to have occurred 'naturally', and if this question is fundamental because it is relationships with living beings (whether human or nonhuman) and not with naturalistically manipulable nature which have

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provided the bases for pre-contact cosmologies, let alone feelings of unity and courses of group action, then homo Melanesiensis is not going to be ready to have his religiously significant explanations trivialized into talk about mere nature or mechanical operation. Apparent confusion—as in cargo cults, for instance—is a sign of this lack of readiness; and relative secularization only barely begins when persons are ready to concede that the cosmos is peopled by fewer spirit powers than they had once believed, such preliminary doubting being far from the (hypothetical) point where, with the acquisition of sophisticated knowledge about the natural world and the dynamics of the psyche, the hold of religion ... will be broken. (Crosby 1981:15)

What we are looking for now, then, is evidence that traditional forms of retributive logic are increasingly giving ground to other forms of such logic which are apparently more commensurate with, or accompany, the forces of modernization. We are expecting to hear more and more about (the universal) God as the agent to explain the events of life and less about traditional spirit agencies (local deities, the dead, sorcery, witchcraft, and so forth), and to some extent our expectations have already been met in the ideologies of cargo cults and transitional movements. As far as naturalism is concerned, we are anticipating the Melanesian's growing acquaintance with scientific principles that govern the environment, the human body, machines, the manufacture of Western-style goods, and so forth. We are not to expect that retributive logic shows signs of disintegration altogether, since its manifestations in consciousness are endemic to humanity (see Preliminaries), and we find them in Christianity and 'naturalism' no less than in primal cultures. Whole books on the history of theology and the sciences, however, would be necessary to cover all the fine points and variations even in the history of Western notions of retributio from antiquity to modern times (Trompf 1979a; 1994); here, it is only possible to provide a bare-bones account of how transported Western Christian and scientific outlooks have affected Melanesian thought. As for Christianity, an underlying tension should be noted—especially in its popular expressions (cf. Vrijhof and Waardenburg 1979)—between the belief that God rewards the righteous with blessing and punishes sinners (a notion hanging over from the Old Testament, yet still with a hold on Christians), and the belief that God's people may suffer very sorely in this life, even to the point of tortuous martyrdom, while 'the wicked' may well 'prosper' (cf. Job 73:12, Jer. 12:1)—such unjust disparities sometimes only receiving resolution in the after-life (cf., e.g., Luke. 16:19-31). As far as the great mass of Christians are concerned, the tension between these two insights would be resolved thus: all good things come from God, to whom we should thus give thanks; all difficult, apparently evil things

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require the Christian to seek the guidance of God (or the Church), as to whether they are pains and necessities which should be patiently borne, and the more quickly resolved through mutual understanding, healing, insights or skills, or whether they are insidious (some might say 'Satanic' or 'tyrannical') outrages which need resisting in God's name. Seeking guidance, admittedly, implies other possible points of tension: between being open and resistant to God's will; between feeling assured and not being sure what that will is; between pressing God for what one dearly wants to happen (to have one's wife saved from a terminal illness, for example) and being resigned to God's will whatever it is; between wanting to blame God for not answering one's pleas and feeling guilty that one has not sought God's help in the right way or shown much faith; and so on (cf. Baelz 1968). But the focusing is much more decidedly on the one God than on a multiplicity of spirit-powers, and also on the simple triangular relationship between God, the person and other living persons, since (in most Western Christianity at least) the ancestors are not conceived to play any important role in the network of active spiritual linkages. Against this very general backcloth, two more basic points about the connection between retribution and action in the Christian outlook should be noted, both entailing a good deal of strain between opposing theological and psychological pressures. First, the Christian is enjoined against 'paying back evil for evil'; instead of wreaking revenge on enemies the Christian should love them, showing a forgiving attitude, 'for vengeance is mine, says the Lord, I [not you] will repay' (Rom. 12:19, cf. Deut. 32:35; Matt. 5:43-44). A whole range of negatives, from vendettas to bad feelings, are meant to be withstood under this broad ethical rubric, though the urge to get even with one's persecutors, opponents, enemies, can be satisfied through being projected into a future judgement befalling the evil ones, and, as we have seen with cargo cults, the prospect of a great reversal can be an enormous source of hope to those in despair about present earthly conditions (Trompf 1990d: 7).1 Secondly, however, the Christian is expected to oppose falseness and injustice, and if the influential Ten Commandments are taken as an index, this also means trying to eliminate idolatry, theft, murder, adultery, and the rest, as much as possible from society. A strain between these two sorts of injunctions naturally comes into play, we note, when social punition is demanded or entailed. At certain stages in their history, the Christian churches have adopted the right to level judicial sentences against wrongdoers, and thus implicated themselves in active negative retribution (e.g. Coulton 1938; Lecler 1960: vol. 2, 329-42; Elton This may be connected with the constant possibility of humans projecting Victory in the imagination' (Nietzsche's way of seeing ressentiment as endemic to Christianity), yet this victory does not have to be futurist, cf. Cross 1933: 53-55.

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1969:214-27). In recent centuries, perhaps, virtually all such privileges have been relinquished to the state, and the only common powers of punishment the churches wield are excommunication (or banning) and condemnation (of evil or error). But such modification does not mark the fact that a chief problem for Christianity concerns how to actualize lovingkindness and vitiate vindictiveness, not only within its own ranks (thus preventing those 'Christians' who wield political authority from misusing the powers of social punition to the detriment of humanity and the faith), but in the 'sinful world' of mankind as a whole (Niebuhr 1940; Maritain 1954). All this has obvious implications for Melanesia, since the expatriate ambassadors of the Gospel, at least, have preached that the focus of spiritual relationships should centre on God (with other supra-human powers, such as Mary or the angels, hardly really competing for attention). They have taught that events should be both evaluated and explained with reference to the One who has an intimate concern for his creation and creatures (e.g. Ps. 139, Matt. 6:25-32, Luke. 12:22-29), and not the 'fears about spirits' and 'faulty causal connections' characteristic of the past. Not only have patterns of revenge—payback killing, sorcery, other forms of recrimination—been commonly opposed, but there have been consistent attempts to alter the patterns of explanation, and thus the logical ordering of indigenous Melanesian thought. Now the relative success of this altering is precisely the subject we must go on to consider, yet the relativities of alteration cannot be properly clarified unless we pinpoint those areas where there will be a greater degree of variance between Christianity and local traditions, and also unless we calculate the effects of naturalism. Some shades of opinion within the minds of Christian missionaries have to be accounted for at this juncture, because some Christians have been prepared to accept the existence of many evil powers (working in opposition to God, and the heavenly hosts). They have therefore interpreted the phenomena of sorcery, for instance, as a genuinely dangerous mode of access to malevolent forces, so that, although insisting on the supreme power of God to destroy sorcery's powers (Acts 8:9-13), they have thereby accepted an important component of the Melanesian Weltanschauung into their own thought, and allowed it to stand firm conceptually in the consciousness of their Melanesian hearers. By turning the ancestors, minor deities, place-spirits, and such like into 'Satans', moreover, as most missionaries have tended to do, they have kept them very much alive at the village level—admittedly, often as forces to be overcome by a Higher Power, but still to be feared and still to be dealt with as integral to the cosmos. The status, role or fearsomeness of these spirits might have shifted, but their reality was left unimpaired. An early brand of missionaries, admittedly, passed off indigenous beliefs as 'dark, vague and perplexing' (if not nonsensical) 'superstitions', and the local systems of diagnosis and cure as 'a system of quackery' (Williams and

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Calvert 1870), but it was the people receiving their new messages who altered their own beliefs—no preacher man could do it for them—and they naturally made adjustments in accordance with their cultural preconceptions. Some people may have felt increasingly embarrassed about their traditional beliefs over the years, admittedly, but the picture in Melanesia is far from uniform; in some cases the culture can be resilient in spite of the Christian presence (see below), in other cases (among Ambrymese, Vanuatu, for example) the former deities have only been 'put to sleep' while the new One is present, and they may thus be woken if necessary in the future (Tonkinson 1982: 3). Now it may appear that the liberal missionary, one influenced by higher criticism of the Bible and by social scientific explanations, has in common with the kind of conservative, unsympathetic and deprecatory missionary stances we have just described the view that traditional beliefs are mostly misguided. After all, it would be true of most trained anthropologists, secular and relativist as most are (Evans-Pritchard 1962), that they could not possibly bring themselves to believe in all the spirits and non-scientific assumptions they find accepted in the cultures they document. One glaring difference between the conservative and the social scientist, however— whether the latter be liberal missionary or anthropologist—is that the latter would normally be intrigued, if not fascinated by the culture, always searching out scientific-looking explanations as to why elements in indigenous thought are so strangely different from Western reasoning, and usually trying to avoid being judgemental toward people whose ways do have meaning after all. At this point, we are faced with the issue of naturalism, along with its secularizing tendency and thus potentiality to modify traditional retributive logic. Philosophic naturalism, as I have defined it elsewhere, comprehends the search ... for rational, non-superstitious explanations; the (resulting) view that there is a tendency for the human spirit to advance from a fictive to a positive mode of thought, ... as well as both mechanistic or (Trompf 1977c: 114) organismic conceptions of social and historical change. This powerful mutual sustenance which the last three centuries' technological progress and this intellectual trajectory gave to each other has produced a whole world, in the urbanized West, which possesses hardly any memories of its 'magical' past (Thomas 1971; Trompf 1991: 79-82, yet cf. Tillett and Drury 1980). By our postwar period this has become a world in which flight between distant nations and continents is no longer a marvel; 'folk medicine' has lost out badly to synthetic drugs; lucky charms—like horseshoes—receive minimal attention; and the newspapers report events as if they are in no way guided by spiritual agencies, unless quoting people's claims (for sensation's sake) that God has saved them from

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the brink of death, or that they have witnessed some weird, occult phenomenon. Thus, this naturalism forms the explanatory and epistemological side to secularization. Sacred space no longer induces feelings about its inviolability; anyone can wander freely around the altar in the church sanctuary, touching what one will as a tourist—one of modernity's new creations—if no one is around to dictate otherwise. Sacred time disappears; one can play sport on Sundays without worry that the Fourth Commandment is being abrogated. And so we could go on. Naturalism carries with it its own forms of retributive logic. Simply from the pragmatic point of view, it often foists itself upon us thus: if you do not press the correct button, add fuel, replace the required component part, use manuals of instruction—on scientific agriculture (not garden spells!), on anatomy and physiology (not on how to draw sharp objects out of the body!), and the like—then things will not work effectively in the world. There is also an implicit ethical dimension to this pragmatism, however, since appeals to natural principles can never escape moral preconceptions built into pre-existing language structures. Hence there develops the commonsense philosophy that one ought to learn how to press the right buttons, or about how the engines of cars eventually seize when no oil is added to them, or house radiators represent a fire hazard if left on too long, and so on; otherwise, one is being foolish (even foolish to trust that the ancestors or God will always help you out). This element of relying on one's skill or 'nous' has never been entirely absent from the known history of human consciousness, we must concede, even in the most religious consciousness (Malinowski 1948: 60), but naturalism maximizes reliance on technique and technology to the point that it appears wrong, or at the very least foolhardy, to set too much (if any) store by spells, prayers and supernatural succour (cf. Trompf 1979a: 285-86). In these general terms, then, though there are also variations to take into account, naturalism encompasses a retributive logic analogous to others, and its casuistical principles are only formally but not intrinsically different from those found in religion, whether Christian or primal. 'How can you expect God to bless you if you are not frugal?' the Protestant Christian might assert, for instance, or 'if you are a lazy housewife the pixies will harass you', runs a local dictum of Devonshire folklore; and both these ethico-religious reminders, one may note, require quite 'natural behaviour' for their fulfilment. Now we are in a good position to establish a crucial point; that by the standards of primal Melanesian religions, the missionaries (of the last two centuries) were just as much bearers of naturalism, and thus secularization, as of religion. Aside from the fact that the Biblical tradition was already relatively more secular than other ancient religions—with all its antianimistic denials that the divine could be contained within inert wood and stone, for instance—the expatriate missionaries to the Pacific over the last

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two centuries were very decidedly 'agents of secularization' for having absorbed and advertised much of the Western scientific outlook (Millar 1973, cf. also Cox 1968: 31-33). Pacification is a work of secularization, for dissipating war-magic; and so also is the opening up of the old, confined secure territories to the great 'family of mankind'. And the missionaries have certainly been busy desacralizing nature; for them sacred flutes are flutes, and sacred stones just stones. They openly lament the way traditional preconceptions hinder the dangerously sick from reaching the hospital in time; armed with stalwart disbelief and the malaria pill, they have walked in places where evil forces supposedly kill trespassers instantly. Those before whom they act take note. So it is that, as each dose of penicillin eases the swelling, as each new adventure in the mission workshops reveals the laws of mechanics, and as each sermon batters against the fear of the vengeful departed or the demoniacal forces of the universes, secularization is bound to be on its onward march (Trompf 1977b: 213). Important, moreover, has been the churches' task of easing the transition of Melanesians from village to urban life, although it is in the towns— where the ancestral religions are weakest and the forms of secularization strongest—that Christian leaders are forced to help their flocks define the limits to the acceptance of modernization, and to oppose its despiritualizing side-effects (cf. Mascall 1965). Overall, we can now appreciate, the missionaries have not only been protagonists for peculiarly religious change, but for a broad shift toward the embracing of the wider world as well; thus, one might as well describe them more generally as 'cultural innovators' (Whiteman 1983; Burridge 1991). Considering the participation of Christianity in the processes of modernization, then, certainly as an important part of that Western (and eventually international) movement which sought to bring 'civilization', 'progress', 'social improvement' and 'development' to less privileged parts of the globe (Considine 1960; Boseto 1978), one might expect even its 'religious effects' in Melanesia to mix the Christianizing and the secularizing of consciousness. Over some issues there will have been obvious analogues between Christianity and given traditional religions—some immediately perceived general idea that spirit powers reward and punish, for example, or a recognition that (group) rituals have good consequences (for the group), or a tacit assumption that the idea of sacrifice has some place in religion (Smith 1901: 3)—which facilitated a relative transference from one form of retributive logic to another. In some cases missionaries have seen how the 'laws' of taking equivalent revenge, or giving back to others what they have reciprocated with you, are not only common to the world's 'rude folk' but to 'civilized people' also, as did A. W. Murray working in Oceania as early as 1836 (1872:35-38; Warneck 1879:228). Whether they have grasped the dimensions of retributive logic as a whole, or made some attempt at

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a systematic examination of it, is less important beside the fact that they have generally looked for the parallels and obvious points of contact between indigenous and Christian worldviews. Yet, over many points of explanation as to the causes of trouble, sickness and death (or their opposites), Melanesian explanations will normally be noticeably less naturalistic than even those of the most pious apostle of the Gospel, especially with their appeal to the role of sorcery and the dead. Certainly, various transferences of an explanatory nature will occur when Christian converts replace one analogue for another: as when they affirm that it is no longer the ghosts who punish breaches of 'family morality' but God, that 'God offers protection, while the ghosts' do 'Satan's work' (e.g., Kyaka Enga, Baiyer River) (Bulmer 1965: 141; Kale 1985), that it is God who best protects gardens or heals sickness (e.g. Samo) (Shaw 1981b: 363-65), and so on. Where the expatriate missionary clearly concurs with naturalistic modi explicandi, however, speaking of accidents, let us say, or naming sicknesses after the whiteman's categories, or interpreting the breakdown in social relations or the environment only in terms of human foolishness, there the transference is likely to be far from complete. And why? For the average Melanesian, just as for black Africans, the language of imported science and technology is 'unable to explain satisfactorily why snakes bite, why lorries have accidents, why some people are childless' (Sarpong 1972: 21). The new explanations are too impersonal, and even Christian appeals to 'the will of God' will seem too general to satisfy the concern to discover 'the specific who(s)' responsible for a significant event. It now remains to document some of the mutations and issues in an extremely complex area of inquiry. In keeping with the model drawn in chapter 3, explanations for trouble, sickness and death, and then their opposite states of well-being, will be considered in turn. Again, we will have to account for the different contexts in which an observer may have explanations. One may find more general statements as to what is supposed to be the case: that whenever a person has done such-and-such, for example, they have fallen ill. Such 'rules' may be set in the form of injunctions, prohibitions or proverbs, and they can be backed up by citing small case histories. More often than not, however, explanations will be first learnt about when applied to an experienced occurrence, and will present themselves as context-specific (for example, this man died of sorcery because he was last seen well in the company of so-and-so, a notorious sorcerer; there is trouble between A and B because A's dead uncle is cross about B's negligences; and so on). With the influences of Christianity and modernization, the observer will do well to learn how to distinguish between traditional, cargoist, Christian and apparently naturalistic explanations, and to discover whether these are utterly confused, kept separate depending on what is being explained, or creatively worked into an innovative epistemology.

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Trouble The first arrival of the missionaries, especially because they made known their hopes for the change of tradition, usually constituted a serious threat to Melanesian societies and demanded serious debate. On the arrival of the Wesleyan missionaries William Cross and David Cargill to the Lau group (Fiji) in 1935, on the very fringes of the region in view, there was a great storm at Lakeba. On consulting the god of the wind 'through the medium of the chief priest (bete)', the king was told that the deity was angry 'because the Christian missionaries were allowed to stay on the island'. Yet, even though an elaborate offering (soro) was made to the priest to placate the god, 'another tremendous storm' arrived within a month, and when the bete insisted that the god was 'enraged by the presence of the missionaries', the king lost respect for the bete and the god. 'Why does he punish us who have not abandoned his service?' was his critical question (Cargill [1839] 1977: 72, cf. Cowen 1982: 11), one which exposed the weakness of the old logic of retribution on the eve of religious change, for epidemics, and even massive floods in southwestern Viti Levu, had already made the explanations of the traditional priesthood look nonsensical (Cargill 1839: 69-72). That is not to say the missionaries could stop storms, but their buildings were more secure against weather and, although their medical knowledge was not so advanced, and clearly not well suited to the tropics, it nonetheless improved on Fijian herbs and counter-sorcery techniques (yet cf. Henderson 1931: 126-40; Gunsen 1975: 254). Such contrasts only further served to undermine the old faith in favour of the new—until the mass movement towards Christianity between 1854 and 1860. In other areas one discovers comparable developments, although the connection between missionaries and vastly improved technologies in this century might seem to have dramatically tipped the balance of explanatory power in favour of the newcomers. Among the Kaupena (southern highlands, Papua New Guinea), for example, between May and September 1969, there occurred both an influenza epidemic and a severe, crop-destroying frost, very soon after the pig-slaughter ceremony meant to ensure fertility. It was the apparent failure of their own rituals, as well as the help offered by missionaries, who had the modern transport to secure medical and food supplies from Mount Hagen, that enhanced the Kaupena interest in Christianity (OT: Kepa 1977). The logic involved in making the transference, however, as is also true of the Fijian case, can hardly be seen as a radical departure from traditional patterns of reasoning, and thus it is possible that setting too much store by Christianity as a method for preventing sickness and economic trouble could produce a disillusionment. On the one hand, the apparent inability of the indigenous system to forestall serious trouble, especially that consequent upon colonial intrusions, may

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count in favour of Christianity's superiority by the standards of traditional retributive logic. On the other hand, the appearance of new troubles, peculiar to 'the new time', may induce doubts about a faith which, at least according to its subtlest exponents, does not fall questionable, let alone rejectable, simply on the basis of either prosperity or adversity (or at least either of these in the short-term) (Trompf 1983a: 132-33). I think here of Huliland (southern highlands), where the trees of the once-sacred groves have been felled—partly owing to Christian non-acceptance of such special places—and where erosion has now developed, to the eventual detriment not only of crop-growing soil but, to a limited extent, of faith in the missionary message as well (OT: Gayalu 1977). And there are other precontact pestilential problems—such as out-of-control salvinia weed on the Sepik (Richards 1979), giant African snails (which were introduced by the Japanese during the war) (Anon. 1976), coffee rust (A 31 Sept. 1986: 15), not to mention age-old hardships such as highland frosts (Brown and Powell 1973)—which, as memory of adverse times past loses its hold, could easily appear to affect a society even worse under a Christian than under a traditional 'dispensation'. Early reactions in the Murik Lake area toward salvinia, for example, have been that it amounts to the judgement of God on the people for their wickedness (Gewertz 1983: 202-03); yet there lies the possibility that if, in trying to live better (and Christian lives), the salvinia problem does not improve, then disappointment in Christianity might also follow. The change to Christianity, therefore, may first be welcomed as a 'good time', but Christianity's staying power may depend on a continual interest in weighing up material benefits as against losses. Among the Orokaiva, for instance, there is a popular macro-historical distinction drawn between traditional times and the time of the first missionaries, who are idealized as bringers of light to darkness. During the postwar period, however, considering both the Anglican Church's relative impoverishment beside other churches and the lack of rapid development in Papua's northern region, a popular contrast has arisen between the (unsatisfactory) 'now' and the (favourable) 'time of the early missionaries', with some village coteries asserting that the Orokaiva were better off under pre-Christian tradition (OTs: Jojoga 1976; Waiko 1983). Modern missiologists will be quick to point out that this restructuring of the past misses the point that the Gospel should not be judged in terms of economic vagaries, and that we must also be aware of the differences between a group-change from one system to another (traditional to Christian) and the maturing of a faith which can persist through any temporal adversities (Tippett 1977: 207, 219, cf. 1964: 12-13, 16, 19-20). They will have to admit, however, that missionaries promised great blessings to accrue from conversion, claiming confidently that many things would be 'added unto' the new followers should

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they 'first seek the kingdom of heaven' (cf. Matt. 6:33) (Hueter 1974), because they reckoned Melanesians to be living in such a dismal state (compared to Europeans back home). For most of the earlier generation of missionaries, indeed, there was a natural, often unquestioned assumption, that bearing the Gospel meant bringing civilization; yet, now, the recent spurts of modernization since the Second World War present new troubles for which missions and churches are susceptible to blame (Firth 1975). If Christian leaders advocate restraining rapid development, they can easily appear conservative, not only wanting to hold back the Cargo which the whites have freely experienced all along, but also forestalling progress. If the territorial backyards of churches are underdeveloped, or comparatively less advanced (as many Orokaiva state of the Anglican areas; and Papuans, of the United Church's), the churches can be accused of not having enough 'go-ahead' (quite apart from the ecological advantages other areas, such as Papua New Guinea's central highlands, may possess, or aside from any Christian preaching about the perils of immediate self-gratification). Sometimes because of overdevelopment, at other times impatience, disenchantment with white ways sets in. Certain new religious movements—Wok bilong Yali around Madang and the Moro movement on Guadalcanal for two—entail a turning away from both mission and government back towards tradition, because dissatisfaction over the cash-and-commodity economy has led them to fix their hopes on the ancestors as the problem-solvers (cf. chapter 4). If cargo cultists imagine that the ancestors can bring about a radical reversal against disturbers of the old fashions, there are others who, witnessing the immense disruptions to their environment, hope for the spoliation of the intruders' efforts. Listen to the poignant comments of a former (?) pastor from the Kikori area on the Purari River Delta Scheme (Papuan Gulf), for example, a project once granted to a South Korean construction firm to harness waterpower for Papua New Guinea's domestic electricity needs and the export market: Many of us believe that they will not be able to succeed in their attempt to close the river. To us it is a sacred place. The whole Purari, and especially upstream, is so sacred because that is where our ancestors come from. The trees, animals, birds, and even rivers are the product of our ancestors. If the whiteman closes the river it will be only a short period of time before our ancestors will spoil their work and open the river once more. (in Burno 1979:152) The same sort of theme crops up in mining areas, more recently at Ok Tedi in the Star Mountains, where the Min and the Ningeram groups have claimed that the collapse of the tailings or waste dam at the mine site was due to megalim (malevolent place-spirits), leading a chief among the Min named Walap to suggest to the mine management that a pig slaughter and ritual appeasement were necessary for safety (SMH 8 June 1985: 43).

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Thus, retributive logic can catch up on Christianity and modernity as it has in the past on tradition, though Christianity is more capable of shielding itself from internal contradiction through struggling to distinguish its Victories' from 'politico-economic success', while at the same time the benefits of modernization and new technology have not yet too obviously outweighted their dire consequences. Matters are naturally at the hottest near or at the point of a decision to make a basic religious change. If peoples such as the Tauade and Fuyughe, for instance, were afraid of trouble brought by place-spirits once the newcomers built roads or airstrips through previously tabued ground (PAR 1938: 29), it was natural for staunch traditionalists (for such a hierophant as Ona Asi, for example) to predict awesome trouble should the local people cooperate with the white interlopers (chapter 4). A paradigmatic act to 'prove' that no harm would come from even reckless freedom with a sacred place or object, however, or the building of a church over a sacred site—over the flat-topped boulder used by Daga priests in the Milne Bay to give ancestors offerings, for example (OT: Cruttwell)—was usually of crucial importance for shifts of religious allegiance. It is not as if there were no times when the rebuffed spirits seemed to fight back. Joseph Knoebel once related to me how, as an SVD missionary among the people at Lake Kopiago, he encouraged clans who expressed their desire to become Christians to bring their sacred stones and acknowledge the inert powerlessness of these items in a ceremonial smashing (OT: 1977; and his 1966: 186-87, cf. chapter 8). Before a large crowd he raised one of the many rocks and sent it crashing down on the others. But a splinter rose up and struck him smartly between the eyes. He reared. In a split second he knew that if he showed any sign of weakness, if he toppled, or held his hands to his head in pain, the act of transference might seem to the onlookers as ill-advised and displeasing to the traditional powers. Somehow he went on unruffled! In the cases of individuals, it is interesting that specialists in traditional religion usually take the longest time to alter their positions. Various Fijian priests were early to consult missionaries, admittedly (Lyth 1842), and prophet or cult leaders elsewhere have sometimes welcomed head-on encounters with the most influential custodians of the new faith (Trompf 1981b: 27-30); but such adepts were chiefly concerned to tap novel and impressive sources of power for their own local causes. I have spoken with the last surviving Motuan 'holy man' (helaga tauna), though, who admitted that he was extremely reluctant to become a Christian until after the Hiri expeditions ceased to operate, because he feared that had he abandoned traditional beliefs too soon, any trips he sponsored and spiritually protected would have ended in disaster (OT: Bodibo 1977). A Wahgi warmagician conceded, to cite a comparable situation, that he practised his arts as long as circumstances allowed, but with so many of his own clan

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turning Catholic he decided to abandon kunje for fear of going to hell (OT: Munga 1976). The recognition that trouble may stem from a particular religious stance means that modernization does not involve simply looking at Christian or naturalistic types of explanation as the only res novae, but at the uses of tradition in response to the many material innovations which some Melanesians have procured. Andrew Strathern once witnessed, for instance, how a Melpa man, when his truck broke down, immediately proceeded into the bush to kill a chicken (OT: 1976). The motive is not clearhe may have feared a dead relative causing difficulty or the car's 'soul' departing—but he certainly put religion before mechanics, a side to things he was apparently ill-equipped to handle. The killing of the chicken compares with the same action taken quickly when a Wahgi is hurt in a road accident; a chicken is killed because the soul (minman) of the injured or shocked person will wander from the body and be enticed back by the cockerel's blood (cf. chapter 3). Such examples briefly illustrate the point that there can be many non-traditional sources of trouble—the failure of new cash crops, to illustrate, inability to cope in towns, imprisonment for theft, inciting a disturbance—which are interpreted through the lens of traditional explanations, but we have to look out for subtle shifts nonetheless. A poor coffee harvest, let us say, might be ascribed to a failure to perform the old rituals, whether at all or correctly, or to a failure of new rituals (with the planting of a new crop preconceived as 'magical rite' in itself to procure money). A case of gaoling might be attributed, quite in line with tradition, to the arrogance and negligences of the incarcerated person himself, yet a newer, previously unapplied point might be that the troublemaker had not been initiated, and thus had not imbibed the disciplines of the tribe. A real difficulty lies in the fact that no meticulous sociologies of knowledge have yet been undertaken in changing Melanesia, with the basic ideas of each individual in one village complex being plotted. And this is understandable because, not only are many Melanesians reluctant to disclose their own religious beliefs, deferring to more articulate spokespersons, but also the criteria for precisely measuring the resilience of traditional epistemologies or the degrees of their modification are inordinately hard to fix. A 'split-level effect' often complicates matters beyond research's manageability (Bulatao 1967); a fluid mental state can exist where a given thinker does not consciously separate two sets of explanatory apparatus, one new and one old, and can apply them indiscriminately to the events related to two types of contexts, one new and one old. There can be such peregrinations of the mind, such existential leaps, such syncretisms, such vacillations between individual and group opinion, such rationalizations and efforts to please one's friends or listeners, that people can run between

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traditional and introduced ideas without fear of contradiction. In any case, if it is inadvisable to project too much order even on traditional Weltanschauungen, how much more so on the fluid situations following contact? One should not expect of most Melanesians, moreover, any more than we would of most humans in general, a propensity to systematize the logic of retribution, to bring its elements more and more into the logical coherence of philosophic theory. It makes sense and has logical force more because it is a consensus frame of reference, lived and applied practically, than because it is an appealing exercise in cerebration (cf. Kolakowski 1982: 142). Mind you, it can be safely maintained that Christianity, in all its various shades, is more intellectualist than its many Melanesian predecessor religions; for, since it has had years of philosophy pressed into its service, and has been cumulatively tolerant towards natural sciences, especially since the Reformation (Dillenberger 1977), expectations of logical consistency and demands for verification among its adherents are relatively much greater. Missionaries have always tended to take sides with critical thought of the time to attempt demolishing 'false opinions', before trying to demonstrate how their own views are more convincing (Chadwick 1969). Even where a few societies have possessed notions similar to the West's 'natural cause' or 'accident' (chapter 3), moreover, this one parallel component looks merely fortuitous beside the thrusts of Occam's razor felt so commonly in or out of church circles of the West. But all this is only half of the story. One other important factor steadily affecting ongoing modifications of retributive logic in Melanesia is the growing acquaintance with material—especially narratives—in the Bible. The Old Testament stories of God's punishment of evildoers and rewarding of the righteous in this life are particularly crucial for injecting a new explanatory stereotype into Melanesian reflection on all kinds of ill and their opposites. The concreteness and unsubtlety of this stereotype will doubtless worry thoughtful Christians, who will remember Jesus's caveats on this subject (e.g. John 9:3). But the simplicity of the Old Testament paradigm captures the imagination of villagers, as it has the world over, and it places local senses of the past in the context of a 'world history' (chapter 3). Thus many Yombi, to illustrate, have come to associate Mount Giluwe with the time of Noah's ark, a coastal Lutheran pastor confirming not only that there was no welman (dangerous lake-spirit) on the summit, but preaching that the bones he found up there belonged to the wicked who were punished by the Flood (OT: Kawa 1977). To turn against the Christian God, once having accepted him, has commonly been deemed grievously dangerous, even by traditionalists. Certainly within Christian congregations, particularly when at worship, Biblical examples of what happens to sinners (like Cain, Lot, 'Pharaoh' Jezebel, Judas, and so on) have been commonly cited, and warnings uttered about the troubles which

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follow disobedience to the Lord or Bikpela. It is through appeals to retributions abounding in the Old Testament, furthermore, as well as future punishment in hell, that preachers issue warnings against congregational unfaithfulness or plead for conversion (Wetherell 1973: 347-48). Not surprisingly, self-appointed teachers and cargoist figures have done the same, and predicting an act of God's wrath is a favoured means of securing an 'audience' (chapter 6). Among the Buang (Morobe), to exemplify, an elderly man gathered a following in the 1960s and 1970s for promising that there would be another Flood, and that the obedient faithful should prepare to retreat to the mountain-tops, where they would build special houses and await a cargo ship (or the new Ark) (OT: Hooley 1977 on a report by Scherle; cf. Gibbs 1978 for an Ipili Enga parallel). By far the most common retributive motif connected with God in public Christian exhortations, to reiterate, concerns 'falling away' from the faith. I have personally heard a good many sermons by indigenous preachers around Oceania as a whole which connect the fact of being Christian with a 'generally (but not excessively!) prosperous' life, both spiritually and materially, and offering exempla as to how disobedience to God's demands has spelt the collapse of 'this man's' successful lawn-mowing business or 'that man's' trade store. Among the Atzera (Morobe), for instance, one hears of the celebrated case of the Christian who made plenty of money, acquired trucks and other riches, but then turned against God, asking 'Who is he? I've never seen him!' Gradually his money was frittered away, as he fell into 'bad company' and the people attributed his fall to rejection of God (OT: Ison 1977). This more recent explanation, significantly, does not conflict with preexisting traditional notions, since it is about new spiritual relationships, and thus it often supplements rather than replaces traditional causal principles. As we have seen with cargo theologies, moreover, reflection on the judgements of God recounted in the Bible can generate more complex and drawn-out assessments of past events. Changes in colonial history, to illustrate, are occasionally found to be interpreted along lines of retributive principles. As a villager near Lae once spelt it out: God sent the Germans to New Guinea and told them to help us. They were before my time but my father told me about them. Because they were bad and wicked God told the Australians to send them away. The Australians were not much better. They did not return our lands and they were sometimes cruel and beat us. God decided to punish the Australians and told the Japanese to come here. The Japanese were cruel and treated us badly and God decided to give the Australians another chance by sending the Americans, their clansmen, to help beat the Japanese. After the war the Australians were much better and said they would help us and give us roads, hospitals, schools and things that grow. They have only done a little of this and now the Americans are coming here again to see whether the Australians are doing what they promised. (Hastings 1973:97)

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Here an incipient macro-history presents itself, the ring of Old Testament judgements chiming with a Melanesian note of reprisal and the hope of better things to come. More recently the same principles have been applied to national politics. In Fiji, for example, rains were worryingly delayed during early 1987 and when they finally came in the context of Rabuka's first coup, there was a sense of relief among the conservative Methodists that God favoured the Fijian nation after all (Yabaki 1991: 15). Sickness Why people fall ill, and may also die after their illnesses, is still rarely answered by Melanesians with an appeal to natural causes. Medical students have undertaken their training on a naturalistic basis in Port Moresby and Suva (cf. Denoon et al. 1989), but even they realize their entitlement to believe the ailments they strive to cure could be brought on by malevolent spirit-power. They are also only too well aware of the usefulness of having practitioners of traditional medicine working near hospitals, in some cases with official hospital approval (as at the Nonga Base Hospital, Rabaul, New Britain). With at least some government sanction, every Melanesian hospital has patients who make no sign of improvement until 'sorcery-removers' (such as the puripuri men from the Papuan Gulf) have given psychological assurance, or else these institutions hold many patients who are totally dis-eased yet with none of the physical signs that accompany most sicknesses (Trompf 1991: 97). The question we are now bound to ask is: to what extent have there been changes in the range and kind of explanations given to sicknesses under the impact of modernization? The methods and views of a few Melanesian medical students, or even of trained orderlies manning aid-posts, may constitute a good introduction to such changes, because along with expatriate doctors and health workers they form the vanguard of those accepting the new diagnostics; but what about the thinking of cultural majorities? First, we must note the growth in the names of illnesses identified, a distinction often being drawn between 'new' ones associated with the coming of the whites and the old ailments. The Kamano, for instance, identify yaws, tropical ulcers, boils, leprosy and seasonal (October) cough as old maladies for which they had no remedies, whereas they did have techniques for curing ingested poison, eye pus, wounds and serious headaches. New (significant) disorders included diarrhoea, measles, scabies (through wearing clothes), chickenpox, influenza, chest complaints (including tuberculosis), serious genital sores, and malaria (brought by other Melanesians coming to live in the eastern highlands). Their special worry was diarrhoea, which was their chief dissatisfaction with the 'new time'. Before contact many bodies of the dead were eaten (the Kamano tribes, like

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the nearby Fore people from Okapa renowned for Kuru disease, consumed the bodies of their own dead), but shame put on cannibalism by missionaries and patrol officers led them to bury many more deceased persons than previously—in characteristically shallow graves—and this contaminated water supplies to produce the serious epidemic of diarrhoea before the last war (cf. also chapter 1). Mission influences during the 1950s saw the graves dug deeper (even if they were still typically near watercourses), but other factors, including refined foods available in trade stores and inadequate sanitary conditions, have left the problem unvanquished. Any deaths resulting from serious cases (that is, dysentery) are still ascribed to sorcery, but as something which is now usually containable. The Kamano tend to think the expatriates are to blame for such bad diarrhoea, yet look to them to provide the medicines to alleviate it (OTs: Ansanko and Tubinofi villagers 1977). This example introduces a variety of pertinent issues. The Kamano have not long been contacted; in other cultures, with a long history of interaction along the coast (for example, the Mekeo), the distinction between old and new sicknesses, if it ever existed, no longer applies (OT: Kavana 1982). That is not to say, however, the expatriates cannot be blamed for sicknesses. Admittedly, epidemics around the time of contact have resulted in antiwhite grievances only in relatively few quarters, since these epidemics occurred when most deaths were explicable in terms of enemy sorcery and when popular instructions about germs and germ carriers were unknown. Under modernizing conditions, though, the whites can receive blame along quasi-spiritual lines. Among the Motu, in fact, it is widely alleged that the Liarubada, the wind blowing hard from the south in September, bears respiratory ailments traceable to the people of Australia (OT: Kopi 1976), and there are warnings given in various cultures that an over-association with expatriates and their lifestyle can seriously impair one's health (see below). The Kamano example only barely suggests it, but other issues pertinent to the explanation of sickness concern sorcery and the breakdown of relationships. We will have more to say about sorcery in connection with death, but it is crucial to remember how the uncertainty surrounding the outcome of many illnesses often forces Melanesian 'patients', and those trying to restore them, to think about fractured relationships which might have caused someone to try sorcery. The Kamano case also points us in the direction of spirit-human relationships. For in no longer being able to practise time-honoured anthropophagy, a practice they believed prescribed by the dead, the traditionalists among them came to attribute persistence of health problems to the failure to keep up the original relationships, which the whites were responsible for blocking. Those attracted by Christianity weigh up matters differently, recalling the association of the

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old ways with fighting, noting the successful elimination of yaws (in 1948), or the lessened number of children's deaths, and contending that, despite continuing health problems, the change to the new ways of God has made life better than it was. Family reflections over a sick person's broken relationships, and concern to isolate the source of sorcery so as to challenge it (chapter 3), continue to apply in most contemporary Melanesian cultures. It pertains, however, in atmospheres different from those of pre-contact times. For one thing, the problem of intra-directed sorcery makes the searching for fractured relationships with people near at hand, more prevalent, and sorcery accusations internal to the (partly artificial) village community more likely. For another, traditional practice continues side by side and has somehow to be brought to terms with introduced theological insights and medicine. We may illustrate the ongoing dialectic between tradition and modernity with a series of separate points, related to each other in a hypothetical process toward modernity. First, a typical rural pattern sees a sick person first diagnosed and treated along traditional lines (although skin sores, open wounds and malaria are among ailments which make more and more seek disinfectant and pills from the local aid-post). There can be stages in this traditional diagnosis and more than one specialist may become involved. The Mekeo diviner (opo) (female) and healer (menga-menga) (usually male), for example, may come to the realization that a certain sickness is more serious than can be contained by rituals or herbal remedies, and will hand the case over to a sorcerer for counter-sorcery (OT: Kavana 1982). But if local procedures fail, and time so elapsed that the disease becomes far advanced, the patient will be taken to hospital—the centre of 'alien' medicine—as a last resort. What are the explanations if the hospital personnel succeed or fail in their efforts to save any such latecomer's life? Among the Mekeo, to remain with that case, there is usually traditional anti-sorcery activity being carried out while the person is in hospital, so that if the person recovers, his return to the community is normally ascribed to the counter-sorcery measures; and if he dies, the death is almost always deemed the outcome of successful sorcery. The hospital, ironically, is an outside system, which is thereby completely circumvented by traditional retributive logic. This is not always the epistemological outcome in Melanesia—the Mekeo worldview has proved highly resilient—but it is a good example of the continuity factor. Modern medical services, second, along with missions and educational facilities can be so pressed into the service of traditional principles of retribution, that sick persons can be convinced that an enemy has appropriated some of the extra powers possessed by the newcomers and is ruthlessly directing it toward them (which is evidently what is believed by the Bimim-Kuskusmin in their 'updated' struggle with the Oksapmin,

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considered earlier as a case of changing sorcery patterns in the west Sepik) (chapter 7, cf. Poole 1981: 70-73). It is thus an added task of those running medical facilities somehow to combine a dissociation of their work from the taint of sorcery—with the attempt to render these facilities integrally relevant to village lines of thought. Proceeding to a third point, we note that what the creators and sustainers of introduced medical facilities would like to see as the 'rightful modern place' of their institutions can only be achieved with religio-epistemological transformation. In bringing about this change, Christian beliefs have already made their impact, and are more capable of adapting to pre-existing mentalites than straightforward 'medical naturalism'. Unlike the secular philosophic basis reflected in the syllabi and methods of most tertiary centres of medical training, Christians (especially Melanesian Christians!) are hardly likely to rule out the possibility that physical ailments may be traceable to sin or a bad spiritual state; thus, they can draw spirit-body connections along religious lines (not just with technical talk about 'psycho-somatic' illnesses). Exorcism has sometimes been used, for instance, when both local people and Christian leader concur that a person's strange behaviour derives from an evil spirit. In one impressive case on north Malaita, a Toa[m]baita woman, with nothing but stumps for legs, was found jumping involuntarily some four feet into the air, the South Sea Evangelical missionary William Neil was summoned by her relatives to call out 'the possessing spirit' (OT: Neil 1962). A chord is struck among many Orokaiva, for another example, when Anglican priests choose to enjoin persons with apparently less serious internal pain: 'Go to the church and confess your sin, it is your sins that are making you sick' (Jojoga 1976: 96). The appeal is meaningful because it insists on the healing of broken relationships. At the opening of the Kutumbugl Aid Post near Mount Kuli (western highlands), the Lutheran bishop Mambu drew a related parallel between ethical and bodily failings, preaching that 'the church was the haus son [place of repentance] for people's moral wrongs, so the aid post was the haus sori for people's bodily wrongs' (PC 17 May 1977: 15). Yet another stage is reached, however—one intriguingly in accord with both the New Testament questioning of traditional Jewish retributive logic and with modern medical naturalism—when there is an acknowledgement that sickness does not necessarily come as the result of sin or manipulated spirit-power, but as an affliction which can even befall the innocent, or a tragedy demanding active care quite apart from whether it was deserved or perpetrated. The idea of affliction, interestingly, was appealed to by Methodist missionaries as early as the mid-nineteenth century to explain why they, too, like the Fijians, and despite their purportedly superior medicine, could fall ill (Cowan 1982: 7-8). It has important innovative implications in that it can help a sick person interiorize the explanation

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as something between himself and God, rather than constantly relate it to outside enemy powers. If a person has confident trust in God, he or she may then take sickness as a testing from Him, or as meaningful suffering in relation to the Lord who is the ultimate Protector no matter what scourges life may bring. On this basis suffering in sickness (even to death) becomes redemptive (2 Cor. 12:7-10, cf. Ferguson 1972); it is no longer a reason for thinking about 'paying back' persons, or for that matter ought not to be a reason for blaming and making a victim of oneself, even if Melanesian traditional and Christian conceptions can easily coincide in affirming that the sick, and those caring for them, should rally against the forces or evil, or have faith that, in living or dying, God is the ultimate shield and vindicator against all malevolence. Much as we have entered into aspects of the Christian theology of suffering (which has been historically more important than germ research in developing a comparatively more 'blame-free' attitude towards sickness and death in 'modernized' culture), it has to be conceded that most Melanesians have only accepted the new insights as applicable to new situations, while consensus pressures keep the average run of village sicknesses under the rubric of traditional modi explicandi. For sickness in non-traditional circumstances, then, such as the typhoid outbreak at Asaroka school (eastern highlands) in 1977, one may expect an appeal to principles which apply outside the local context, and which indeed have cross-cultural workability. 'Yes, that school used to be very religious, but that side of things has gone down a lot, and I see the typhoid sickness as some kind of punishment [from God]' (OTs: Anon, to Wrigley 1977, cf. PC 3 Oct. 1977: 3). In situations of regional or national association, therefore, and in urban areas, this newer form of retributive logic, usually smacking strongly of the Old Testament, is more commonly invoked. Death Sorcery has an extraordinary endurance in Melanesia as an explanation for death. In societies where all deaths by sickness were traditionally ascribed to sorcery, in fact, the persistence of this notion of causality persists most strongly, because their members now believe that the amount of sorcery has increased, is more unpredictable and closer at hand. To consolidate our ongoing analysis, we argue that traditional causes for deaths through sickness are more likely to be utilized in respect of rural, villagebased demises, while claims about the punishments or will of God, or reference to new kinds of explanations, will be made about certain deaths which are understood to fall outside these local contexts. As already shown, an individual death by some physical onslaught yet which has not been witnessed, usually leaves little room for doubt that a human was

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responsible, and the object of many post-mortem divinatory procedures is to locate which clan or place holds the culprit. Sickness unto death, by contrast, usually calls forth a more complex aetiology; even in those cultures where sorcery is the first and almost exclusive suspicion, the death of one of their fellows happening outside the rural context (and certainly deaths of expatriates and of Melanesians not belonging to their cultural complex) could be attributed to an atypical cause. A university student friend of mine from the Aroma-Velerupu area, for example, opted against both traditional and Christian beliefs and claimed he believed in science instead. In playing football at the university, however, he sustained a shoulder injury and was diagnosed at Port Moresby General Hospital some months later as having contracted a rare bone cancer. Radium treatment did not help and, before completing his degree, the student took himself back to the village, not just to his family, but to the whole world of village explanations as to why he was dying. He struggled and in the end made his own peace with these village pressures; yet, on his decease the consensus interpretation of his early death was that he had been contaminated by whitemen (OT: Varagi 1976). The ideas he had imbibed were as foreign as much of Port Moresby itself; thus he came to be considered something of a stranger in death. Here there is a note of village vindictiveness toward the whites (though no one expects it to be acted on), and one can often find this built into the distinction between local deaths caused by local agencies and expatriate (nationally significant) deaths willed by God. Among the Wahgi, for instance, who still generally adhere to the traditional aetiology for deaths, it was widely diffused that an expatriate electoral officer, who died with his family in an air crash straight after the February 1972 elections, was punished by God for deliberately misconstruing the results. Had the officer been a highlander, or 'national' however, involving God as punisher would be less likely (Trompf 1991: 72). Have Christianity and naturalism, then, only minimally affected traditional explanations of death? The answer naturally varies from culture to culture, depending on how much creative intellectual interaction there has been between tradition and introduced worldviews, and how much 'legroom' a given culture gives to innovation in such an important area of belief. Since notions about why people die were intimately connected with actions taken at death—such as divinatory procedures for communicating with the dead person and thus identifying this person's killer, or payback running, to cite two such actions (cf. chapter 1)—traditional beliefs will be under threat once the rituals have lapsed under mission or government influence. On the other hand, it is precisely because the beliefs may be the one integral element left in this part of tradition, after various pre-contact measures of corpse disposal were quickly abolished, that it may be quite self-consciously kept intact. At least the older generation have a vested

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interest in preserving it, with their continuing concern to avenge their dead relatives and one must recognize that the area of tradition least threatened, and one barely undermined even by the school-educated younger generation, is that quiet, ultimately 'unpoliceable' arena of thought, that covert, non-public practice, called sorcery. But the extent of naturalism's success will depend on the extent of the old cultures' resiliences. In the history of interactions between Christianity and tradition, obviously, the nature of any explanation of death has depended on who the explainers were. When the earliest missionaries arrived, for instance, South Sea Islanders were numerous among them, yet 103 out of 203 of them died through illnesses, and these single deaths could have been, and undoubtedly were attributed to a weakness in power (to an inability to counteract sorcery, perhaps, or to the apparent fact that their God was not so supportive of them after all) (Lewis 1970: 59). It had to be argued for among potential converts, and eventually built up as an accepted understanding within congregations, that the deaths of these pioneers were 'martyrdoms' (especially if they were put to death) or 'sad happenings' (or the nearest equivalents to 'unfortunate accidents') (OT: La'a 1973). There always remained the danger, however, that any locals' deaths which could be connected with the failure to uphold tradition might be blamed on mission opposition (I can think of a case in Yangoru where, in 1965, three children died after an expatriate Catholic priest objected to the carrying out of initiation ceremonies) (Gesch, pers. comm. 1982). It was thus as theoretically possible for traditionalists to appeal to the retributions of their own gods, showing how they could bring death or other inflictions as punishment for the failure to perpetuate ancestral practice, as it was for Christians to threaten pagans with Hell. In the cult of Nggwal (among the Ilahita Arapesh), for instance, deaths are generally ascribed either to sorcery which the god approves or to Nggwal's direct action; so, nowadays, the deity is liable to kill those who defect to Christianity, or at least bring successively poor yam harvests or other trouble on their account, in the view of his cult's custodians (Tuzin 1974: 323, cf. 320, 324). Melanesia is not known as a region where peoples show a continued confidence in their old deities, however, and what happens more often than not is that God or Deo (or any traditional high god capable of being more broadly conceived as such) replaces them. Room is usually still left for the dead and for sorcery to play some explanatory role, admittedly, but as putative factors these are commonly called into question by missionaries or Christians, who tend to dichotomize spiritual causes into God and Satan(s), while also commonly denigrating the fearful credence given to sorcery powers or even advocating the elimination of the whole sorcery system (yet cf. chapter 1). That Christian explanatory paradigms have gained ground, however, is more because the new power-bringers, with all their apparent signs of supremacy both material

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Table 6 The aetiology of death, with post-contact adjustments (the Hula, AromaVelerupu case) Evaluation of a Person Dead A Good B Badc

a

Nature of Death Quiet Quiet

b

C Good

Nastye

D Bad

Nasty

Typical Explanations God rewards a person with few sins Sorceryd, evil spirits taking the person quietly Martyrdom; 'sad accident'; psychological flawf; sorcery^; witchcraft11 God punishes ancestral spirits of 'the house' or lineage; sorcery^

Notes: a nama. Note: Christians do not estimate all non-Christians to be bad as a matter of course, nor vice versa. b That is, peaceful departure, no fuss being made, and not fearful (or traumatic) (cf. note 4). c larava. Typically someone who is lawless, arrogant, uncooperative by village standards, or mores which are generally shared by Christians and non-Christians. d The Aroma-Velerupu have a respect-fear relationship with local sorcerers, who have a working relationship with many Christians, and are acknowledged as important custodians of village tradition (being shown off as such, for instance, to expatriate visitors!). The death of a bad man through sorcery (even the local sorcerer) can be accepted as an appropriate, socially acceptable punishment by both Christian and traditionalist. e That is, unexpected, sickening or even horrific. A sudden sickness unto death would be one example, death by drowning or by shark attacks are others (crocodile attacks are now rare, as are physically violent deaths by spear, and both would require special evaluation). f That is, an upright person who may have some special personality (one might say psycho-pathological) weakness. Two significant cases were mentioned: one of a man from Gavuone who showed himself too worried about his trade store; the other of a boy who fell from a cliff, his worries about his family's inner tensions bringing him 'bad luck' (rava capi). g Here sorcery, if recognized by consensus as the likely cause, is lamented and is more likely than in cases B and D to produce reprisal sorcery, and it is hard for most Christians to elude involvement in this likely recourse. h Strange, hypnotizing lights at night are attributed to wandering witches who lure their victims nocturnally. There are variant emphases in the application of these principles from village to village, and the acculturative elements in this matrix apply much more to the avowedly Christian majority than to the traditionalist minority. The principles are not shared as dogma so much as 'hermeneutical devices', and there are recognized areas of uncertainty. It takes probing, for instance, to decide whether a putatively good person who died in a most unsavoury fashion might have been evil 'inside' without others having detected it.

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and spiritual, could hardly be taken for granted and because they bore ways of interpreting the world which cried out to be accommodated. It has thus not been so much because the traditional explanatory systems were themselves easily invalidated, even if this indeed was also a factor. An example of a fairly complex form of accommodation is worth presenting here, before commenting on certain weaknesses in traditional divinatory and explanatory models. Among the Aroma-Velerupu one detects the interplay of Christian and traditional principles of interpretation concerning death in the matrix conveyed by Table 6 (OT: La'a 1973). This example illustrates how old and new modi explicandi can synthesize, although the synthetism has probably been this 'fruitful' because, in the traditional Hula, Aroma-Velerupu repertoires, sorcery was not the virtually exclusive cause of death-incurring sicknesses or mishaps. In this case something of the new and the old have reinforced each other rather than remaining locked in ideological conflict (though purists on both sides worry about the outcome). Nonetheless, a place for sorcery remains, and one now needs to ask, in those places where a struggle between sorceryand introduced-explanations became more intense, what have been the weaknesses in the traditional outlook upon which its opponents can capitalize? Basically this: that there are too many apparently motiveless deaths for an over-appeal to sorcery to be justified (Zelenietz 1981: 10-11). Yet it is pointless for the opponents of sorcery to argue this out on intellectual grounds, because there is a persuasive intellectual counterargument, that sorcery-power can be deflected on to the wrong person. In south Ambrym (Vanuatu), to illustrate: Some sorcery deaths were widely held to be 'accidental', as in the case of mistaken identity or poor aim, resulting in the wrong person being 'hit' or an innocent person being used callously for target practice by sorcerers testing their powers. (Tonkinson 1981:81) The attempted, Christian-inspired drive to eliminate sorcery on the island (in 1973), then, played not on the logical weaknesses of the old explanatory apparatus but on the socially disturbing fact that too many innocent people of all ages were thought to be sorcery's Victims', and that this, as Christians have maintained in many other areas, was the kind of thinking which breeds fear, tension and hostility (Baro 1973: 3). Would it not be true, however, that the widening horizon of each Melanesian culture has involved a displaying of the death-event in circumstances quite different from those known to tradition? Quite so, but even with new types of situations affecting a given locale, the parochial retributive logic can still demonstrate its durability, it being imagined that powerful sorcery can be directed from far away in a big town, that botol can be inflicted on motor vehicles, that the success of children in the new school system is either a sufficient reason for sorcery to be used against

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a child or his family, or a common ground for allegations of sorcery (bright schoolchildren in Fiji, for example, supposedly being deployed by their parents as clever agents of dau vaka draunikau) (Griffin 1982: 21, cf. 13, 17). Once an individual or a member of a confined culture zone leaves for a wider world, however, or comes under persuasion by fellows who have known wider experiences, then the local models of interpreting significant events often do begin to appear insufficient. They look inadequate when applied to affairs well beyond home base, or to happenings of regional and national significance. When the Japanese took over local churches along the coastal fringes of the Morobe during the last war, for example, they made camps inside them, burning the altars, cross and benches for firewood, and leaving excreta on the floor before they marched off to another position. When many Japanese died of diarrhoea and dysentery, or were eventually trapped in chasms, or forced to throw themselves down fast-flowing rivers, 'word was spread' among the societies affected west of Finschhafen, and in the Kabwum area, that 'God punished the Japanese for violating the church and maltreating the Christians' (Nayong 1977). The external threat with its cross-cultural implications brought out the relevance of 'Christian logic' as a viable cross-cultural means of making sense of super-local upheavals, and in this light one can see the indirect value of the war in strengthening Christian ties across traditional boundaries. This logic, of course, has a variety of possible uses. Naturally, as suggested above, it is most often taken up as a way of explaining the deaths of significant expatriates, and perhaps relating such deaths to the local situation. Just before Papua New Guinea's independence in 1975, to take an urban example, a member of Port Moresby's Seventh Day Adventist community, after she had suffered a second miscarriage and then heard about the deaths of both Sir Donald Cleland (the former administrator) and Lady Chatterton (wife of the well-known missionary and statesman), was moved to conclude: 'God is punishing us for wanting Independence too soon' (OT: Tracey 1975). And then there is the issue of explaining great environmental catastrophes which affect more than local interests; these, too, appear to demand a cross-cultural logic. It is true that notions of retributive logic in local, traditional religion can be invoked to threaten disaster, or the possibility of multiple deaths. When certain Kamano decided to become Christians at Bamio early in 1952, to illustrate, the sacred flutes were brought out and displayed to the uninitiated, to women and children. Not surprisingly, 'many visitors left to spread the news . . . The whole area became disturbed and men prophesied disaster for Bamio' (Berndt 1965:100-01). Again, to take a case of local preconceptions applied this time to important new political developments interfering with local patterns, one Abudai, a candidate for the local government council at Bogia (Madang) in 1967, proclaimed that he was in special contact with the place-spirits and the departed, and that anybody

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who did not vote for him was sure to die (OT: Plutta 1980). Yet, tragic events of much greater magnitude—those affecting a variety of groups—can call forth appeals to 'the God of the whole world' commensurate with the size and complexity of the drama. The giant eruption of Mount Lamington in the northern district of Papua (1951) affords an apt illustration. At the time the eruption occurred, significantly, when hundreds of villagers were overcome by smoke and volcanic gases, Orokaiva explanatory reactions mainly focused on the anger of the traditional god of the mountain, Sumbiripa; each village having Varying explanations of the probable cause of that anger' (Tomlin 1951; Benson in An 18 March 1955: 6). The lack of a consensus, however, at a time in history when groups were with much freer access to each other's opinions than ever before, seems to have counted in favour of talk about God's anger, as a factor applicable to the whole region, and as the powerful wrath of the Great Being Orokaiva Christians would have conscientiously appealed to as an alternative to the false Sumbiripa. Thus, when Belshaw interviewed survivors 'a few weeks after the disaster' he heard the following sorts of explanations: Some people said that this was God's visitation because they had disobeyed the Bishop's instructions to build new churches. Others said that God had punished them because they had not helped the Allies sufficiently during the war and because some of them had betrayed missionaries to the Japanese. (1951a: 242, cf. Keesing 1953)

and there was also mention of poor cooperation 'in Mission and Government plans' for regional improvement. Such ideological developments, however—grassroots Christian though they may have been, and somewhat akin to the Old Testament image of Yahweh rumbling on Sinai—did not prove popular with the expatriate Anglican clergy, who, under Bishop David Hand's leadership, tried their best to quell the notion that the Christian God harboured anger against the Orokaiva and was so indiscriminately violent toward them (cf. also Schwimmer 1969: 123-32). Nowadays, significantly, the explanation invoking God is rarely heard, and the cause is either ascribed to Sumbiripa (the very agent Christians would rather not have in the local worldviews!) or to 'the fire under the earth' which mission and government personnel alike insist is the natural property of all volcanoes. The latter, naturalistic explication is somewhat 'unnatural' for a people who, like all other Melanesians, have evaluated significances in terms of mutual obligations between living forces, recurrently looking to see whether reciprocations have broken down or not (Schwimmer 1973: 79) Natural disasters are not the only source of multiple deaths, and it is noteworthy that, in the case of the Mount Lamington explosion, some linkage with the upheavals of the war in the early 1940s suggested itself to various Orokaivans. 'Political disaster', however, in the form of assassinations or collective executions sanctioned by the state on ideo-political pretexts, however, has not been a feature of modern or postwar Melanesian

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affairs. This kind of disaster can induce special developments in Christian retributive logic. In Uganda, for instance, the Amin regime, which foisted a pro-Islamic tyranny on a population nominally 57 per cent Christian, came to be interpreted by Christian leaders as a trial permitted by God to test and purify the churches, an understanding akin to Old Testament historiographical explanations of the Babylonian Exile and St Augustine's approach to Alaric's sack of Rome (Charles 1981). Such an approach is known but does not yet seem to have received widespread airing even in Irian Jaya, New Caledonia or Bougainville, where many local Christian congregations identify with the struggle to remove political or socioeconomic oppression. Failure to appeal to such an approach bespeaks the dual fact that this oppression has been more uniformly heavisome than startlingly traumatic, and that theological education is often weakest in the regions where the difficulties are greatest. In general, it will now be obvious, Melanesians have not embraced naturalistic accounts of the deaths of their fellows. A fully naturalistic account, of course, requires not only that there is no 'spiritual' reason for a particular death but also that nothing 'spiritual' happens to persons after they die. If it is possible, as already shown, that various societies accept the death of the aged as tantamount to 'natural' or that some deaths by weaponry or ambush involve merely humans as against more-than-human agencies (chapter 3), that is not to say that any accept a post-mortem nothingness. In modern armies instructors teach the art of killing the enemy with cool rationality, but there are always church parades and group discussion to handle the meaning of death or the prospect of after-life (in fact, among the OPM there also exist consensus explanations for death, built out of Melanesian and Biblical retributive logic, that if a soldier 'sins' by raping a woman or keeping loot for himself, an Indonesian bullet will 'find him') (OT: Fairio 1985). Thinking further about 'modern settings', it may also be the case that there will be an extensive secularization of explanations in urban areas about all sorts of areas of human existence; a team captain may claim that the 'real reason' for a loss in a football match was that 'most of (the) boys had been drinking the night before', for instance (PC 26 April 1982: 24); or urban dwellers under great strain may claim that their economic troubles are only to do with the breakdown of human relationships within a bustling town; or highly educated observers in seeing death befalling somebody completely outside their own cultures—and in the world of modern bureaucracy and business—may put these down to over-work or to the sad fact that the best of modern medicine was not available or perfected enough (fieldnotes 1971-89). Yet the belief in an afterlife is virtually beyond question; bodies are very carefully sent home from the most diverse quarters by land or air for the funerary rites, and I know of no Melanesian who has yet been prepared to donate his body in advance

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for medical research (all the cadavers used in tertiary institutions for teaching purposes being expatriate). Have there been basic changes in the way Melanesians conceive existence in the after-life? Without doubt the idea of a heaven and hell has been extremely influential, coupled as it often is with the prospect of 'the Last Things' (an End to known order when the dead will rise, Jesus return and God's kingdom be established). It is as well to look out for the manifold ways by which these aspects of Christian eschatology can be taken over and related to pre-existing belief-systems. Where there were already notions of a place of reward for the 'good' and of punishment for the 'bad' (as among the Motu, chapter 3), there Christian notions could be readily incorporated into tradition. It was then up to Christian leadership to 'demythologize' the specificity of the place of the dead. But the success in making the conceptual transference has not always been the same in apparently similar cases. In the Trobriands, for example, where it was traditionally believed that those deceased who were able to reach the Island of Tuma without mishap became the supportive ancestors, one finds a distinctly split-level effect because of the traditional culture's resilience. Thus, the more traditionalist Trobrianders conclude that the dead proceed to Tuma, while those bowing to Christian influence talk of heaven. Some among both groups voice and admit both explanations without seeing contradiction, while another group has wrestled with the problem so as to reason out a compromise solution: that the dead undertake the journey to Tuma first and then heaven or hell afterwards (OT: Knight 1977). In those cultures, where there is no clear idea about the state and place of the dead, by contrast, Christianity usually fills in the vacuum, and there is often a tremendous fascination—as I found among the Bena(bena), for instance—for church iconic representations as to what after-life with either God or the Devil's minions is supposed to look like (fieldnotes on Four Square Gospel churches, 1980) In some societies, moreover, Christianity gets harnessed to procedures used to communicate with those who have passed to the spirit-world, and the new religion has also affected traditional pictures as to where the dead go, should the quality of their departures be separated out in a pre-contact mould between 'quiet' or 'nasty' (as in table 6). Phenomena among the Nalik of New Ireland nicely illustrate both points. At Lakwraman village (50 kilometres south of Kavieng), a United Church lay preacher-cumdiviner relies on contact with the spirits of the departed, particularly those who have been victims of sorcery, to help discover the cause of serious sicknesses among the living. Before his consultations with the dead, he always asks those present to sing a few Christian choruses or hymns, and then he himself offers a short prayer. His case is atypical in an area which has fallen increasingly under the spell of the charismatic style of Christianity,

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but he is obviously more engaged in a self-conscious Christianization of the ancestor cult than we have seen in chapter 3 (on the Wahgi golmolk). In connection with the placing of the dead, moreover, Christianity has modified the Nalik picture in an intriguing fashion. In pre-contact times a distinction was drawn between those deceased who died 'naturally' of old age or by sickness (including sorcery-induced illness) and those who died violently through either an accident or fighting. The former (or awarak) made their way successfully to the island of Djaul (Maitmat), while the latter (or apuru), were forced to roam around relentlessly in the bush (cf. chapter 3 on Roro beliefs). With the coming of Christianity, however, these two classes have tended to merge into one, the awarak a mat, who enter into the spirit world, while a new class of humans—evil persons, such as sorcerers, murderers, or thieves (who threaten the new order of peace throughout New Ireland)—are believed to be destined for endless wandering in their post-mortem existence. The Christian logic of recompense, being very ethically oriented, has made up for an apparent lacuna in the traditional one (Maralis 1981: 27-28, 38-40). These examples are not given to show what is officially accepted by church leaders, but rather to exemplify the many kinds of unofficial, organismic shifts occurring at the village level. After all, seminarian-trained clergy or church leaders would usually worry about the summoning of the dead as a practice detracting from central reliance on Christ. They might also baulk at 'folk methods' of preempting who is going to which place in the Next World (though I suspect they would be less unhappy about the new Nalik vision of posthumous fates than, say, recalcitrant Wahgi tribal fighters at Kup who, not sure where the spirits of the dead now go, hope that their fallen comrades will 'go to heaven' (OT: B. Kai 1976). But it is difficult to contain the manifold forms in which Christian notions of the after-life or of divine judgement can be 'Melanesianized'. The capacity of certain people to break across the barrier between life and death was a crucial, generative feature of the old Melanesian religions, and now that avowed Christians claim to trasverse these straits, we can expect some fascinating syntheses. Thus, such a remarkable Christian prophetess as Genukaiya Opeiya of Buna (Jaua, Orokaiva) has passed on strange messages about her Dantesque journeys to heaven and hell. In hell (or Gewa) she sighted the horrors of 'fire and smoke', and of being 'kicked around and mocked', a fate awaiting those 'who have performed black magic . . . or committed adultery'. In heaven she heard from God that He was now holding the world with one arm outstretched and one arm down, but that the time was coming when both his arms would give succour to all mankind—to the blacks and not just to the whites (Jojoga 1981: 137, 139-40). This is the kind of experience and creative insight beside which a formalization of Christian doctrine or principles, or an abstract outline

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of Christian ideas about rewards and punishments, will look dry and unattractive. Although these introduced beliefs are steadily having a serious modifying effect on Melanesian tradition, it is through a complex process of lived out or existentially significant experiences, rather than through intellectual debate, that 'relative Christianization' comes to the village. In the towns there is somewhat more demand, in contrast, to take note of Christian propositions as applicable across all cultures, and they are not so organismically related to the ongoing struggles of one's own people. The analysis proffered here in connection with the after-life also applies to notions and anticipations of the Great Event at 'the End of the World'. In cargo cult eschatologies, we saw retribution was to befall the oppressors in a final scenario of death, while the oppressed experienced the actualization of their desperate hopes (chapter 6), but quite a wide variety of eschatological pictures have emerged at the village level, ranging from the highly concretized and localized (see below) to rather stereotypical Christian images of Christ riding on the clouds of heaven and of the dead rising from their graves (cf. 1 Thess. 4:13-18, Mark 13:26, Acts 1:11, Rev. 21:12 - 22:4, etc.). In village more than in town congregations, again, expectations will differ rather more considerably as to whom God (and/or the ancestors) might have in mind eventually to requite, or to the location and extent of this dramatic Moment.2 Since much indigenous eschatology centres on the arrival of cargo and blessing, however, it is as well to place further discussion of it under the next and final heading. Well-being Tragic figures as most mortals turn out to be, they are usually more plagued by the threat of trouble, sickness and death than grateful for the rewards of life. And this is understandable, considering most of humanity until the present century lacked the disinfectants, penicillin, anti-venene, anaesthetics, blood transfusion methods, and a small host of other medicotechnological achievements to help vouchsafe a longer life-span. We would be fooling ourselves not to conclude, in any case, that even when humans are not given over to hostile actions, they are generally more placatory, more concerned to ward off possible trouble, more alienated and locked in the contradictions of society, more anxious and more prone to neuroses than able to embrace each moment of existence as a welcome gift of experience or a joy unto itself. The technical marvels and skyrocketing standard of living over the last hundred years, predominantly in the West, has had little effect in generating a radical transformation of this 'human nature' for the 2

We note here that some consideration has been given by Melanesian thinkers to the threat of the world's end by a nuclear holocaust. See Siwatibau and Williams 1982.

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better. Given such a melancholic or cynical note, though, there is no gainsaying the extraordinary fact that a complex sea of lithic, tightly bounded, primal cultures in Melanesia have become heirs to the so-called 'panaceas' of Western science in less than a few decades. Recently climaxing in preparations for four independent nationhoods, the importation of 'marvels', ranging from computers and satellite television to newly isolated prophylactics for chloroquine-resistant malaria, began to transform social and intellectual life, and have already dramatically lengthened average lifeexpectancies in various quarters of Melanesia, even if not improved human nature. Whether indigenous hopes in all these new life-enhancing 'gifts' have been actualized, and whether they have actually fallen within the grasp of most Melanesians, there is naturally a pervading sense of potential wellbeing in a region that has witnessed such changes in a mere generation. The 'rewards' of modernity, or the prospects thereof, have flooded in so dramatically that Melanesians are naturally prone to welcome the immense plethora of 'new offerings' without discrimination, as markers of wellbeing. Peter Lawrence argued persuasively that, while the predominant concern of black African traditional religions is 'health', that of Melanesian religions is clearly 'wealth', as the cargo movements testify (OT: 1978). Yet we should also acknowledge the sense of wholeness which lies behind most Melanesian visions of 'prosperity'—the general assumption that out of the actualizations of 'right reciprocal relationships' come, not just material abundance, but bodily strength, healing and escape from death. As scholars such as John Strelan (1977: 77) and Carl Loeliger (1977) have ably argued, Melanesian struggles for total well-being are comparable to ancient Israelite yearnings and thanksgivings for salvation (which was not distinctly spiritualized for most of ancient Israel's history, and consisted of deliverance from enemies or the pit of Sheol, a long life, a large family, and wealth which derived from just and proper social dealings rather than evil gain). Considering this point of contact between the Pacific and Biblical traditions, it is not inappropriate to talk of significantly agreeable happenings as 'blessings' (Loeliger 1977:136-38), since persons who consider the cosmos to be peopled by more-than-human beings usually acknowledge that the good things of life are not the fruits of their own labour alone. This recognition is not necessarily a reflection of the worker's alienation (Entfremdung) from his work, to use Marxist language, or a sign of compensation for contradictions in his society, since in almost all primal and archaic societies food is as dependent on eco-environmental factors which humans cannot or do not dominate, even through collective labour. Insofar as the religious mind senses that the sensible cosmos points beyond its own sensibleness, therefore, it will be grateful to supra-human (along with human) gifts, whereas a secular mentalite is content to talk simply of welcome relief, or of 'good things' perhaps offering a token gesture to the ancient motif of 'luck'.

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As is consistent with the general overview already sketched, Melanesians are still predominantly attuned to expect super-normal rather than merely natural blessing. With Christianization and modernization, of course, new interpretations of happiness and well-being arise; yet, whatever points which I now wish to make about new Christian and secular elements in retributive logic, these should be set against the backcloth of considerable continuity in hunting, fishing, agriculture and food-gathering in rural Melanesia. God tends to be relegated to a distance and not have the same attractions as the traditional spirits if He does not have involvement in such fundamentals as these; and if He lacks a role in them, new secular techniques and principles of interpreting the world have as much chance of diminishing Him as the old powers. Basic points to do with the altered rationale of blessing or rewards will concern food, prosperity (and prestige), happiness, healing, along with introduced theological beliefs about atonement, providence, resurrection and eschatology—a strange yet strangely interrelated motley. Food

The coming of the new order is associated with a new range of foodstuffs. This has produced the common preconception that increased access to the new foods engenders greater well-being among the partakers. Thus, not only has good garden land been set aside for cash crops to procure money to buy trade-store foods, but the purchasers of trade-store foods have few criteria by which to judge the new consumables' nutritious value. Research reveals some unfortunate myths. Comparing attitudes to diet in two eastern highlands primary schools, for example, one proximate to Kainantu township and one in a rural setting (among the Taiora), a team of medical students I worked with in 1977 showed that a significantly higher proportion of students in the rural school held 'Cheesepops' and sweet biscuits to be more important than sweet potato for bodily growth (UPNG 1977, cf. also Lederman 1981: 23). Here we locate the problem that, because virtually every element in the traditional diet is of bodily value (which is generally the case), every item in the expatriate-introduced array of foods is as well—when in fact a 'mixed blessing' lies in every bottle of beer or 'lolly water', and a whole mini-nation of diabetics can be created out of the recurrent consumption of marzipan bars (cf. SPC 1978: 2-8). Thus, accessibility to many new foods is a reward in the mind but not to the body; a signal that one is allegedly managing modernity when in actual fact one is courting the whites' physical maladies. Prosperity (and prestige) Cargo cult phenomena instruct us that the items of the new order are associated with introduced religion, chiefly Christianity. A working dichotomy is often found at the village level, consequently, between the

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good harvests and catches resulting from the traditional techniques and spiritual forces, and the access to Western-style commodities which issue from trying to be a Christian. What distinguishes many cargo cultists is their setting store by the ancestors to bring them Cargo and money; such is often the case because the churches have not disclosed the key to either set of items, although this only implies that many village Christians hold—and they do—that only the God of the whole universe of whom the missionaries have spoken could create Cargo and money (Lawrence 1964a: 63-86 for background). In the urban centres, where the human origins of cargo and money are more generally known, this does not mean that the strong associations between Christianity and the new wealth dissolve. On the contrary, in a Melanesian version of the later Judaic and eighteenth century Calvinist supposition that prosperity is a sign of God's favour (cf. Kitch 1967: 95-188), successful urban-dwellers tend to 'advertise' their economic security (including their white shorts and colourful meri dresses) as an attractive aspect of their faith. But prosperity is almost expected to be accompanied by generosity—whence prestige—and only bad ends are foreseen for the niggardly, while Melanesia has given birth to very few moneymakers who treat their profits as their own rewards. In the villages, moreover, Christians have fostered a nexus between Biblical and traditional injunctions to share, and produced relatively fair but constrained societies now threatened by modern trends. 'The younger generation . . . would rather be radical and businessminded', writes a Huli of his own people, but they have to contend with the 'conservative and dogmatic old[er] generation', who, combining primal and Christian preconceptions, complain that 'money has become more important than anything else' for too many younger people, and that 'it is a sin to get too wealthy' (Pape 1978:17). Quite anti-cargoist comments for Melanesia, it may seem! Yet, even the cargo cultist (though he may exempt his leaders) is usually opposed to the unequal distribution of prosperity's benefits. Happiness It is hardly true that laughter and joviality were absent from pre-Christian traditions, even if it were common that levity was the privilege of children while a general seriousness was becoming in adults. Without pretending to offer a safe generalization about the phenomenology of happiness or gladness, however, taking in everything from the Tolai's disdain towards those who mix their conversation with laughter to the erotic tableaux put on by Fore dramatists in the eastern highlands, I would venture to suggest that notions of happiness (pidgin: hamamas), or of a joyful state of wellbeing, have increasingly reflected the impact of Westernization and Christianization. As a supposed reality, one must concede, happiness is something of a modern chimera, since its experiences are always relative to the experiencer (Russell 1930: 27-44); but the introduced order of relative

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peace and opening opportunities for the new kind of plenty has become steadily associated with the possibility of a less anxiety-inducing, more flexible and unburdened way of life. This is a neglected area of social scientific investigation, probably because such states as gaiety or solemnness are often contingent upon circumstances and physiology, and inordinately hard to measure as social conditions. Relaxed mirth can constitute a 'false release of tension', or perhaps a means of glossing over suspicion and embarrassment in situations of rampant change. What can fairly be concluded? Most Melanesians may have lost the worry of war, but reaped a bad harvest or sorcery; they may have seen the pointlessness of many old tabus but learnt from sermons how it feels to be guilty before God; they may have experienced alleviations from the relentless hardship of stone-age economics only to be depressed by the inequalities of colonialism (and its carry-over into independent nationalism). The general tone of Melanesia, however, may be assessed comparatively: so that—in contrast to most black African states, and with the special problems of both Irian Jay a and New Caledonia acknowledged—the relative absence of rebelliousness towards the new 'macro-systems' themselves and the common cargoist hopes of embracing them too quickly or more speedily than is socially possible, are more indicative of the collective willingness to embrace 'Great Changes' as producers of hamamas than not. That Christian encouragement of joy and cross-cultural fellowship, as well as the growing popularity of 'secular' parties in urban settings, have played a crucial role in associating modernization with the pursuit of happiness or bettered social cordiality is beyond doubt. Whether the signs of happiness are, or prove to be illusory, and are responses to changes which are not all godsends after all, is a question for constant debate. Healing One of the great boons of the new order is modern medicine. This has been widely associated with Christianity since missions have often held clergy or support staff trained in basic medical skills, and have often established aid posts in outlying regions (e.g. Schweitzer 1948; Neill 1964). The paradigm of the healing Jesus has thus been constantly related to the care, which is tendered in Christian hospitals or sick bays, and not just to the giving of medicines (Kettle 1979). Naturally there have been (partly false) impressions that the missions possessed special spirit-power to bring about their many spectacular results (and thus a reading of modern treatment in traditionalist terms). There are cases, too, of disenchantment (and, thus, relative secularization?) when it is discovered, as it was among the Huli over in the 1980s, that the (independent) government was just as capable of setting up health agencies and utilizing the novel medical techniques as the missionaries (Pape 1978: 18; Frankel 1986).

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Discussion of healing as blessing can hardly stop short with comments about the impact of conventional Western medicine, however, and an increasing number of Melanesians are now as apt to attribute their recovery to the help of God as they are to the effectiveness of traditional herbs or anti-sorcery procedures. More than the supposed spiritual dimension of modern medicine, this shift can be accounted for by distinctly religious activity of the churches on behalf of the ill. I mean prayers, the layingon of hands and anointment, as well as the actions of individuals or charismatic groups who sense themselves to be empowered to heal. It suffices to remark that this field is a rich one beckoning further investigation, especially because indigenous founders of independent churches—such as Silas Eto (Roviana, New Georgia) and Vuniwai (Fiji) (Trompf 1983b: 71)— as well as participants in the various 'Spirit Movements' burgeoning throughout the Melanesian region, associate the gift of healing with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and thus rank it as one among a number of blessings which supersede those of the ancestors or local deities (Barr 1983b: 11). In certain cases the emergence of a Christian healer-figure in a society made more tense by an increase in sorcery (and by the continuing interpretation of all deaths as the results of such), has offered some hope of a break from a dissatisfying yet apparently immoveable religious 'trap' through a form of religious innovation. Joseph Oro, an eastern Toaripi man (Papuan Gulf), is one healer in this kind of situation I have interviewed. Though not well-versed in Christian belief, a visionary encounter with an angel, as he put it, directed him to collect the kinds of herbs and make the prayers requisite to combat the evil designs of sorcerers in his culture. In the 1970s he became a focus of hope for many sick and barren throughout the Moripi-Toaripi zone, struggling as he did to show that there was a higher source of power which could cancel out both the fear and effects of harm-dealers (Trompf 1991: 104) The coup failed against such a hidebound system, but the attempt, given the likelihood of anti-sorcery drives in the future, is portentous, as is the more recent outburst of healing by Ioa Boiori, the so-called 'miracle girl' whose short ministry of Christian healing near Port Moresby in 1985 began by requiring her father, a Koitabu sorcerer, to burn his house down (Trompf 1985). Theological insights Bearers of Christianity have floated a range of claims about the grace of God being evident in the opening of every evangelistic frontier. The degree to which these claims have made sense in terms of each culture, and the manner in which they were indigenized, makes for an inordinately complex story. One has to examine how a message fits into each primal belief system. Rhetoric about the shed blood of the Lamb (= the crucified Jesus), to take a negative example, has already been out of tune with people who

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domesticate swine not sheep, and who in some cases (as among the Loniu) find such an allusion to blood is distasteful (OT: Kolowan 1975). But the doctrine that Jesus died for the sake of humanity, and atones for its sins, has multiple implications and such an archetypal attractiveness that it can chime in with aspects of many different traditions. It links with pre-existing notions about sacrifice, for instance, or beliefs about certain cultic heroes (or so-called dema deities) who died in mythic time when bringing gifts and skills to their people (Idulusia 1985; May 1990: 128; Flannery 1979; Aerts 1981: 368-70). Among the Orokaiva, to take an interesting example, Jesus was early linked with a changing of names, particularly in baptism. It was traditional, significantly, that a manslaying warrior should adopt the name of the victim he slew—to obtain the ivo (spiritstrength) of the dead person (chapter 3). Now, 'since Christ was slain by his enemies', writes Erich Schwimmer of changing Orokaiva consciousness (1973: 78), after his death, those who adopted one of His names were saved and obtained great wealth and power ... Ivo can now be obtained (from Christ) without the need to kill a human victim. The baptismal name has, therefore, come to take the place of the old (evilly acquired) appellations. There have been striking connections made which are as concrete as this, and there have been much more abstract statements of meaning, such that Melanesians, on learning how much larger the world is than they ever imagined, can quickly grasp that the macro-cosmos has need of such a saviour, or at least that the whites, if they say they have such a need, can certainly be saved by him (cf. Trompf 1983b: 56, 67-68). Christian theologies of atonement, it will be seen, substantially spiritualize Old Testament conceptions of salvation. To be saved is no longer deliverance from death and danger, but from the forces of Evil, which can kill the soul as well as the body (cf. Matt. 10:28). We have already acknowledged, however, that Melanesians are generally less prepared for this spiritualization than many pious, other-worldly expatriate gospellers would like. There is much in every denominational tradition, at any rate, which is concerned with physical basics—such as material security, and healing (just discussed)—and this appeals to Pacific Islanders. Providence is another important case in point, since it can be manifest in both material and spiritual blessing. The idea of providence incorporates the assumption that God protects whole collectivities and institutions, and has a general plan for His work on the earth. Providence is a significant idea because it can be appealed to by nation-builders, who can wed it to the more secularlooking hope of development and progress, as one finds, for example, in the political philosophy of Father Walter Lini, former prime minister of Vanuatu, and in his rather jingoistic Christian claims that:

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in God is our history, in God is our victory and in God we shall have victory. Vanuatu stands in God, lives in God and moves in God. (in GV 1980b: 9, cf. 6-8)

Another paradigm of providence often derives from the stories of famous religious leaders, who may be preserved from perils so that they can complete the work of God 'assigned' to them. I think here of Zuruwe, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea, who has from time to time preached on his miraculous, Moses-like rescue from the jaws of a rushing stream. Born an illegitimate child, his desperate mother hurled him on the river bank. Later in the day his mother's sister noticed that the child had been delivered but was nowhere to be seen. Rushing from the village, the sister recovered the body, with ants teeming all over it, right on the river's edge, but not in the water. Taking the infant, she brought him up as her own son. —and he eventually rose to be the first black bishop of his church! (Trompf 1981a: 165). The providential succour of God, then, can be readily interpreted as applying very much to this life. On the other hand, the churches have also promulgated the hope of future blessings, normally (but not uniformly) placing their actualization in a heavenly, spiritual realm beyond this world. Resurrection is proclaimed as a state in which the faithful are gathered to God, and the End of the known order, though it is understood to affect this world, is usually described as a totally 'new heaven and a new earth' (Rev. 21:1), which God— and not human effort—will usher in in His own time. The rewards for Christ's followers are usually depicted as paradisal, but the emphasis has generally been placed on the spiritual unity with God, on complete peace, harmony and satisfied needs, not on the experience of bodily or material pleasures (thus Eusebius Eccles. Hist. Ill, xxviii, against the 'proto-cargoist' Cerinthus). It has been characteristic of Melanesians, on the other hand, to concretize Christian eschatology and to tailor Christian beliefs about the location and state of the departed to suit traditional pictures. Understandably, because talk of this world's end coincided with the appearance of cargo, the 'eschatological dimension' which the Western-style goods already had, in marking the end of the 'Old Time', tended to get incorporated into the futuristic promise of a totally new (or renewed) cosmos. In addition, the belief in the collective return of the ancestors—barely present in traditional expectations—became important, especially in the cargo movements, the more 'the remarkable circumstances and changes of the twentieth century demanded an eschatology from the Melanesian' (Trompf 1979c: 135; 1989a). The ancestors were the very same resurrectable dead spoken of by the Christians: as traditional sources of blessings and prosperity, their return would answer the concrete needs of Melanesians in the confusing, inequitable, colonized here-and-now (chapter 6).

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Already in certain styles of Christian Biblical interpretation this concretization of eschatology was present. In the New Testament there is an evident tension between belief that the faithful departed go straight to be with Christ on death, or whether they sleep in the grave until the Last Trump (1 Cor. 15: 42-50; 2 Cor. 5:4, yet cf. 1 Thess. 4:16-17; Rev. 20:13, etc.), so that certain individuals or groups (as in the noticeable instance of the Seventh Day Adventists), taught that the Last Day would see a supernatural reconstitution of the dead, especially out of the graveyards (and thus out of the matmat or cemeteries which have preoccupied so many Melanesians). Yet there has been a special diversity of Melanesian eschatological speculation which reflects a remarkable religious creativity along with all the signs of hope and despair that have drawn the attention of sociologists and anthropologists. At times the Melanesian susceptibility to harbour great hopes can take on political significance; and not just in grandiose secular political promises of rapid development, but even in campaigning on the ticket that Cargo would arrive after the right people win the elections (as Pangu candidate Singere promised among the Morobe highlanders in 1971) (OT: Voutas 1972). At other times, the focus is highly local. Among the Timbe (in the Morobe), for instance, it was previously believed that the dead went to a lake. After the living confessed all illfeelings towards the deceased, the 'soul' would show it had settled in its resting place when the relatives found a stake 'firmly planted into the earth near the lake'. Despite church leaders forbidding all talk of this belief, funerary rites are still to this day noticeably traditional, and most Timbe hold to the view that the ancestors remain in the lake awaiting the second coming of Christ (while there is no rumour that they, nor any traditional deity, should come back on their own accord) (Watts 1977: 1-3). Thus, the dialogue between Christianity and village religion goes on, and takes on intermittent intensity especially when there is need to work out the relationship between God and the ancestors, and the relation of both to the future security, or blessings, of the group (cf. Janssen 1974). Within the constant give-and-take of village reciprocity there lurks the prospect of a Recompense which supersedes all recompenses, a prospect, moreover, which contributes to the reordering of behaviour, not only belief, in a thousand varying degrees. The more undivided Christian stands for the purging of Melanesian Christianity from all misunderstanding, mind you, and challenges the intrusion of indigenous 'falsities' both old and novel. As Ben Lenturut, the leading light in the New Ireland charismatic movement once preached (1980), with some rather brilliant exegesis on Luke 24, the women who go trembling to Jesus's tomb and do not find whom they seek are like Melanesians seeking answers in the ancestral cult, while those who debated the significance of the crucifixion are like cargo cultists or intellectuals lost

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in speculation. For him there is no substitute, or no more worthwhile source of ultimate well-being than the real one. The task of purifying Christianity is an endless one, however, and quite apart from whether it has ever been completely achieved, it risks being pointless if Melanesians are overdeterred from spontaneously responding to the Gospel in ways which make sense in their language and inherited conceptual frameworks. The task is also formidable from another point of view; for out 'the other side' of Christianity, as it were, is the secular mentalite—often rebellious towards all authority (even if in spasms), and perhaps wanting too much freedom, more than is good either for the individuals or their societies. As a saying I have found currently popular in various Melanesian drinking houses has it, Drinking makes you go to sleep, sleeping means you will do no sinning; Not to sin means you will go to heaven; So drink up! and you will go to heaven! and as a T-shirt design in Port Moresby jibes, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the death, I fear no evil because I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley. Thus retribution, or at least requital understood to be meted out by spirits or God, shows its potential for being a matter or transaction of the past, always susceptible to being paid back itself by self-interest, and by those who would consign its religious ramifications—its shame and guiltincurring consequences, together with its other-worldly pies-in-the-sky— to the historic movements of human consciousness and the slices of human experience they themselves prefer to leave behind. As we contended right from the beginning of this work, however, retributive logic is a universal which can never be expunged from the psyche, but only moulded or manipulated into different shapes. And not to forget that in modern scientific thought it can carry much of the sting of its traditional or more distinctly religious pre-history, and sometimes apply an apocalyptic pressure with no less urgency than in 'hellfire and damnation' preaching. If this policy is not followed, there will be disaster.' If nature is misused any more, there will be catastrophes' (perhaps an explosion of 'the population bomb', or the megadeath of some fauna, and so forth). This is the rhetoric of 'modernized' retributive logic we hear more and more in tertiary educational institutions of Melanesia and along the corridors of power. It is the scientific payback logic one finds neatly illustrated in the 'input' and 'output' of general systems analyses and computerization, and its origins, as perhaps do the origins of science in general, go back to the applied logic of retribution in primal religions themselves.

Conclusions and Recommendations

What we have been finding in the southwest Pacific is of universal significance. Nowhere else on earth have so many small-scale societies and religions been locked up in the one domain, 'hermetically sealed' from outside contact until the recent days of modern European imperialisms. Nowhere else have the nature and pace of technico-social change been of such dramatic consequence for so many distinct cultures. Yet the human problems and issues arising out of each and all of the Melanesian microhistories thus far reviewed, as well as those laid bare through the experiences of proto- and emergent-nationalisms, are of profound importance for the human species as a whole. One reality remains sure: the complexes of thought and actions we call payback, reflecting as they do our ratio or humanity's universally recognizable principles of thinking, and manifesting as they have in a host of particular syndromes—such as war and peaceful resolve, blaming and forgiveness, punishment and mercy, uncooperativeness and active exchange, and so forth—will never leave us alone. In these complexes lie the chief problems and yet also the best promises of our general condition. The message from Melanesia to the rest of the world is precisely this, because in Melanesia the issues are curiously sharpened. There, perhaps, 'modern' military confrontation may not seem so significant, although long-term guerilla struggles over West Papua and Bougainville look inevitable. But in the persistence of tribal warfare we are jolted into imagining how the demon of war might have first inflicted itself on us. There in Melanesia, moreover, the special tensions between primal exchange systems and capitalism, and between the bearers of startlingly disparate technologies or lifestyles, have generated a whole landscape of fascinations, including the stupendous hopes of cargoists, the vicissitudes 457

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of financial experimentation, and the desperados from among the urban poor wanting a slice of modernity's cake. All these developments show members of other cultures something about themselves—about the almost endemic, internationalized pursuit of the new commodities, the underlying, irrepressible concern for both material security and total well-being. Put simply, they tell us all over again in refreshing terms what we all are at base: givers and takers, lovers and haters, friends and enemies, forgivers and resenters. As for addressing the specifically Melanesian challenges themselves, and thus compiling conclusions with recommendations, we can safely affirm that both the key difficulties and yet bright prospects of the region have everything to do with the subject of this book. Most of the problems and most of the best answers to them revolve around ethics and moral choices. Melanesia is not one of those areas easily located in the Third World, with dilemmas so materially fundamental that they have to do with famine and plague, hunger and the dearth of available resources. As my Tongan colleague, Sione Latukefu, never ceases to plead, most of the Pacific Islands should be put into a special class of their own—a kind of Fourth World— in which almost everybody has the chance of returning to a quite satisfactory subsistence in the tropical village if any national economy happened to collapse. Even were a look at the processes of massive landalienation in some quarters to modify this view, and the very hardening of colonial or post-colonial socioeconomic structures and inequalities to teach us that people can make choices within a decreasing range of options, Melanesian futures are becoming more and more dependent on the balance of value orientations. The sociology of these orientations—who holds which kind of values and for what motives they are canvassed or operated— is now a crucial area of inquiry. I have intended to open the whole scope of the inquiry with this book precisely because I perceive its immense importance, and because it has increasingly dawned on me that religious issues—those about our ultimate concerns, our deepest desires in life — constantly reappear as fundamental, and as equally determinative as the effects of material conditions. Without succumbing to the paternalism of definite prescriptions for Melanesia's 'social diseases' (so heeding Sachs 1992; Hours 1992), I would suggest that it has become a top priority for the national and indigenous leaders from the southwest Pacific to improve upon their acquaintance of 'the payback factor' and develop more systematic analyses of its effects. There is no guarantee that leaders might make use of the negative, retaliatory dimension of payback—to put down political opponents, let us say, or justify their own particular bigotries. The clear implication of this book, however, is that the human predicament is the better handled by the depletion of hostilities, suspicions, accusations, sullen withdrawals,

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

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and so on, and by the reinforcement of life-enhancing elements—appropriable in Melanesia itself from local traditions and from introduced sets of values or ideas claiming universal ramifications. The challenge of the future is for leaders to develop the right paradigms for conscientizing populaces through time into the wilful (though necessarily shrewd) pursuit of goodwill or cooperation and the healthy rejection of arrant destructiveness. The awkwardness will forever abide, admittedly, as to whether and how negativity will be appealed to in response to the 'undesirable tendencies' emerging in any society, and where leaders' practical choices will fall between recourse to violent punishment and a gentle word turning away the wrath. Nothing is left for it but for the decision-makers to take ethical choices of one kind or another. And if that is the reality, it is preferable that they at least know something about the bases of these choices: to learn when they might be legitimating their actions more on the cornerstone of one value-set than any other; to wrestle with the question as to how one decides the respective merits of one body of principles or another—allowing broadly humane values to outstrip narrow group interests (Mead 1977: 101), ethics and justice to challenge legalism (Deklin 1989), policies of vision to temper ad hoc pragmatism (Strathern 1989), and imaginative paradigmatic acts to generate changes of consciousness when hosts of boring bureaucratic decisions simply cannot. Enough has been written in this book to suggest that various blendings of tradition and Christianity into Melanesianized Christian or paraChristian outlooks amount to a vast shift of consciousness underway in the southwest Pacific. By and large, my tenor has been, not only to accept this transition as rampant and inevitable, but to celebrate its potentials and excitements. I would not like to leave the impression, however, that what is socially constructive in this shift cannot be undermined, for it certainly can, and rather easily at that. Without constant self-criticism, Christianity, or any religious tradition for that matter, is susceptible to being used for people's own ends—to justify violence, turpitude, unsociability and all the opposites to 'unconquerable goodwill'. And unless Melanesian traditions are Vetted' by an un-debased Christianity, they will easily reactivate old ethno-solidarities for divisive purposes or tame the Christian faith's astounding universalism into forms of neo-tribalism. Besides, with the influxes of new wealth, it will suit many leaders and clever Melanesians to downplay the roles of traditional or Christian commitment in their lives, and thus to avoid the hypocrisy of acquiring riches while still espousing non-selfish values. The danger is that, by their keeping one foot in a camp which once succoured them, but which they steadily come to betray, such people will thus cast a cloud of inauthenticity over the whole tradition that nurtured them in the first place.

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In this last point we allude to the modern politicization of decisiontaking in Melanesia. The very recent tendency is to expect that the solutions to Melanesia's problems will be essentially and almost exclusively political solutions, coming from more effective legislation, law enforcement and bureaucracy. If this book reveals anything, it is that religion in various forms is the predominant force in Melanesian life, and that no genuine or long-term solutions will be arrived at if the datum is swept under parliamentary carpets. 'On the ground', in every local sphere I have experienced, Christian and traditional leadership are in play along with government officials or representatives, and I doubt if any state of genuine peace will be possible, or any law-reform remain unimpeachable, or any community or national bonding durable, unless peace, good order and cooperativeness are embraced as religious commitments rather than political expediencies. If, on the other hand, traditional belief systems and Christian denominationalisms will perpetuate tendencies making for disunity, together with political parties and other factional groupings, it is going to become an important matter of ongoing discernment as to how much 'harmless' or non-violent plurality can be tolerated within Melanesian nations, and which actions are to be taken when divisions fester into the worst forms of negative payback. Recommendations of a highly specific nature do not come readily to conclude a book generalizing about a whole region. One way of covering the diversity of need is to finish by proclaiming an urgency for the governments and non-government (especially church) agencies of Melanesian countries to coordinate already existing work on conflict resolution and peace research; actually spending resources, as well as campaigning publicly and educationally, to ensure a prolonged concentration of energy on the pragmatic 'arts of peace' (not punition!), and an integration of this work with contextually realistic 'economic development' and employment strategies in conflict-torn or disaffected zones. At the end, then, I freely confess that the analyses herewith undertaken have hardly been for historical interest alone, but for the learning of lessons from the past to effect human betterment in the future, with both the individual reader and societies at large in view. The analysis, indeed, is meant to spur action with humanity's most neglected work-tools, the artifices of peace. Far from being another call to arms on behalf of sectionalisms, a cry for the Workers of the World to Unite, for instance, and thus to extol yet another reason for disunity, it is a summons to each person, from the most skilful pragmatist to the quietest recluse, indicating that the most precious yet barely experienced gift that the world can receive is positive, creatively sponsored peace, and that there is nothing to be prized more highly as an antidote to the poisons of revenge.

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PG Provincial Government Papers (PNG) 1980a Chimbu (Songo, 'Comprehensive Community Education' mimeographed directive, 20 Oct.). 1980b Western Highlands (Koiam, 'Proposals for Compensation Payments' draft, Oct. pp. 2-3). 1982 Manus (Report on Makasol, Lorengau). PNA Papua New Guinea National Archives 1910a Ioma Patrol Reports (Bowden, 3, 5, 7 Dec.) (Ser. G91, Box 6528). 1910b Ioma Patrol Reports (Henry, 23 Dec.) (as above). 1912a Ioma Patrol Reports (Henry, Nov.) (as above). 1912b Ioma Patrol Reports (Wuth, Nov.) (as above). 1927 General Correspondence of the Papua Government 13-6-3, 24 Feb. 1935-36 'Upper Ramo Patrol Report' (B, No. 28) (p. 6 on Finintigu). 1938-39 'Hagen—Sepik Patrol Report' (Taylor, sep. bound file). 1941 Kairuku correspondence, Thompson to Hon. Govt Secretary 1941 (Copy 23, No. 59-21-41). 1941-42 Kundiawa Patrol Report (Warren-Shand, No. 2, 'Wahgi Valley'). 1949-50a Central Highlands Report, Minj (Corrigan, No. 1 of 1949-50, s.v. Aug. 1). 1949-50b as above (Corrigan, s.v. Village officials'). SDF Sub-District Files (Papua New Guinea) (examined on location) 1944-45 Goroka Patrol Report No. 10 (Lt Stevenson). 1959 Pomio Sub-district File 51-1-2 (Fleay, 21 July; West 1 Sept.). 1960 Pomio Sub-district File 51-1-2 (Fleay, 12 Jan.; Oakes 13 March). 1962-63 Goroka Patrol Report, Lunipe Region No. 5 (Jacobsen, Alder, and Levi). 1964[?] Pomio Sub-district File (Fore, typescript marked 'Koriam and the little book' n.d.). 1965 Goroka Patrol Report No. 65/6 (Connors and Davies, Nov.-Dec. s.v. 'Cargo Cult' [Sioikei]). 1965[?] Pomio Sub-district File 51-1-2 (marked 'Cargo Cults - W Morgan' handwritten, n.d.). 1966-67 Pomio Sub-district File 51-1-2 (McCarthy, 5. Oct. 1966, Dickinson, 26 May 1967; West, 10 May 1967). 1967 Pomio Sub-district File 51-1-2 (Bottrill, 26 Feb.). 1969a Yangoru Sub-district File 67-2-1 (Hicks, 27 Oct., 1969). 1969b Goroka Patrol Report No. 14 (Nov.-Dec. D'Albus). 1969c Goroka Patrol Report No. 20 (S. F. Foran). 1969-70 Goroka Patrol; Report No. 10 (McLachlan). 1970-71 Goroka Patrol Report No. 24 (Local Government Patrol 6) (Vandenberg). 1979 Pomio Sub-district File 7-1-1 (Bos, marked 'Meeting long Palmal' etc. 6 Jan.). SNA National Archives, Solomon Islands 1934 Report on New Georgia District, BSIP File 78/7 (formerly Western Pacific Archives). UPNG University of Papua New Guinea 1977 'Minutes of the 8th Meeting of the History Department' (item 4); and Letter to the Vice-Chancellor by Kaniku, Jojoga, and Aitsi, 19 July.

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APCM Australia Pacific Christian Mission Papers 1980 Hughes, 'Kobakma Cargo Cult' (mimeograph). EA Evangelical Alliance of the South Pacific Islands Records 1979 'The Relationship of the Major Churches to the Small Divisive Groups' (April) (mimeograph). 1981 Annual General Meeting 8-12 Sept. Membership List (mimeograph). CL Catholic Liturgical Documents 1976 'Ordinesion bilong Pris: Mark Worn' (Mount Hagen Diocese), n.d. 'Ordinesin bilong Pris' (Liturgical Catechetical Institute, Goroka). LA Lutheran Archives (Lae, Papua New Guinea) 1974 Pres. Gediisa-Tingasa, 'Kago Kult Fall Studie, Pitenamu Society' (Nov. 1974, ed. F. Steinbauer). LMS London Missionary Society Archives 1876 Lawes, 'Diary, visit to the villages in the interior' (Mitchell Library, microfilm item 33, A3923-1). 1880 Chalmers, 'Diary, Trip to the Papuan Gulf (dated 2 Jan. Mitchell Library, as above). 1884 Chalmers, 'Diary, Trip to the West' (dated 20 June, Mitchell Library, as above). 1917 Pryce-Jones, 'Diary' (LMS Archives, New Collection, UPNG Library). MCC Melanesian (recently Papua New Guinea) Council of Churches Papers 1978 Annual General Meeting, Item 77:7. 1985 Special Submission on Probation Procedures (Giddings), 22 June. 1993 Special Statement on Missions (R. Ngepe). MSC Mission(naires) du Sacre Cceur 1888-89 Navarre, Notes et journal, Juin 1888-Juli 1889 (Bereina). 1928 De Boismenu to Dubuy, 18 Jan. (Ononghe). 1942 Dubuy, Rapport pastoral, s.v. 'observations' (Ononghe). 1953-54 C. Gremaud et ah, Journal du district, Ononghe, 1953- , s.v. 'Avril; 1954' (Ononghe). UCA United Church (of PNG and the Solomon Islands) Archives 1975-76 Gemo Island File (UC Head Office, Port Moresby). 1979 Munda (Bishop's Files, New Georgia). WMM Wesleyan Methodist Mission Society Archives (Fiji Mission) 1835 Cargill, Letter to Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society; General Secretaries, London, Lakeba, 18 June, s.v. p. 72 (Mitchell Library, Sydney, archiv. item A 2809). NEWS MEDIA AND RELATED LITERATURE Ag An AB A AAB B BCM BM BRW Bu DKZ Fam FEER

The Age (Melbourne) The Anglican (Melbourne) Arawa Bulletin (Bougainville) The Australian (Sydney) Austral-Asiatic Bulletin (Noumea and Sydney) Bella (London) Brisbane Courier-Mail (Brisbane) Die Biene auf dem Missionfelde (Gossler Soc, Berlin) Business Review Weekly (Sydney) Bulletin (Sydney) Deutsche Koloniale Zeitung (Berlin) Family (Anglican Church of PNG) (Port Moresby) Far Eastern Economic Review (Hong Kong)

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465

Fiji Sun (Suva) Fiji Times (Suva) Green Left (Sydney) Guardian Weekly (London) (including Le Monde and Washington Post) The Independent (London) Kanak (Noumea) Die katholischen Mission (Bonn) Les temps modernes (Paris) New Guinea Mission (London) Niugini Nius (Port Moresby) National Times (Sydney) Paradise (Papua New Guinea) Papuan Courier (Port Moresby) Papua New Guinea Post-Courier Pacific Islands Monthly (Suva) Rabaul Times (Rabaul) Seli Hoo (Vila) The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney) The Times (London) Time Magazine (New York and Sydney) Telegraph-Mirror (Sydney) The Times of Papua New Guineci (Port Moresby) United Church News (Port Moresby) Uni Tavur (UPNG, Port Moresby) The University This Week (UPNG, Port Moresby) Workers News (Port Moresby) ORAL TESTIMONIES*

Abaijah, hon Josephine Agnanta, Avi A'ide, Raphael Aim, Bari Aipe, ]Kulne Aisak, Beka Akuram, mag Paul Albaniel, Manuel Allen, Dr Bryant Allen, Prof Michael Apa, pstr Aihi Armini, Herea Arsanko, counc Aruga, Wesley Aubo of Sitokalehai Awai, Mary Baal, Prof (former Gov) Jan van Bagomas, Cornelius Banaku, Stephen #

Barr, Fr Kevin Berry, Terry Binner, pstr A. Binot, Yatosa Biten, pstr Bugang Bodibo, Seri Bomou, Moriah and Tukou Brown, Rev Herbert Brunton, Caroline Carrad, Emmanuelle Chambers, Dr Marcus Chatterton, Rev Dr Sir Percy Cleazy, Prof Kenneth Coltre, Fr Davide Corr, Ian Cruttwell, Rev Norman Dambui, Premier Cherubim Dash, Sahun

Names in brackets are of important oral informants not appearing after OT in the text.

466 Dillon, Fr Ian Dudley, hon Job Duinarinu, S. Dus, Puo Edoni, William Enos, Apisai Entonia, Seti Esef, Camillo [Eto, Silas, the Holy Mama] Fairio, Bas Ferea, William Ferguson, Dr James Filo of Inawai'a Flannery, Sr Wendy Fleckenstein, Dr Fritz von Frendo, Dr Henry Futrepa, Umakive Gadiki, Rev Princ Vasi Gaigo, bish. Gargoa Gardiner, David Garuai, Sr Mary-Luke Gay, Gudrun Gayalu, Benjamin Gesch, Fr Patrick [Gnu'u, Aisa] Guilliam, Rev John Hall, Raymond Hand, archb David Harets, Levi Hassett, Sr Rita Hau'ofa, Dr Epili Hawina, Daniel Hooley, Dr. B. Houghton, Rev William Ine, Gregoris Iobi, Wilfred Ison, Terry Jojoga Opeba, Willington Kadiba, John Kai, Boma and James Kaipel, Kur Kamen, Barunke and Philip Kanangl, hon Opai Kanava, Adrian Kaniliso, Eva

BIBLIOGRAPHY Kapi, Henry Karo, Vavine Kasaipwalova, John Kavo, Andrew Kawa, Peni Kawei, Louise Kepa, Taka Kidu, Rev Dr Idea Kigasung, Rev Dr Wesley Kilage, Gov Gen Ignatius Kingkei, Cathy Knight, Fr James Kokon, Jack Kolia, Dr John Kolip, Wusel Kolowan, Caleb Kopi, Sibona Kopyoto, Christopher Kuerten, Fr E Kuiwan, Peter [Kuku, Samuel] Kumai, Kai La'a, pstr Armini Laba, Bilai Lahua, Tamarua Lamaro, John Landi, Orim Lapa, pstr Charles Latukefu, Princ Dr Sione Lawrence, Prof Peter Leeuwen, H. van Lenturut, Rev Ben Leona, Eoimila [Longi, Leo] Lopa, I. Luko, Lagitamo Maddox, Prof Ian Maharaj, Indar Rohit Mali, Marcus Malone, Fr Antony Manarip, hon Leo Mangi, Dr Joseph Manmije, Tumbo Mantovani, Fr Dr Ennio Markuas, Ellie Martin, Tapei Masina, Ahne Matiabe, hon Aruru Matthew, John Meba, Lohia

BIBLIOGRAPHY Mennis, Mary Mileng, Mirian Momong, Paul Mond of Manump Mopio, hon James Mordaunt, Fr Frederick Munga, Koi Munil of Bolba Munster, Dr Peter Nabnai, Joseph Nam, Kumbe Narokobi, hon Bernard Neil, William Neulifia, Brugue Nianfop, Mary Nolia, M. Norwood, Hugh O'Hanlon, Dr Michael Okona, Risiepa One, Koide Oram, Nigel Pala, Rev Jina Pat, pstr Numa Plutta, Fr Paul [Pokawon, Premier Polonhou] Polekaman, Clement Polume, Bonowan, Samuel and Thomas Posu, Obed Pouwer, Prof Jan Pratt, bish David Ramsay, Dr Elzabeth Rasinakafa, Foritime Rearea elders (various) Reay, Dr. Marie Rogermuri, Rev Andrew Ruhan, Fr Tony Rumakiek, Rex Sapenta, Carson Seifert, William Seman, Rokki Shaw, Prof Daniel Sipari, Hermann Elsolo Smith, Dr Alan Soariba, Cornelia Somerville, Rev Ian Spycher, Rev U

Stanley, pstr Chester Stottick, Rev Dr Karl Strathern, Prof Andrew Takoi, Lilian Tamoane, Matthew Tapari, Budai Taylor, David Temu, llama Teosin, John Teske, Rev Gary ToBurua, Mod Albert ToKilala, Rev Princ William ToKivai, Usiel Tongil, Clitus Topo, Thomas Toroken, Jacob Tracey, Sandy Tschauder, Fr Joseph Turner, Arthur Tuza, Esau Unero, Afito Vangeke, bish Louis Varagi, Sport Vetunuawa, Gerard Vod, Gabriel Gulola Vogasung, Thomas Voutas, hon Antony Wabadela, Suluba Walep, Victor Wandel, Dr Michael Wani, Makuri Watts, Ties Weeks, Prof. Sheldon Welling, Fr Luis Wen, Beig Wer, J. Weymouth, Dr Ross Whitmore, Dr Timothy Wilkinson, Dr Alan Wilkinson, Anne Wilkinson, Princ Kenneth Wilson, Excel. Michael Worn, Fr Mark Wrigley, Peter Yaliwan, Matias Yeki, Kanangl Zechariah of Buka

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Abbott, D. C. 1984 'Anglican Mission Education in Papua New Guinea 1891-1972'. Doctoral dissertation, Australian College of Theology, Sydney. Acton, H. B. (ed.) 1969 The Philosophy of Punishment, London. Adams, R. 1982 'The Pitenamu Society' in R. J. May (ed.), Micronationalist Movements in Papua New Guinea, Political and Social Change Monograph 1, Canberra, pp. 63£f. Aerts, T. 1981 'Melanesian Gods' Annales Aequatoria 1: 357ff. 1983 'Melanesian Gods' Bikmaus 4(2): 21ff. 1984 'Christian Art from Melanesia' Bikmaus 5(1): 47ff. Aerts, T , and Trompf, G. W. 1991 'The Catholic Missions: a case history' in G. W. Trompf, Melanesian Religion, Cambridge, pp. 163ff. Afigbo, A. E. 1972 The Warrant Chiefs: indirect rule in southeastern Nigeria, 18911929, London. Ahrens, T 1974 ' "Lo-Bos"and Christian Congregations in Astrolabe Bay' Point 1: 29ff. Ahrens, T. 1977 'Concepts of Power in a Melanesian and Biblical Perspective' Point 1: 61ff. Aitsi, L. A. 1984 'The Impact of the Pacific War and the Angau Administration on the Power and the Status of the Chiefs of the Roro People'. Honours subthesis, UPNG, Port Moresby. Aldrich, R. and Connell, J. 1992 France's Overseas Frontier, Cambridge. Alexander, R. 1987 The Biology of Moral Systems, Hawthorn, N.Y. Ali, A. 1982 'Fiji: the politics of a plural society' in A. Ali and R. Crocombe (eds), Politics in Melanesia, Suva, pp. 138ff. Allen, B. J. 1976a 'Information Flow and Innovation: diffusion in the East Sepik District, Papua New Guinea'. Doctoral dissertation, ANU, Canberra. 1976b Tangu or Peli: Dreikikir Open Electorate' in D. Stone (ed.), Prelude to Self-Government, Canberra, pp. 133ff. Allen, B. J., and Giddings, R. 1983 'Land Disputes and Violence in Enga' in B. Carrad, D. Lea, and K. K. Talyaga (eds), Enga: foundations for development, Armidale, pp. 179ff. Allen, M. 1967 Male Cults and Secret Initiation, Melbourne. 1976 'Roads, Cults and Authority'. Unpublished typescript, University of Sydney, Sydney. 1981 'Innovation, Inversion and Revolution as Political Tactics in West Aoba' in M. Allen (ed.), Vanuatu: politics, economics and ritual in Island Melanesia, Sydney, pp. 105ff. 1987 Tig Sacrifices in North Vanuatu'. Unpublished paper, Symposium on Sacrifice, ANU, 18 April, Canberra. Allen, R. 1927 The Establishment of the Church in the Mission Field: a critical dialogue, London. Allport, G. W. 1958 The Nature of Prejudice, Garden City, N.Y. Amarshi, A., Good, K., and Mortimer, R. (eds) 1979 Development and Dependency: the political economy of Papua New Guinea, Melbourne. Amean, A. 1973 'Early Methods of Punishment in the Highlands' Oral History 7:23ff. Amerlsvoort, V. F. P. M. van 1964 Culture, Stone Age and Modern Medicine. Samenlevingen buiten Europa, Assen. Amnesty International 1990 'Papua New Guinea: human rights violations on Bougainville 1989-1990'. Mimeographed papers, London.

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Index of Melanesian Cultures For districts, islands, provinces, regions, towns and other topographical references, see General Index

Abelam 45, 53, 59, 73, 74 Ablingi 260 Agarabi 358 Airmati 195 Ambai, see Lombaha Ambrym 28, 93, 360, 422, 441 Aoba 229 Aore, see Aurora Arapesh 27, 45, 88, 90, 127, 345, see also Ilahita Arapesh Arawe-Kandrian 88, 91, 92 Aroma-Velerupu, see Hula Arube 53 Asaro 47, 87, 247, 347-49, 364, 379-80 Asmat 54, 277 Atchin 81-92 Atzera 101, 395, 432 Aurora 31 Awa23 Baining 45, 163, 247, 261, 292, 296 Baktaman 35, 53, 66, 110, 118, 121, 125 Baled 95 Baluan (Matangkor) 212-213, 214, 273 Banaro 68 Banks Is. 116 Bedamini 27 Begesin 45, 167, 295 Bena(bena) xv, 33-6, 40, 41-7, 52, 56, 62, 87, 88, 90, 133, 137, 138, 149, 183-84, 241-43, 302, 333, 386, 445 Biak31, 171, 195-201,250,261 Biami 105 Bibo 105 Bilbil 166, 361 Bimin-Kuskusmin 141, 361, 435-36

Biwat 144, 149 Bogia groups 249, 442-43 Bokondini 61, 66 Bonarua 57, 162 Bongu 31 Bosavi 57, 64-5, 94, 110-2, 138, 307-08 Bosmun 45, 140, 143, 144, 148, 149 Buang 432 Buin 87, 132, 136, 143 Bukaua 146 Bulolo (Karin) 336 Buna 94 Bunama 57 Bundi 161, 358, 363 Busamo 74-5, 90 Chambri 27, 50, 87, 89, 98 Chimbu 25, 27, 50-1, 94, 98-9, 108, 118, 120, 150, 183, 184, 185, 196, 187, 190, 192, 293, 313, 324-29, 334-35, 358, 363, 367-68, 376-77, 385, 394 Choiseul 45, 52, 85, 98, 109, 136 Chuave (fringe Chimbu) 327, 338, 344, 386 Daba 293 Daga 257, 293, 429 Dani (including Dugum, Grand Valley) 17, 53, 125, 352, 400, see also Bokondini Daribi 121-2, 146 Debere 293 Dene 161 Djaul 31, 446 Dobu 26, 44, 57, 66-7, 88, 372-73, 362 Dovaraidi 293 Duna 122, 429

528

INDEX Efate 27, 126 Elema 54, 66, 84, 87, 104, 118, 161, 166, 171, 202, 240, 299, 362, 397 Enga groups 167, 223, 324, 331, 334, 363, 384, Ipili 121, 322, 354, 357, 432, Kyaka 122, 357, 378, 396, 425, Laiapu 357, Mae 28, 33, 46, 57, 75, 90, 92, 94, 101, 108-9, 119, 135, 146, 184, 319, 329-30, 357, Sau 357, Tombema 236 Erave 146, 180 Erromango 294 Espiritu Santo groups 210, 219-20, 228, 231, 249, 255-56 Etoro 43, 57 Evo85 Fiji 23, 42, 45, 55-6, 120, 125, 126, 138, 150, 166, 171, 210, 223, 280, 291, 298-99, 323, 373, 375, 389, 401, 425, 429, 436-37, 442, 450 Finingitu 323 Florida (and Sau) 84 Foi 349 Fore 53, 120-21, 434, 450 Fuyughe xv, 31, 50, 79, 98, 101-2, 151, 163-4, 174-83, 195, 204, 269, 292, 297, 304, 334, 336-37, 391, 429 Gabadi 361 Gadsup 41, 62, 83-4, 125, 356-57 Gahuku-Gama, see Asaro Gainj 88 Gari 30, 88 Garia 45, 277, 418 Gebusi 27, 65 Gimi 138 Gira 230 Gizra 323 Gnau 138 Goilala, see Tauade Guadalcanal groups 69, 211, 232, 302, 428, see also Gari, Koaka, Moli Haku 136, 143, 148, 149 Halia 45, 75,136,143,148,206,216-17,224-25 Haruai 35, 45 Homan 333 Houailou 71, 86 Hube 43, 245, 404 Hula-Aroma-Velerupu 72, 91, 144, 294, 298, 362, 394, 438, 440-41 Huli 45, 66, 92, 107, 122, 138, 141, 145, 150, 280, 307, 333, 377, 427, 450-51 Iatmul 26-27, 28, 50, 54, 89, 98

529

Ilahita Arapesh 44, 46, 52, 53, 58-9, 67-8, 90, 94, 439 Iova 44, 125 Iwa Is., see Massim Jale 53 Jeannet Is. 164 Johnston Is. (Matangkor) 215 Kabwum 442 Kalam 37-8 Kaliai 88 Kaluli, see Bosavi Kamano 52, 166, 248, 319, 377, 384, 433-35, 442 Kaowerabedj 195 Kapaour 280 Kapauka 83-8, 91-2, 246 Kapuna, see Purari Karkar 144, 148, 172, 277 Kaupena 101, 426 Ke'efu 241 Keraki 53, 147 Kerewe 54 Keveri 27, 293 Kikori 54, 232 Kiriaka 90, 209 Kiwai 125, 323 Koaka 43, 115 Koiari 163, 179, 297, 299, 334, 362, 383 Koitabu 70, 78, 143, 452 Kogu 87 Koko(da), see Orokaiva Kolepom/Kimaan 97 Kopani 237, 273, 321 Kopiago, see Duna Kove 112, 360 Kridime 291 Kubo 105 Kukukuku 26, 92, 166 Kumula 105 Kunimaipa 80, 293, 297, 334, 336 Kutubu 140 Kwaio 86, 110 Kwato, see Suau Kwoma 61 Laewomba, see Wompa La Foa 72 Lakalai 90 Lamassa 143, 148, 149 Langalanga 280 Lau (Malaita) 86 Lau group (Fiji) 23, 426 Lemakot 126

530

INDEX

Lifu 69, 255, 296 Lolo 114 Lombaha 122 Loniu, Los Negros (Matangkor) 69, 106, 388, 453 Loyalties, see Lifu Mailu 69, 71, 307 Maisin 72, 361 Malala 43, 143, 144, 148, 149 Malekula groups 35, 46, 53, 98, 115, 122, 125, 323 Managalas 45, 161 Manam 44, 115, 220, 249, 400 Mandak 106 Manus 71, 87, 89, 94, 99, 112, 117-8, 207, 214, 223-24, 246, 249, 255, 274-75, 323, 398 Mappi 25, 53, 86 Marind-Anim 26, 52-4, 87-8, 91, 125 Maring 38-9 Massim 53, 57, 67-8, 84, 88, 97, 98, 110, 142, 147, 161, 372 Matangkor groups 106, 249, 255, see also Baluan, Johnston, Loniu, Rambutyon Mekeo 76-8, 87, 89-90, 93, 96, 99, 120, 181, 203-5, 273, 304, 336, 355, 359-60, 387, 434-45 Melpa 31, 43, 75, 88, 105, 293, 331, 338, 378, 400, 430 Mendi 42, 70, 118, 149, 358, 385, 412 Mengen 136, 138, 140, 143, 144, 148, 149, 257-66 Mimika 233, 277 Min 428 Misima 341 Moi 412 Moli 69, 138 Monu-Alu 31 Moripi 99, 452, see also Toaripi Motu 46, 54, 71, 78, 91, 104, 114, 138, 143, 145, 149-50, 170, 205, 293-94, 297, 306-07, 336, 362, 379, 389-90, 394, 397, 429, 434, 445 Muju (Woodlark) 151 Mumeng 349-50 Mundugumor 53 Murik Lakes 52, 57, 58-9, 94, 149, 427 Mussau 26, 299 Muyu 93 Nalik 98, 149, 445-46 Nara 362 Narak 136, 143, 148 Nasioi 85, 88, 237, 353, 383

Negrie 27, 90, 141, 217, 226-27, 257, 379 Ngaing 106, 215, 230, 244, 265, 269-70, 418 Ngalum 89 Ngarawampum 295 Ni'i 89 Ningeram 428 Nipa 70 Okena 75. 130 Oksapmin 361, 435-36 Onabasulu 57 Orokaiva groups 23, 27, 45, 52, 72, 88, 90, 91, 94, 116, 368, 374, 394, 427-28, 436, 443, 453, Binandere 53, 110, 166, 323, 415, Jaua 53, 99, 120, 131, 166, 321, 445, Sangara 128-31, 258, Ioma 136, 143, 148, Koko(da) 129, 233, 391 Panniet 5 Pentecost Is., see Raga Ponam 143, 148, 323 Purari (including Kapuna) 53, 245, 301-02, 428 Raga 302 Rambutyon Is. (Matangkor) 215, 273 Ramu, middle 97; see Bongu, Bosmun, Malala, Tung Rigo 25, 170-1, 306, 343 Roku 276 Roro 78, 89, 120, 142, 151, 304, 317, 333, 387, 446 Roviana 30, 49, 60, 87, 120, 221-23, 452 Samo 105, 425 San Cristobal 43 Santa Ana 30 Santa Isabel (Cheke Holo) 355, 395, 406 Sawi 27-8, 125 Sawos 50 Sengam, see Yam Senseng 85, 88, 89, 93, 126, 133, 360 Sentani 336 Seragi 69, 176-7, 181, 196 Siane 118, 293, 386 Siassi 27 Si'ini 69 Simbai 236, 411 Simbo 30 Siwai 85, 116, 148 Solos 45, 84, 310-11 Suau 88, 400 Suki 53, 146 Sulka 262-63, 293 Sursunga 136, 143, 144, 148, 149

INDEX Tabar 26 Taiora 106, 143, 144, 202, 240, 343, 377, 449 Takin-Telefomin 28 Tambul 58 Tanga 26, 61, 140 Tangu 114, 141, 206, 250 Tanna 166, 202, 207, 208, 210, 220, 228, 231, 255-56, 308 Tauade (Goilala) 40, 59-60, 79-81, 84, 167, 171, 292, 304, 313, 322, 334-37, 429 Taulil 292, 296 Tauna Awa 62, 136-7 Tchambuli, see Chambri Telefomin, see Takin Tiang 31 Tigak 48 Timbe 136, 144, 455 Toambaita 43, 46, 122-3, 436 Toaripi 42, 92, 138, 245, 297, 452, see also Moripi Tolai 45, 46, 47, 71, 75 81, 84, 90, 91, 94, 132, 142, 143, 144, 148, 149, 166, 220, 246-47, 250, 262-63, 291-92, 296, 301-03, 305, 318, 336, 338, 363, 379, 386, 397, 412, 450 Tor 70, 141-2 Torau 78, 118 Torres Strait Is. 132, 167 Trans-Fly 142, see Keraki Trans-Gogol, 308 Trobriand 42, 75, 88, 120, 132, 136, 140, 167, 250, 346, 394, 445 Tulu 127 Tung 126

531

Umeda 25 Unea (Bali Witu) 245 Usiai 71, 214, 249 Wain 84, 127, 295 Warn 140 Wahgi xv, 25, 26, 45, 46, 50-1, 52, 58, 61-3, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 97, 98-101, 104-5, 114, 116, 118, 119, 121-2, 133, 134-5, 137-9, 141, 146, 183-95, 197, 233-36, 240-41, 292, 300-01, 313, 321, 323-26, 338, 345-47, 355, 358, 373, 376, 384-85, 388-89, 392, 394, 399, 406, 429-30, 438, 446 Wantoat 43, 120, 136, 144, 149 Wape 118-19 Waropen 27, 98, 125, 196, 197 Wassisi 387 Wedau 84 Wiru 142, 232, 295 Wogeo 116 Wompa (Laewomba) 27, 333, 432 Woodlark, see Muju Wuvulu 23, 73-4, 150 Yabob 166 Yam and Sengam 166 Yangoram 217-18 Yangom 217, 226-27, 257, 362, 364, 379, 439 Yapen-Waropen, see Waropen Ye'in 89 Yombi 101, 431

General Index

Abal, T. 330, 367 Abel, C. 400 Aborigines (Australia) 101 abstention 110, 236, see also fasting accidents, notions of 132-3, 425, 439, 441, 445 accusations 67, 69, 274, 355, 366, 435, 459 acquisition, acquisitiveness 113-15, 239, 412 Admiralty Is. 162, 323, see also Manus (Cultures Index) adultery 84, 87, 120, 141, 173, 237, 313, 316, 321, 420 affliction 436-37, 444 Africa 15, 42, 72, 117, 121, 124, 163, 181, 221, 232, 236, 264, 327, 352, 356, 366, 396, 444, 448, 451 afterlife, ideas of 36, 120, 150-2, 253, 276, 278, 419, 430, 432, 444-47, 449, 454, see also death, explanations of aggrandizement 47, 99 aggression, see emotional states aid, overseas 407 air transport 161, 178, 183-85, 206, 241, 249, 252, 260, 262, 266, 277, 333, 335, 364, 422, 429, 438, 444 Albertis, L. d' 163 alcohol 134, 308, 314, 326, 328-29, 331, 333, 338, 341-45, 349, 360, 376, 378, 384-87, 403-5, 444, 449, 456 alienation 406, 408, 448; see also land issues allegations 355 Allen, M. 229 alliances 38, 45, 49-50, 77, 97-9, 101, 108, 129, 175, 241, 250, 257, 320, 325, 366, 389, 392, 403, 407, hiring killers 38, 44, modern treaty 368

Alotau 301 altercation 169, 200-02, 206, 221, 247, 303 altered states of consciousness, see amok; dreams; mediumship; insanity; shamanism; spirit possession, etc. altruism 6, 376-83 Ambon(ese) 291 amok, running 323 ancestral spirits 27, 31, 42-44, 54, 57-60, 94, 99-106, 109-10, 117-51, 162, 170-96, 203-05, 215, 226, 236, 241-80, 308, 318, 326, 354, 374, 384, 394-5, 403-07, 419, 422-25, 429, 434, 439-55 angels 421, 452 anger, antagonism, see emotional states Angganita Menufeur 197-9, 233, 236 Anglican mission/church 211, 228, 296, 301-02, 398, 427-28, 436, 443 animals 79, 93-94, 133, 138, 241, calling animals 274-75; see also pig herding; sacrifice Ap, A. 352 apocalyptic(ism) 168, 207, 252, secular 456; see also eschatology; millenarism appeasement, apotropaism, see rituals of protection Apui, J. 233-34 arbitration, see courts archaeology, archaeological issues 17-18, 23-24, 58, 98, 117 architecture 23, 104 Ardri, R. 16 army, cargo cultist 198-200, 207-208, 231, 233, modern 198-200, 207, 320-21, 366, 369-70, 380, 444, private 321 arrogance 362, 430, 440

532

INDEX arson 345, 347, 350 art, artistry 32, 59, 365, 372-4; Christian 396, literary 355, 372-4, 402 Asia Pacific Christian Mission (APCM) 307, 333 Asian peoples 165, see also Chinese; Indians; Vietnamese Asad, T. xv assassinations 352, 443-44 asylum 46, see also sanctuary atonement 449, 451-53 Aufenanger, H. 193 Augustine of Hippo 444 Australia 98, 101, 159, 170-83, 202, 207, 214, 219, 266, 300, 311-13, 331, 343, 432, 434, 408, ANGAU 189, 210, 214, Australian Defence Administration 305 Baal, J. van 88 Baaren, T. P. van xvi Baigona cult 174 Balitape, A. 263 Balitape, B. 260, 262-63 Bani, A. 220, 228 banking 265, 388, 411-12 banning 235, 421 Banz 193, 347, 399 baptism 220, 227, 253, 453; see also sacraments Baptists 300 Barnes, J. 40 Barre, W. la 16 Bateson, G. 28 Bavadra, T. 369-70, Mrs. 370 Begesin rebellion 167 Beig Wen 226, 230, 279 Bell, W. 166 Belshaw, C. 443 Bergmann, W. 195 bigmen, see leadership Bible, the 14, 16, 146, 151, 172, 178, 212-14, 217, 220-21, 226-28, 233, 249, 255, 270, 272, 280, 294, 299-300, 302, 308-09, 321, 351-52, 393-96, 399-401, 419, 422-23, 427, 431-39, 444, 447-55 Bilalaf cult 174-83, 194,236 biological issues 16-7 bitterness, see emotional states blame, blaming xiv, 6, 8, 17, 68, 138-145, 146-7, 189, 201, 267, 274-75, 278-9, 420, 428, 457, self-blame 145, 151-3 blessing, notions of 119, 195, 201, 209, 264, 267, 271, 403, 406, 427,447-56, see also salvation; redemption blood bounty 44, 125

533

Boda Kwato Church 223 Bogia 249 Bohn, A. 180-81 Boiori, I. 452 Boismenu, A. de 297 Bosnik 198 Bougainville 215, 231, 297, 308, 337-38, 340-41, 368, 374, 444, 458, Bougainville Copper Ltd 225, 368, 391, Bougainville rebellion 166, 167, 225, 351, 353-4, 383, 457, BRA (Bougainville Revolutionary Army) 351, 353-54 brawling 92-93, 108-9, 130, 297, 331, 337, 342, 344, 371, 384 Brennan, P. 329 bribes 76, 413 bridepayments 88, 110-111, 130, 134, 136-7, 320, 345, 360, 384, 387, 389, 410, 414 Britain 196, 202, 206-7, 211, 220, 294-6, 365, 400 Bromilow, W. H. 373-4 Brosses, C. de 16 Brown, G. 247, 291-2 Brown, H. 293, 297 Brunton, R. 246, 248 Buddhism 14 Buka Is. 206, 215, 217, 224-25, 231, 234, 353-54 bullying 89, 93 Bulmer, R. 122 Bulolo 336 Buluk, chief 219-20 bureaucracy, see Public service business 244-46, 253, 265, 289-90, 305, 358, 369, 383-84, 386- 87, 392, 402-09, 444, 458; see also capitalism Butadroka, S. 369 Caesar, bishop. 293, 327 Canada 226-28, 255, 257 cannibalism 52-5, 105, 125, 130, 165, 166, 373, 433-34 capitalism, modern 341-42, 354, 404, 407, 412, 458; see also business, primitive 103 captives 27, 52-3, 98, 112, 129, 130, 147, 199, 312, 352 Cargill, D. 426 cargo cultism xiii, 103, 155-281, 288-90, 298, 303, 315, 351-52, 375-76, 396, 403, 407-11, 419-20, 425, 428, 432, 447-50; prosperity cults and religion 102-4, 182, 193, 201, 212, 403, 411, 416, 448-50, 454 cargoism 160-161, 340, 367, 369, 390, 398, 411, 415, 428, 458

534

INDEX

Cartaret Is. 225 cash-cropping 164-65, 245, 328-29, 323, 338, 343, 347, 384-85, 387, 403-4, 430, 449-51, 454-55 caste 400 catastrophes, see disasters Catholic missions, missionaries 176-82, 185-7, 193, 203-4, 214-15, 218, 226, 228, 230, 233, 253, 255, 259, 264, 292-94, 296-9, 300-3, 309-10, 326-27, 330, 350, 352-54, 359, 385, 394-99, 407, 439 causation, notions of, see thought ceremonies, see ritual Chalmers, J. 164 Champion, I. 177 Chan, J. 367 charismatic Christians 232, 300, 396, 445, 452; see also Holy Spirit movements; Pentecostalists Charles, prince 230, 256 Chatterton, P. 297; Mrs 441 children 2-4, 24, 40, 79, 87-91, .94, 108, 118, 121, 123, 125-6, 131, 237, 333, 399, 406, 441,450 Chinese 213, 216. 337, 402 Chowning, A. 133, 160 Christian, W. A. xvi Christian Fellowship Church 221-23, 229-30 Christian Life Centre 301 Christian Revival Crusade 300-1 Christianity 4, 14, 25, 92, 127, 150, 167-8, 172, 174, 178, 197- 268, 276-90, 298, 305, 312, 315-20, 330-408, 414, 416, 421, 424-56, 459-60 Church of Christ mission 220, 228 circumcision, see initiation clairvoyance 149 Clarke, G. 163 class 3, 116, 304, 331, 341-42, 367, 390, 406 Clausner, A. 176 Cleland, D. 441 clothes 399, 412 clubs 384, 386, 404 Collingwood, G. 38 colonialism 25, 29, 65, 69, 73, 77-82, 98, 159, see also pacification Coltre, D. 297 Communism 407 community, ideas of 393, 399-402, 407 compensation 17, 65, 84, 97, 107-112, 123, 145, 181-2, 187, 338, 345, 354, 363-64, 368, 376-84, 410, 448; see also reparation competitiveness 3-4, 6, 101, 113-5, 131, 246, 296-97, 302, 335-37, 365, 368, 370, 376, 385-86, 397-98, 415

compromise 318 computers 364, 448, 456 concessiveness 5-7, 417, see also cooperation; reciprocity; peacemaking confession 247, 265, 273, 295, 329, 392, 436, 455 Confucius 315 confusion 200, 202, 323, 419, 454, cognitive dissonance 274-76 Congregation of the Poor 223 Congregationalists 295 conscience 399, 402, 417, 459 contact history, encounters 25-26, 68-69, 162-3, 174-5, 180-1, 194-95, 202-3, 252-53, 268-69, 312, 337 contrition 181-82, 380, 402 conversion 294-95, 308, 402, 418, 425, 427, 429, 434, 439 cooperation 3, 101, 168, 249-51, 325, 459, 460; see also uncooperativeness Cooperative societies 245-46, 253, 261, 265, 403-04; see also Pitenamu Society; Pomio Kivung, etc. corruption 209, 367, 392-93, 415-6 Couppe, L. 296 courts 211, 313, 313-5, 316-20, 322, 327, 329, 332, 334, 339, 344-45, Court of Native Affairs (Papua and New Guinea) 312, Village Court Act (PNG) 316 criminality 4, 80-81, 339-50, 347, 382, 393, 416 Cross, W. 426 Crutwell, N. 293 culture heroes 120-30, 146, 171-2, 172-73, 175, 195-6, 270, 277-8, 280, 453, see also gods, dema deities curfew 314 cursing 3, 92, 374 Dakoa of Unea 245 Damen, D. 353-4 dance 52, 110-1, 114-6, 161, 195, 197-8, 205, 207, 255, 260, 296, 300-01, 373, 384, 389, 396, 399, 408 Davidson, D. xv dead, the, see afterlife; ancestral spirits; ghosts death, explanations of 8, 35-36, 62, 67-8, 72-4, 77-8, 130-31, 133, 137, 145-51, 179, 276, 356-57, 424, 434-35, 438-47, 452, origins of 146 debts 113-16, 360, 388-89, 405, 413-14 deities, see God, gods demonstrations 167, 216-17, 229-30, 378, 386-87

INDEX denominationalism, see sectarianism Derham Report 316 desecration 29 Development 250, 266, 375, 416, 418, 428, 455 Devil, the, see Satan(s) Diro, T. 370, 393 disasters, cosmic 31, 133, 176, 181, 197, 203, 207, 235, 268, 447, socio-political 133-4, 137, 427, 442, environmental 133-4, 137, 183, 266, 268, 426, 439; see also trouble disease, see sickness disputes, see courts; quarrelling; warfare, etc.; dispute-solving, see peacemaking dissatisfaction, disaffection 202, 231-32, 246-49, 302, 319, 349, 383 divination 145, 147, 149, 438, of sorcery 33-6, 42, 73, 147, 149-50, 355, 363-64, 445 divorce 129, 320 domestic conflict and relations, see gender; children; divorce, etc. Doreh Bay 292 dreams 12, 42, 58, 120, 149, 170, 208-209, 214, 239, 242, 269, 270 drugs 150, betel nut 378; see also kava Dubuy, J. 177-178, 297 Dudley, J. 229 Dutch Administration (New Guinea) 159, 196-9, 201, 277-78, 280, 365-66 Dutch Reformed Mission/Church 196-201, 253 earthquakes, see disasters eclipses 146, 172 ecological issues 16-17, 38-39, 54-55, 69, 98-99, 118, 138, 217, 219, 229-30, 271, 354, 383, 405, 426, 428, 439, 448, 460 economic issues, see gift; money; reciprocity; trade, etc. educational issues 2-3, 24, 89-90, 93, 139-140, 168, 171, 188, 205, 216-17, 225, 233, 249, 266, 292, 302, 308-09, 323-25, 327, 331, 333, 337, 341, 347-49, 362, 365, 373, 378, 385, 390, 399, 417, 432, 435-36, 439, 442, 444, 449, 460, tertiary institutions 307, 364, 415 egalitarianism, relative 103, 113, 115, 253, 314, 317, 390, 393; see also inequalities Eliade, M. 265, 269 Eliot, T. S. 400 elites 231, 390, 416 embezzlement 391, 416 Emboge 166 emotional states 10-12, 106, 291, 417, aggression xiv, 27, 29-40, 79-81, 99, 109, 152,194, 323, 329, 339, 367, 371-72, anger

535

35, 88, 360, 370, 377, 417, antagonism 47, 210, 212, bitterness 223, 259, 352, desire 417, fear 145, 417, 452, frustration 195, 34, hate 417, 458, other 420 England, C. 280 environment, see ecological issues envy, see jealousy epidemics, see medicine, sickness epistemology, see thought equivalences, see reciprocity eschatology 161, 173, 201, 225, 254, 266-76, 445-49, 454-55; see also apocalyptic; millenarism ethical issues 6, 10, 16-17, 49, 95, 103, 150-51, 201-02, 211-12, 247-50, 302, 319, 332, 377, 379, 390, 393, 402, 404-06, 412-17, 420, 423, 436, 446, 458-59, justice 393, 459-60; see also Ten Commandments Eto, S. 221-23, 225, 452 Evangelical Alliance 301 Evara 161, 171 exchanges, see gift excommunication 216, 308, 421 exile 5, 84, 196, 402 exorcism 333, 436; see also spirit possession explanation of significant events xiv, 1, 7-9, 24, 131-153, 162, 168, 169, 183, 266-81, 290-1, 412-56; see also death; sickness, trouble; thought factions 211, 351-52; factionalism 460 faith 240, 272 Fallows, R. 211 fasting 120, 142 feasts, festivals, see ritual fear, see emotional states Feil, D. 107 Ferguson Is. 362 fighting, see brawling; warfare Fiji (modern) 159, 165, 208, 288, 292, 298, 304, 322, 364, 366, 369, 375, 433 Filo of Inawai'a 181, 236, 274; Filo movement 203-05, 236, 273, 297, 359 films 178, 341, 350 fines 107, 233-35, 247, 262, 264, 307-08, 313-14, 321, 328, 356, 371 Finschhafen 292, 442 Flierl, J. 292, 294 food 97, 112-14, 127, 129-30, 138, 142-4, 184-85, 187, 267, 242, 317, 395-96, 398, 403, 448-49 forgery 413, 416 forgiveness 129, 253, 318, 377, 379-80, 457 Foucault, M. 402 Four Square Gospel Church 445

536

INDEX

France, French Administration 159, 220, 231, 255, 288, 293-94, 296, 337, 350, 352-53, 365-6, French Communist Party 255 Frazer, J. xiii, 70, 141 Freud, S. 13 Friday religion, see Kopani cult Front de liberation nationale kanake et socialiste (FLNKS) 351-52 funerary rites 94-95, 106, 119, 142, 175-76, 333, 337, 359-60, 384, 387-88, 390, 406, 408, 438, 444, 455 Frum, see Jonfrum gambling 314, 378, 387-88, 414; lotteries 390, 414; luck 422, 448 games 388; see also gambling; sport gangs 140, 230, 331, 335, 337, 339, 345-51, 353, 366, 368, 379-81, 393, 458 gender issues 25, 32, 44, 46, 52, 62-63, 67, 71, 79, 84, 86-89, 107-08, 112, 118, 123, 126, 129-30, 134, 140, 146, 186, 189-90, 196, 216-17, 224, 237, 244, 271, 295, 302, 309-10, 318, 335, 341, 343, 345, 386-87, 399, 420, 442 Genukaiye Opeiya 446 George, T. 212 Gereina 335 German Administration 159, 164-66, 246, 292, 294, 296, 335, 432, German Evangelicals 196 ghosts 57, 60, 106, 109-110, 118, 121, 136, 139-41, 143-44, 147-48, 184, 241-42, 329, 357, 425, 434, 438; see also ancestral spirits Gibbs, P. 121 gift, gift exchanges xiv, 7, 18, 99-104, 106, 109, 110, 112, 119, 124, 128-30, 152, 185, 187, 190-92, 194, 213, 236-37, 239-40, 242-43, 246-50, 253-54, 257, 265, 272, 350, 358, 360, 375, 384-86, 389, 391-98, 400-01, 404-06, 408, 410, 417-18, 424, 448, 458, divine gifts 203, generosity, magnanimity, etc. 109, 112, 115-16, 152, 237, 385, 393-94, 400, 413, 416, 450; see also prestige; trade Girard, R. 18 Glasse, R. 45 gloating 209 glossolaly 198, 301, 377 Goaribari Is. 164 God (Judaeo-Christian-Islamic) 6, 8, 14, 173, 179, 211-212, 214, 236, 261, 270, 273, 289, 356, 378, 407, 416, 419-23, 425, 431-32, 435-39, 443, 447, 450, 452, 456

gods, traditional Melanesian 52, 55-60, 68, 104, 118, 125, 141, 146-48, 194, 205, 217, 224, 236, 255, 259-61, 264, 308-09, 394, 419-22, dema deities 126, 129-30, 141-42, 453, see also culture heroes; war gods 53, 57-60, 151, 349-50, surrogate gods 416 Goitaye Dolpa 190-92 Goodenough Is. 372-73 Gordon, R. 107 Goroka 335, 338, 347-49, 364, 379, 386-87, 391, 404 gossip 91, 112, 127 government, general 358; colonial, see colonialism; national 190, 228-29, 252, 262, 266, 275, 336, provincial 190, 221, 227, 230, 263, 266, 275, 328-29, 331, 336, 346, 368, 404, local 210-11, 316, 326, 442, alternative 190, 192-93, 197, 200, 212-13, 216, 227, 230-31, 235, 263, 274-75, 321, 330, 346, theocratic 308 grace, idea of 101, 250, 253, 413, 452 graves 123, 264-65, 273, 357, 394, 455, 434, artificial 244 Gregory, C. A. 124 grudges, grievances 65, 93, 217, 219, 360 Guillain, C. 296 guilt 7, 9, 27, 99, 247, 393, 402, 420, 451, 456, see also sin Gulf region of Papua 301, 338, 348, 362, 433, 435; for particular societies see Cultures Index Habermas, J. xv Hagai, F. 217, 224 Hahalis Welfare Association 210, 215-17, 224-26, 231, 234, 237 Hahl, A. 71 Hallpike, C. R. 39-40 Hand, D. 293, 443 handicapped persons 310, 399, Down's Syndrome 90 Hannett, L. 373-74 happiness 449-51 Harding, T. G. 160 hate, see emotional states Hau'ofa, E. 93 Hawina, D. 219, 226-27, 236-37, 244, 257 headhunting 25, 27, 31, 52-54, 373 healing, healers 73, 145, 151, 168, 197, 223, 358, 363, 420-21, 425-26, 433, 435, 448-49, 451-53; see also medicine Heider, K. 47 heroism 370, 372 Hides, J. 57, 177

INDEX highland societies, general 161, 298, 301, 304, 307, 319, 323, 332, 361, 363, 377, 379, 383, 387, 395, 405, 428; for particular societies, see Cultures Index Hiri expeditions 104, 397-8, 429 Hogbin, I. 115 Hoka, J. P. 211 Holland, see Dutch Hollandia 208, 214 Holy Spirit movements 258, 377, 396, 452; see also charismatic Christianity; Pentecostalism homicide 3, 9, 16, 18, 26-27, 32-33, 47, 53, 58, 80-82, 107, 108-09, 111, 164, 185, 234, 321-23, 327-29, 332-39, 393, 417, 421, 453, murder 42, 79, 80-81, 83, 111, 129, 166, 167, 316, 322, 332, 368, 420, 446; see also ritual homicide Honiara 254 honour 402 Hoskins 262 hospitality, see gift hospitals 170, 327, 333, 338, 392, 432-35, 451 hotels 290-91, 326, 330, 334, 342-43 humanism 375 hunting 17, 87, 121, 137, 148, 178, 182, 196, 332, 449-50 Huon peninsula 249 Huxley, T. H. 162 Hylkema, S. 89 imprisonment 4, 65, 186, 234, 264, 308, 311, 314, 320-22, 333, 345-46, 350, 356, 358, 369-70, 380, 383, 391, 393, 430 imputations, see accusations incest 84 indemnification, see compensation independent churches 213-14, 217, 220-21, 223, 225, 227-30, 230-32, 245, 249, 251, 264, 280, 395, 452 India, Indians 13, 15, 27, 165, 208, 236, 342, 364, 369-70, 402 individualism 404, 408 Indonesia 221, 288, 351-52, 366, 368, 401, 444 inequalities 113, 161, 237, 249, 269, 341, 349, 375, 387-90, 393, 450-51, 454 infanticide 90 inflation 246-48, 385, 387, 389 initiation, initiation rites 27, 87, 90-91, 110, 140, 179, 202, 207, 213-14, 263, 309, 348, 349-50, 386, 399, 430, 439, 442, traditional clubs 115, 296, secret societies 142 insanity 79-80, 310, 363, 414 insults 32, 85, 109, 345

537

Insumbabi Is. 197-98 Inter-group Fighting Act (PNG) 320, 328 Irakau of Manam 220, 400 Irian Jaya 27-28, 159, 165-66, 210, 220, 288, 298, 320, 323, 351, 370, 386, 401, 412, 444, 451, 457 Islam 14-15, 196, 343, 375, 386, 395, 444 Israel, Israelites 14, 16, 127-27, 448 Jainism 14, 117 Japan, Japanese 4, 172-73, 197-9, 201, 207, 213, 215, 234, 254, 293, 405, 427, 432, 442-43 Jayapura 336, 352 jealousy 5, 7, 77-78, 96, 148, 181, 209, 243, 294, 345 Jehovah's Witnesses 225, 301 Jesus of Nazareth 8, 170, 172-173, 198, 202-203, 213-14, 216, 218, 224-27, 259-60, 264, 268, 274, 277, 279-80, 315, 333, 343, 378, 431, 445, 451, 453, 455 jibes, 90 Johnson cult 220 Jonfrum movement 202, 207, 209. 220, 229, 231, 245, 255-56 Jones, P. 240 Josephine Bahu 'Mamma Dokta' 236, 411 judgement, divine see punishment, divine; rewards, divine Jung, C. G. 11, 13 justice, see ethical issues; law justification, see rationalization Kabisawali movement 167, 250, 345 Kai, J. 50 Kainantu 166, 249, 338, 356, 376, 449 Kaman, B. 328 Kaman, P. 345-46 Kamisese Mara 369 Kamma, F. 197 Kanangl, O. 392 Kaputin, J. 370 Kare Mt. 354 Karius, C. 177 Kasaipwalova, J. 346, 373-74 kava, kava drinking 309, 378 Kavieng 445 Kerema 362 Kerepia, P. 368 Kerowagi 185 Kerpi, K. 373 Keysser, C. 295 King, C. 292

538

INDEX

kinship 28, 38, 44, 66-67, 71, 74, 108-109, 112, 115, 342, 357-60, 363, 379, 388-89, 403-04; see also marriage kivung lavurua 220-21, 247, 255 Knoebel, J. 429 Kolowan, C. 254 Kondom Agaunda 313, 326-27 Kopani cult 237, 273, 321 Kopi, S. 149-150 Koreri movements 195-201, 205, 207, 231-33, 241, 255, 260 Koriam Urekit 260-64 Kukuaik cult 172 Kula ring 101, 116 Kundiawa 186-87, 194, 326 Kup 190, 193, 324-27 Kuripi 307 Kutubu, Lake 407 Kwato mission 293, 297 Kwikila 170 labour, see work labour trafficking 165 Lae 217, 266, 336, 338, 344, 379, 404, 432 Lagitamo Luka 245 land issues 32, 46, 71, 80, 113, 116-17, 129, 164, 204, 220, 230, 292, 311, 313, 318, 325, 328-30, 349, 352, 354, 376, 383, 385, 398, 405, 407, 432, land alienation 186, 188, 220, 256, 279 Langness, L. L. 40 languages, linguistic issues 26, 114, 133, 145, 290, 303, 367, 377, 417-18, 425, 456; see also rhetoric Lapthorne, G. 328 Lasaro, M. 370 Lattas, A. 402 Latukefu, S. 458 Lautoka 369 law, legal issues 4-5, 8-9, 16, 73, 80, 93, 107, 197-98, 207, 237, 248, 262, 264-65, 280, 292, 299, 304-22, 321, 380, 424, 460, canon law 233, 310-11; see also courts; ethics; Ten Commandments Law Reform Commission (PNG) 316, 321 Lawrence, P. 29, 160, 172, 226, 269-70, 278, 407, 418, 448 leadership 82, 88, 103, 136, 152, 162, 189, 272, 295, 306-07, 319, 372, 323, 348, 360, 362, 460, bigmen 35, 44, 73, 75-78, 108, 109, 112-13, 115-16, 186, 188-89, 190-91, 229, 241, 243, 246, 262-63, 302, 313, 319, 325, 328, 392, 404-05, chiefs 42, 44, 75, 96, 115-16, 142, 166, 175, 177, 204, 210, 216, 224, 359-61, 369-70, quasi-chief 140, fight leader, war lords 62, 74, 84, 123, seniors,

elders 109, 214, 217, 360, initiators 90-91, traditional religious 429; see also priests; charismatic 215, 220, 223, 237, 272, cargo cultist 190, 192-93, 208-10, 216-17, 235, 237, 250-51, 271, 398, 432, church 307, 316-17, 378-79, 398, 424, 428, 446, 459, new political 312, 330,352, 460, gang 349 Leahy, D. and M. 183 Leakey, L. and R. 16 Leenhardt, M. 132 legitimation, see rationalization Lenturut, B. 455 Levi-Strauss, C. 103, 142, 270 Levy-Bruhl, L. 132 Lewis, G. 138 liability, see obligation Lihir Is. 407 Lini, W. 383, 453 Loeliger, G E. 448 London Missionary Society (LMS) 240, 291-92, 296, 299, 307, 361, 397-98 looting 392 Lorengau 224, 230, 274-75 Lorenz, K. 16 Louis Napoleon 159, 293 love 6, 126-27, 212, 253, 376-95, 401, 417, 420, 451, 458 Loyalty Is. 323, 352 Ludditism 167, 229-30, 353, 403 Luganville 231 Lukas, P. 224, 244-45 Lus, P. 367 Lutheran missions 166, 172, 185-86, 188, 214-16, 226, 235, 242, 248, 278-79, 291, 295, 297-300, 303, 329, 331, 349, 356, 385, 387, 392, 394-95, 403, 431, 436, 454, Liebenzell 214, 390, Wabag Lutheran Church 232 McCarthy, J. 254 McFarlane, S. 296 McGregor, W. 296, 356 macrohistory, mythic 170, 174, 213, 252, 277-78, 427, 432-33 Madagascar 181 Madang 162, 171-72, 202, 207, 214-15, 218, 235, 245, 261, 279, 292, 294, 306, 335, 363, 379, 428 magic, magicians 8, 30, 32, 46, 53, 60-61, 70, 74, 104, 114, 119, 130, 131-33, 136, 138-39, 151, 167, 173-74, 190, 204, 241, 243, 261, 312, 325, 355, 383, 396, 409, 411, 422-23, 430, 451, love magic 136, rainmaking/stopping 136; for peace magic, see under peacemaking; war magic under warfare

INDEX Mair, L. 160 Malaita 166, 167, 206-07, 223+, 280, 323, 354 malaria 357, 433, 448 Malaya 27 Malinowski, B. 132 Mambu 206 mana 119 manslaughter, see homicide Manus Is. 214; see also Admiralty Is. and Cultures Index Maoris 401 Marchant, W. S. 212 Marching Rule (Maasina) 167, 202, 207, 210-12, 214, 219, 233, 254 marriage 44, 84, 86-9, 99, 101, 103, 106, 108, 110-12, 117, 119, 123, 129-30, 140, 168, 175, 217, 236-37, 309-11, 320, 324, 345, 360-61, 386-87, 394, 399, 406, polygamy 311 Martin, T. 381 martyrdom 291-3, 401, 416-17, 419, 439-40 Marxism 8, 39, 161, 168, 246, 329, 353, 448 Mary the Virgin 198, 203, 421 masks 32, 59, 106, 119, 124, 295, 307 Mataungan League 167, 250 materialism 103, 375, 412 material well-being 174, 447-52 Matiabe, A. 45 Mead, M. 24 medicine, traditional 111, 138-9, 145, 421-22, 426, 435, 452, modern 266-67, health issues 306, 312, 337, 341, 356, 42122, 425-26, 434-37, 444-45, 447, 451-52; see also hospitals mediumship 57, 111, 134, 138, 178, 193, 241-43 Meggitt, M. J. 28, 319, 330 Melanesian Council of Churches 300 Mendi (town) 399 Meokwundi, 209, 254 mercy 112, 127, 458 messianism 272 Metais, E. 72 Methodist mission/church 221-23, 246-7, 291-92, 295-97, 299, 303, 308-09, 369-370, 372-73, 397, 433, 436 micronationalism 250 middlemen 404-05 migrants 303, 328, 335, 341, 347, 360, 384-85, transmigration 352 millenarism, millenarianism 160, 173, 217-8, 235-36, 244-46, 249, 269, 278-79, 301; see also apocalyptic; eschatology Milne Bay cultures 164, 174 Mingende 185, 187, 327

539

mining, miners 162-163, 176, 179, 183, 253, 293, 330, 335, 341, 353-54, 364, 407, 416, 428 Minj 185, 189, 193, 325 miracles 252, 269, 275, 411 Misima 341 missions, missionaries 25, 58, 79-80, 160, 162-3, 165-7, 186, 189, 196-227, 242, 249-328, 352, 356, 361, 378-79, 384, 394-99, 403, 416, 421-38, 443, 451 mocking, see taunting; see also violence, mock; warfare, mock modernity 112, 290-91 modernization 105, 160, 266, 287-456 Modjeska, N. 39 Momis, J. 322 Momote 209, 254-55 Monckton, C. A. W. 164, 166, 176 money, traditional 84, 91, 107, 114, 184-85, 187-88, 240, 246, 360, 383, 387-88, 408, 410, 412, modern 114, 168, 188, 203, 209-11, 215, 218, 233, 241-5, 247, 254-57, 265-68, 273, 309, 328, 343-44, 350, 358-61, 375-417, money economy 210, organized funds 209-10, 244-45, 261-63, 265 morality, see ethical issues Morauta, L. 246-7 Moresby, J. 294 Mormonism 280 Moro movement 232, 428 motive, motivation 6-7, 332, 339-40, 343; see also thought, causal Mount Hagen 183-85, 189, 335, 330, 33, 338, 342-44, 358, 399, 426 Muhammad 315 Muhammad Ali 343 Muli 273, 333 'Mur Madness' 183-94, 205, 235, 240-41, 271 murder, see homicide Murray, J. H. 53, 312 music, songs 31-32, 46, 52, 57, 109, 197-98, 264, 308, 378 musical instruments 124, 295, 399 mutilation, self- 127 myth 12, 30-32, 106, 112, 125-6, 128, 129-30, 132, 146, 169-73, 176, 181, 183, 195-201, 259, 267, 269-70, 277-78, 280, 295, 410, 453 Nadi 369 NaGriamel movement 210, 219, 227, 229, 231, 249, church 229 Namaliu, R. 368 Namaviro of Kopena 247 naming 52-53, 453 Napoleon III 296

540

INDEX

Narokobi, B. 321-22 nationhood, nationalism, nation-building 229-32, 252, 267, 288-89, 373, 375, 378, 418, 448, 451, 453, 458, 459-60 Native Lands Council (Fiji) 210 nativism 201, 215, 217, 225, 232, 234, 238, 325, 335, 351, 354, 385 natural, notions of the 133, 149, 152, 216-17, 418-19, 421-25, 430, 433, 436, 443-44 Nauvilou of Mbau 323 Navarre, L. A. 276 Navosa 171 Nazism 4 Neuliafo Brugue 241-42 Nevermann, H. 29 New Apostolic Church 226, 230, 231, 257, 300 New Britain 280, 338 New Caledonia 159, 165-66, 288, 293-94, 296, 299, 311, 322, 337, 350-53, 356, 366, 370, 382, 405, 407, 444, 451 New Georgia 299 New Guinea, see Papua New Guinea New Guinea coast and islands 161, 338 New Guinea, West, see Irian Jaya New Hanover 208, 220 New Hebrides, see Vanuatu New Ireland 231, 301, 303, 335, 455 New Zealand 296, 353, 401 Nissan Is. 353 'Noise, the' 215 oath-taking 92 obligation 27, 46-47, 49, 101, 107-09, 112-16, 126-27, 137, 253, 317, 362, 380, 389-90, 393, 403, 407 obscenity 8 offence-taking 379 offerings, oblations, see sacrifice Ok Tedi 354, 428 Okuk, I. 329, 367-68, 392, 407 Oliver, C. 257 O'Malley, J. 57 omen-taking 46, 59, 136 Ona, E 353-54 Ona Asi 174-83, 233, 269, 429 Ononghe 176-77 Oosterwal, G. 195 Organisasi Papua Merdeha (OPM) 231, 323, 340, 351/52, 366, 374, 444 opposition, political, see under parties, political ordeals 85; see also initiations ostracism 27, 84, 264

pacification, colonial and/or missionary 29, 64-5, 68, 71, 116, 165-6, 177, 186, 235-36, 248-9, 291-92, 310, 323, 325, 327-28, 332, 334, 361, 370, 424 pacifism, see peace Pako, S. 217 Paliau Maloat 162, 207, 214-7, 223-4, 244-45, 260-61, 274-75, 280 Paliau movement 212-14, 230, 234, 249, 274-75 Pangia 298-99 Panguna 353-54 Papua Besena movement 250, 371 Papua New Guinea 23, 71-72, 159, 161,163-65, 167, 169, 207, 288, 292-3, 299-300, 303, 305, 311-12, 314-17, 320-22, 338-39, 367, 370, 375, 381-82, 389, 410-16, 439; for individual societies, see Cultures Index; for West Papua New Guinea, see Irian Jaya Papuan Republican Fighters Army 166, 321 participation, partnership 251-9, 281 parties 384, 386-89 parties, political 4, 210, 218-19, 221, 229, 231, 244, 367, 369; opposition 219, 451, 460 Paton, J. 292 patrol officers 185, 186-90, 243, 306, 312-13, 382 peace, peacemaking 16-7, 68, 97-9, 107-9, 113, 123, 125, 129, 134-5, 137, 173, 178, 204, 225, 233-34, 236, 250, 291, 293, 303, 312, 315, 317, 322, 326-27, 351, 354, 370, 373, 376-83, 386, 399, 451, 455, 459-60, peace magic 98, peacepiping 98, pacifism 14, 27, 200, 234, 291, 351, 371, non-violent activism 216, 234-35, 293 Peacock, E. 256 peasants 342, 402 Peli Association 112, 210, 217-9, 226, 230-31, 234, 237, 244-45, 248, 257, 260, 273 penalties, see punishment Pentecostalism 226, 232, 300-01, 395-96 personhood, idea of 96, 126 petition, see sacrifice Philippines 304 Phoenix Foundation 231, 257 pig herding 66, 79, 108, 121-2, 137, 178, 188, 190-1, 295, 306-07, 452-53, stealing 32-33, 323, pig killing, see gift exchanges; sacrifice Pilhofer, G. 292 Piri 306

INDEX Pitenamu Society 210, 220, 245 plantations 164, 165, 171, 188, 200, 248, 253, 334-36, 361, 364, 379, 402, 406; missionary 308 Platvoet, J. G. xvi Ploeg, A. 66 pluralism 460-61 poisoning 184-85, 368 Pokawin, P. 275 police 189-90, 194, 213, 306, 321-22, 326-28, 329-31, 332, 337-38, 347, 349-50, 364, 368, 378, 380, 325, cargo cultist 234 politics, traditional 83-86, 97-116, 174, cargo cultist 207, 455, modern 203, 207, 218-19, 229, 231, 238, 250-2, 288-9, 319, 355, 365-70, 374, 392, 405, 459-60; see also leadership; parties, political pollution 86-89, 96, 140-2, 345, environmental 383 Polynesia(ns) 28, 210, 378, 439 Pomio Kivung 210, 220, 259-66 Popondetta 301, 364 population, depopulation issues 26, 64, 69, 71, 74, 80, 165, 292 Porgera 298, 330, 354, 407 Port Moresby 150, 170-1, 208, 303-34, 306, 333, 335, 337, 341, 343, 347-49, 361-63, 368, 371, 380, 382, 389, 391, 397, 414, 433, 438, 441, 452 Port Vila 229, 254, 383 power 52, 56-68, 83-92, 113-4, 116, 130, 168, 170, 178, 189, 193, 203-4, 206, 209, 218, 225, 227, 237, 246, 342, 344, 365, 367, 383, 388, 453, powerlessness 3, 341 Prai, J. 351 praise 10, see rewards prayer 105, 120, 123, 177-78, 205, 262, 293, 301, 379, 387, 405, 452 Presbyterian missions/church 202, 228, 255, 292, 295, Calvinism 450, Reformed 302 prestige 101, 113-115, 119, 136, 147, 152, 177, 235-36, 350, 383, 388, 391-92, 397, 403-04, 450 priests 57, 120, 122-123, 125, 426, 429 prisons, see imprisonment prohibition, see tabu; law; Ten Commandments property 37, 86, 94-5, 137, 179, 189, 339-40, 346, 349, 368, 380, 388, 390; see also land issues prophetism 149, 170, 174-6, 197-98, 204, 206, 226, 229, 268-69, 272, 274, 416, 429, 446 prosperity cults/religion, see cargo cultism prostitution 84, 87, 225, 341, 414

541

protest movements, rebellions 3, 165-6, 169, 193, 204, 228, 231, 257, 339-41, 346, 350-54, 383, 393, 451 proverbs 114, 132, 423, 425 providence, idea of 449, 453-54 psychological issues 1-13, 25, 40, 61, 68-74, 79-80, 91-2, 105, 116, 124, 132, 234, 253, 267, 271-2, 302, 309, 339, 363, 373, 402, 420, 440, psychiatric disorders, see insanity public (civil) service 290, 306, 363, 415, 460 punishment, general 6, 17-18, 131, 189, 216, 275, 281, 305-06, 360, 362, 379, 399, 417, 420-21, 457-59, 460, specific xiv, 4-5, 8, 424, traditional Melanesian 66, 73, 75-7, 81-93, 95-6, 107, 112, 120, 140, 142, 150-1, 339, 385-86, colonial and national punishments 73, 81, 181, 185, 194, 233, 310-22, 328, 332, 352, 368, 380-81, 393, 420, 443-44, punitive expeditions 4, 164, 272, 291, 294, 306, 12, 350, cargo cultist 232-37, 264, 266, 273, missionary 308, religious 425; see also banning, excommunication; projected (often cosmic) punishment 173, 183, divine, cosmic 14, 185-86, 214, 227, 273, 279, 374, 420, 425, 427, 431-32, 436, 438-41, 445-47, self-punishment 2-3, 18, 91, 110, masochism 2, 402 Quakers 295 quarrelling 93, 212, 333, 339, 345, 415; owning the quarrel 108 Rabaul 189, 207-08, 213-14, 216, 254, 265, 272, 292, 301, 303, 305, 323, 363, 433 Rabuka, S. 369-370, 433 Rai coast 162, 209, 212, 214, 234, 278, 335 ransoming 98, 112, 125 rape 32-33, 321-22, 324, 337, 340-41, 350, 380, 444 Rappaport, A. 39 rationality, see thought rationalization 7-13, 40, 274, 281, justification 97, 135, 201-02, 340, 343, 354, legitimation 58, 74-75, 88, 105, 117, 125, 150, 281, 299, 315, 339, 360, 370, 459; see also confusion: cognitive dissonance Read, K. 126 rebellion, see protest movement reciprocity 5-7, 15-6, 83, 85-6, 97-131, 162, 169, 189, 194, 197, 202, 209, 218, 237-58, 273, 281, 290-91, 375-409, 443, 448-51, 455, 458; see also compensation; gift; peacemaking; sacrifice

542

INDEX

recompense, see retribution; reciprocity reconciliation, see peacemaking recrimination 197, 205, 220, 288-374, 393, 399, 417, 421; see also resentment; revenge redemption 151, 161, 238-59, 279; see also salvation redress 4, 58, 92-93, 124, 138, 162, 382; see also compensation refugees (traditional) 116, 313; modern 401, 414 regionalism 202, 336, 338, 345, 347, 349-51, 367, 370-71, 442-43 relationships 435-36, 444; see also gender; kinship; marriage; reciprocity; warfare religion, meaning of xv-xvi, 9, 14-5, 24, 36, 95-6, 103-05, 109-10, 134, 152-53, 204, 211, 288-90, 312, 331, 340, 342, 354, 376, 383, 387-88, 398, 408, 410, 418-19, 448, 458-60, traditional Melanesian 19-153 et passim, cargo cultist 155-281 et passim; see also Christianity, Islam, etc. relinquishment 115-16, 239-48, 414 Remnant Church 223, 280 remorse 107 reparation 110, 313; see also compensation repentance 308, 377 reprisal 3, 139, 142, 147, 159-237, 239, 242, 268, 294, 351, 367, 433, 440; see also retaliation; revenge; warfare requital, see reciprocity; revenge resentment 5-6, 30, 96, 134, 170-71, 177, 194, 198, 201, 208, 212, 215, 258-59, 262, 266, 281, 301, 303, 341, 349, 361, 369, 373, 420, 458; see also grudge reservations 165 restitution 107, 322 resurrection, see after-life retaliation 3, 25, 32-6, 41-2, 53-5, 68, 108, 130, 145, 164, 169-220, 268, 291, 293, 323, 334, 340, 373, 417, 458; see also reprisal; revenge, warfare retribution, logic of, general theory 1-18, Melanesian expressions of 23 et passim, origins 16-18; see also compensation; gift; punishment; revenge, etc. revenge 2-5, 9, 14-6, 18, 23-96, 162, 168-9, 173, 174, 179, 204-05, 234, 291, 293-94, 323, 327-31, 337-39, 346, 348, 353, 360, 364, 367, 371-78, 393, 417, 420-21, 460, mock revenge 30; see also warfare (including mock); reprisal; retaliation; sorcery, etc. reversal, notions of 170-2, 268, 278, 420 revivalism, Christian 356, 377 revolts, see protest movements

rewards xiv, 8, 108, 113, 131, 138, 150-2, 201, 237, 266, 272, 275, 279, 280, 380, 407-08, 413, 417, 431, 445-46, 449-50, divine 203, 420, 446-47, 454 rhetoric 108-09, 208, 303, 307, 319, 340, 346, 365-66, 378, 452, verbal payback 3-5, 201, logomachy 365 Riebe, I. 37-38 rights, infringement of 5, 380 riots, riot squad 314, 320, 325, 345-46, 352, 392, see also Ludditism ritual, general 8, 132, 135-36, 152, 161, 168, 179, 216-17, 264, 271-72, 277, 308, 343, 394, 403, 416, 424, 426, 430, 438, traditional: of distribution 103, of fertility/increase 88, 100-01, 307, protection 57-58, 94, 110, 119, 121, 135, 139, 145, 178-179, 349-50, purification 75, 110, 120, 131, 142, pigkilling 99-102, 105, 112-26, 129-30, 134-35, 139, 183-84, 190, 192-93, 235-36, 240-41, 295, 300, 324-26, 337, 355, 384-87, 392, 394, 403, 428, redress 92, ritual homicide 27, 44, 53, 70, 86-87, 125, 234, 273, 333, sorcery rites 70-71, various traditional 119-120, 265, 326; cargo cultist 205, 244, 247, 411; Christian 395; see also divination; funerary rites; initiation; peacemaking; sacrifice road transport 320, 338, 343-44, 352, 357, 362, 378, 384, 387, 415, 429, 444, road accidents 326-29, 338-39, 358, 376, 385 Rosman, A. 103 Ross, W. 185, 293 Ruatoka 293 Rubel, P. G. 103 Rumkorem, S. 351 sacraments 214, 220, 224-25, 227, 253, 394, see also baptism sacrifice, general 6-7, 18, 98, 113, 115-16, 128, 130-31, 142, 151, 197, 209, 224, 237, 239-43, 247, 265, 272-73, 401, 417, 424, 430, expiation 129, human 125-126, 131, 394, self 6, 126-127, particular sacrificial rituals 45, 59, 79-80, 105, 110, 39; see also ritual, pig-killing, traditional offerings 120, 394, Christian and church offerings 309, 343, 397 Sahlins, M. 55 Saidor 209, 254 salvation, notions of 131, 151-52, 168, 173, 206, 239, 248, 251, 253, 268, 290, 448, 453; see also redemption Salvation Army 300, 401

INDEX Samarai 171, 297 sanctuary 28, 118; see also asylum Sarei, A. 310 Satan (devil[s]) 8, 221, 223, 225, 274, 279-80, 301, 308, 356, 420-21, 424, 439, 445 Saunana, J. 374 scapegoat 8, 15, 307 Schieffelin, E. 101, 110 schisms 221-22 Schmidt, W. 18 Schwimmer, E. 128, 130, 453 science, ideas of 8, 10, 18, 131, 142-43, 152, 250, 418-23, 425, 431, 438, 447-48, 456; experimentation 202-203 secessionism 225, 257, 338, 340, 354 secret societies, see initiation sectarianism 232, 272, 289, 291-305, 367, 460 secularity 103-06, 110, 117, 372, 376, 384, 390, 400-01, 403, 407, 410, 449, 451, 455 secularization 105, 288-90, 292, 339, 342-44, 382, 388, 405-08, 411, 416, 419-24, 436, 444, 449-50, 456 self-interest 376-77 Sepik region 72, 297, 427; for individual societies see Cultures Index sermons 272, 293, 308 Seventh-Day Adventism 218, 223, 225, 232, 255, 280, 299-300, 348, 378, 397, 441, 455 sexual relations, see gender issues shamanism 57 shame, shaming 5, 7, 84-85, 88, 90-91, 99, 127, 149, 187, 234, 237, 402, 434, 456 sharing 127, 450 Shaw, D. 105 sickness, explanations of 8, 72, 78, 94, 121, 137-146, 151, 276, 356-57, 362-63, 424, 433-37, 445, 449; disease patterns 26, 69, 134, 182, 190, 197, 212-13, 426, 434 Simopyaref, S. 198 sin 204, 247, 264, 308, 379, 431, 436, 453, 456 Sisili, A. 212 Sisimia Z. 280 skin colour, ideas about 170-72, 176, 277, 280-81 sky beings 142, 146, 150 slaves 52, 112 slogans 208 socialism 353 sodomy, ritual 91 Solomon Islands 30-31, 119, 159, 163, 165, 167, 169, 202, 207, 210, 229-30, 288, 292, 299, 303, 322, 374, 398 Somare, M. 367, 392, 415 song, see music Sope, B. 370, 383

543

sorcery xiv, 8-9, 25-26, 34, 36, 42, 56, 60-78, 83-84, 96, 105-06, 111, 128, 136-38, 141-44, 146-50, 168, 177, 182, 184-85, 190, 205, 236, 261, 273-74, 279, 293, 303, 310, 333, 336-37, 343, 354-64, 367-368, 371, 373, 378-79, 393, 406, 419, 421, 425-26, 433, 434-42, 445-46, 451-52 soul, notions of 122, 135, 137, 145, 151, 430, 456 South Sea Evangelical Mission/Church 211, 223, 436 Spinks, K. 183 spirit possession 32-36, 43, 175-79, 190, 205, 222-23, 232, 436 spirits 56-57, 74, 103-05, 112, 117-20, 122, 135-138, 149, 151-53, 163, 178, 183, 202, 218, 238-39, 240, 247-48, 269, 271, 273-74, 388, 394, 403, 408, 411, 418-22, 429, 433, 456, place spirits 118, 122, 363, 421, 428-29, 431, 442; see also ancestral spirits; gods spite, see resentment sport 15, 290, 297, 314, 343, 355, 365, 370-72, 374, 396, 406, 438, 444 squandering 384, 405, 414 squatter settlements 304, 321, 336, 341, 345-49, 363, 379-81, 391, 406, 414 Stanley, O. 162 State of Emergency (PNG) 320, 322, 324, 326-27, 338, 380 Steinbauer, F. 174 Steinmetz, S. R. 16 Stevens, J. 219, 228-29, 231, 256-57 Strathern, A. xvi, 329, 430 Strehlan, J. 448 strikes, boycotts 167, 303, 305 sufferance 417 suicide 88, 126, 194, 324, 345, 402 Sukuna, R. 210 survivalism 61, 37-42, 59-60, 77, 110, 112-13, 131, 152, 182, 193, 322, 414 suspicion 61, 458 Suva 304, 341, 369, 433 Swiss Evangelical Brotherhood 300-01, 395 Sydney 173, 251 syncretism, synthetism 195, 202, 430, 441 Taboro, K. 170 tabu, tabu breakage xiv, 17, 83-85, 95, 136, 138-40, 141-44, 147-49, 237, 242, 247, 264, 270, 277, 299, 310, 312-15, 325, 328, 378, 406, 451 Tagarab cult 172-73, 207, 226, 278 Tago, S. 364, 390 Taiwan(ese) 230

544

INDEX

Talmon, Y. 173 Taminja. M. 230-31 Tanganyika 164 Tapini 107 taro cult 174 tattoos 151, 348 Taukei movement 369 taunting 131, 331 Taylor, J. 163, 183, 186, 213, 308 taxes 164, 167, 171, 201, 203, 209, 211-12, 216, 219-20, 244, 259-60, 262, 264, 311, 390 technology, traditional 23, 167-68, 179, 266, 278, modern 161, 167-68, 170-71, 173, 176, 178, 186-87, 189-90, 238, 249, 251, 266, 269, 277-78, 288-89, 423, 425-26, 429, 447 television 15, 448 Ten Commandments 173, 233, 242, 261-65, 279-80, 294, 309, 313, 315, 420, 423 Teosin, J. 216-17, 224-25, 237, 280, 353-54 territoriality, see land issues theatre 372-373 theft 3, 32, 85, 130, 163, 186, 204, 212, 242, 306, 333, 337-38, 340-46, 350, 392, 411, 413, 415, 420, 430, 446 theology 129, 224-25, 227, 297, 449-50, 452-56 Thompson W. H. H. 177, 181, 205 thought, causal 7-9, 37-41, 131-132, 324-25, 329-30, 334, 421, 432, 437-9, classificatory 142-143, consciousness 10-13, 106, 170, 205, 288, 290, 341, 377, 418, 423, epistemology 10-13, 267, 289-90, 309, 418, rationality 6-7, 9-13, 15, 40-41, 131-32, 153, 168, 202, 267, 269, 276, 281, 291, 303, 339, 341, 403, 414, 417, 421-22, 430, 449, 444, reflection 101, 111, 127, 131-56; see also explanation; rationalization threats 46, 234; see also emotional states: aggression; antagonism Tidor 196-97 tithing 397, 405 Tjibaou, J. M. 351-53 ToBobo 166 Toit, V. du 41-42 Tonga(ns) 93, 219 torture 5, 52, 83, 363 totem(ism) 101, 106, 112, 337 trade, traditional 32, 101, 104-05, 116-17, 152, 194, 196, 204; see also gift; reciprocity, colonial and modern 162, 253, 276, 292, 294, 403, maritime 23, 397-8; see also hiri; kula trade unionism 368 traditionalist revivals, see nativism treachery 368

tribal confederacies 45 tribes, clans and kin units, 28; see also kinship trouble, explanations of 133-37, 151, 424, 426-33 truces, see peacemaking tyranny 420 unconsciousness 12-13, 232, 267, 269 uncooperativeness, non-cooperativeness 3, 88, 182-83, 197, 199, 200, 202, 216, 262, 457 United Church, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands 223, 225, 229, 254-56, 260, 271, 301-03, 362, 378, 397-8, 403, 428, 445 United Nations 375 United States of America 172, 199, 206-08, 211-212, 214, 217, 220, 231, 246, 368, 432 urbanization 266-68, 290, 303, 313-34, 321, 332, 336-37, 341-42, 347, 356, 358, 361-64, 379, 382, 384, 389-90, 396, 401, 405, 408, 424, 430, 441, 444, 450, 457 'Vailala [Madness]' movement 161, 171, 232, 240, 267 valuables 97, 106, 112, 114, 139, 161-64, 168, 187-88, 190-91, 387, 408; see also money, traditional value judgements, see ethical issues vandalism 167, 346-47 Vangeke, L. 181, 359 Vanimo 217 Vanua Levu 369 Vanuatu 123, 159, 165, 169, 219, 228, 231, 255, 288, 292, 274, 321-22, 336, 356, 368, 370, 382-83, 398, 404, 453-54 Vayda, A. P. 39 vendetta, vengeance, see revenge Vietnam(ese) 402 vindictiveness, see resentment violence xv, 4, 27, 43-47, 55-57, 77-82, 87, 109, 111, 164, 198, 204-06, 231, 291, 297, 302, 306, 308, 312, 314, 319, 333-34, 337, 339-46, 354-55, 357, 366, 369, 371-72, 378, 396, 416, 459, mock 194, 326, structural 393 visions 207, 274 Viti Levu 55, 426 volcanoes 172, 224-25 Vuniwai Loaniceva 452 Wabag 330, 334 Waiko, J. 373-374, 405 Wallace, A. R. 253

INDEX wantok system 334, 341, 345, 389, 391-92, 403-04, 414-45 Wapenamanda 357 warfare, traditional and neo-traditional, general 26-68, 76, 79, 84-86, 97-99, 102-05, 109, 123, 135, 128, 129, 137, 140, 165, 167, 186, 189, 198-201, 268, 277, 291-92, 302, 306, 312, 319-20, 323, 327-30, 339, 342, 355, 360, 368, 376, 378, 398, 435, 445, 451, 457, field warfare 28, 47, 61, 98, 371-72, raiding, ambush 26-28, 35-36, 43, 45-47, 58-59, 64-65, 111, 125, 151, 166, 183-84, 194, 291, 294, 323, 343, 351, 371, 444, feuding 3, 314, 334, 335-37, 346, war magic, magician 58, 61-63, 74, 76, 355, 357, 424, mock 98-100, 370, 372, causes of war 37-41, psychology of war 46, 68, 71 (see also gods), war between separate cultures 45, massacres 45, 352, civil war 292, modern and guerilla warfare 228, 254, 323, 351, 457; Six Day War 247; Coconut War 231 Warren, N. N. 319 warriorhood 25-82, 84-85, 110, 182-83, 204, 241, 248, 268, 294, 308, 312, 325, 331, 370, 373, 378, 401, 416 Watoka 304 Wau 335-36, 363 weaponry traditional 29, 32, 53, 57, 60, 73, 79, 92, 97, 108, 110, 173, 177, 199, 204, 343, 350-51, 378, 444, exchange of weapons 110, punishing weapons 110, makebelieve 166, 192, 206-207, modern 161, 167, 178-79, 190-93, 199, 204, 206, 231, 240, 291, 350-51, 378, 380, 444

545

Wesleyanism, see Methodist mission West Irian, West New Guinea, West Papua, see Irian Jaya Westermarck, E. xiii Wewak 218, 249, 254 widowhood 87, 317, 387 Wilhelmina, queen 277 Williams, E E. Ill, 128, 130, 140, 240 witchcraft 63-65, 67, 73, 142, 147-48, 189-90, 236, 358, 361, 419, 440 women, see gender; widowhood Woods, R. 293 work 5, 164, 168, 188, 201, 211-12, 246, 248, 277, 292, 335-36, 337-42, 364, 368-69, 379, 389, 398, 400-09 World War I 403 World War II 161, 166, 170-71, 181-82, 186, 189, 199, 207, 209-12, 233, 243-44, 254-55, 259-60, 279, 291, 293, 307, 403, 427, 441, 443 World Wide Evangelistic Crusade 297 Worsley, P. 247 Wriford, G. 2, 163, 179 Yakob of Sek 244 Yali Singina 162, 202, 214-16, 218, 226, 244, 265, 269, 271, Yali movement (wok bilong Yali) 210, 212, 234, 244-46, 249, 269-70, 279, 428 Yaliwan 162, 217-19, 227-28, 230, 231, 236, 245; 248-49, 271, 364 youth issues 323, see also gangs Yule Is. 176, 181, 297, 359 Zuruwe, Z. 454