To cite this article: Frederick H. Damon (2000): From regional relations to ethnic groups?, The Asia
Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 1:2, 49-72
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FROM REGIONAL RELATIONS TO ETHNIC GROUPS?
On the transformation of value relations to property claims
in the Kula Ring of Papua New Guinea
Frederick H. Damon
I. INTRODUCTION
In this paper I put forth and partly illustrate the thesis that neither the idea of
ethnic groups nor a focus on ethnic group boundaries is appropriate for
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Muyuw, a collectivity forming the northeast corner of the Kula Ring and a
location of Western missionary and extractive activities cyclically since the late
1840s (see Map 1). This paper is written close to the end of a second phase of
research begun in 1991 and devoted to ethnobotanical questions (see, for
example, Damon 1998): I situate the region with findings resulting from that
work.
(Trobriand I )
BBudibud
ILaughlan I.)
0k ,9.
C30tB6A c(al.ados I.)
, &(Rossel .)
.... -
Map 1
FREDERICK H. DAMON 51
Manguin 1993). After then, global climatological changes may have brought
about a restriction of traditional Indo-Pacific sailing systems just as they
helped lead, eventually, to a transformation of Europe's productive order, and
its spilling out of Western Europe. 5
Although there have been people in Australia and Melanesia for some
60,000 years, Milne Bay Province seems to have been settled quite recently.
Most provincial languages are in the Austronesian family. Guessing from the
archaeology of this region, these languages seem to have arrived in Milne Bay
over the last 2000 years.
Although scholars have tended to view the Indo-Pacific region divided
into separable social systems - Madagascar, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast
Asia, Melanesia, Polynesia, and so on - it is becoming clear that this is one
vast region defined by pulses of interaction over the centuries (see Wheately
1983, Swadling, 1996). Dong-son trader/sailor culture's influence was
followed by the synthesising cosmologies of Hindu and Buddhist India on the
one hand and China on the other, Bali being a particular meeting point for
these orders. In the Kula area much seems to have happened about 1500
years ago, and I suspect that activity was an eddy off the complex interaction
patterns between China and India.
If hypotheses based on recent evidence are correct, this region
developed through a prestige system based on megalith building which
resembles, and may be historically related to, the centre-periphery systems of
Southeast Asia. 6 It probably transformed into the current system 600 to 800
years ago. Now 7 a social actor generates prestige by exchanging the two kinds
of shell wealth clockwise and counterclockwise along a succession of people
around the participating island-cultures. Through the agency of this person
the energies of particular places flow out and into allied areas. 8 The valuables,
individually produced, named and defined through a male/female opposition,
52 FROM REGIONAL RELATIONS TO ETHNIC GROUPS?
SOCIAL ORDERS
In his vigorous Preface to the new (1998) edition to Ethnic groups and
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boundaries Fredrick Barth writes that when the conference and volume were
first held and published (1967/1969):
Most anthropologists ... thought ... that the world could be described usefully as a
discontinuous array of entities called societies, each with its internally shared
culture, and that this framed the issues of ethnicity. They further assumed that each
such entity should be analyzed in a structural-functional paradigm to display its
systematic order and functional integration ...
similar ways of thinking are constantly being reintroduced ... The breakthrough we
were striving for during our symposium in 1967 was to identify the particular
processes whereby ethnic groups are formed and made relevant in social life ... We
were trying to see social organization as emergent and contested, culture as
something characterized by variation and flux, and to think of cases of relative
stability in ethnic and other social relations as being as much in need of
explanation as cases of change.
The most heterodox and still contentious sentence in my Introduction is the most
central: I urged us to focus the investigation on the 'ethnic boundary that defines
the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses' (Barth 1998:6).
over. Marx described these dynamics in Chapter Two of Capital (Vol. 1). His
analysis suggests that these ideas were more to mystify than reveal
accumulation processes. 14 Dumont isolates perhaps the critical social fact in
this orientation when he writes of the late seventeenth-century English
philosopher Locke:
With his doctrine of trust, Locke characteristically evades the problem of political
subjection and maintains the idea of a society of equals governing themselves by
consent. Private property appears, not as a social institution, but as a logical
entailment of the individual's self-sufficiency (1986:81).
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intermarry with one another, sometimes change positions, but define their
realities with respect to one another. About rice practices Helliwell writes:
once produced in the swiddens, [it] is marked explicitly as part of 'our' rather than
of 'the Malay' world: after carried back to the village it is processed (trampled,
husked, and winnowed) on a longhouse space intermediate between the 'inner' and
the 'Malay' sections of the apartment, before being carried into the 'inner' section
to be stored at its spiritual heart (in a sacred jar immediately next to the hearth). At
this point the rice is said to have 'come home': it is one 'of us', rather than 'other',
a 'Malay' (pp.13-14).
Kertanagara, a 13th century king (1268-92) of Tumapel (or Singhasari) in Java ...
He united Java, extended his influence over Sumatra, and resisted Mongol attempts
to exact tribute from his kingdom ... [The] ... son of princely families - King
Vishnuvardhana of Janggala and a princess of Kadiri - so that by birth he was a
reuniter of the two halves of the Javanese kingdom. Even his name, Kertanagara,
meaning 'order in the realm', might refer to reunion, which was the achievement of
a great king according to the Javanese dualistic cosmology (Encyclopaedia
BritannicaOnline).
With the idea of united differences being essential let me go quickly into
a review of Muyuw's social order. I have already provided one critical
description - the complementary exchange of male and female Kula
valuables among spaces defined through the different trees used to epitomise
different activities. This is a form which is refracted through many different
56 FROM REGIONAL RELATIONS TO ETHNIC GROUPS?
domains. I select two for description, one a 'simple' item - fishing nets; the
other more complex - the dialectical relationships between encompassing
and encompassed clans and subclans.
The Muyuw fishing net (wot) is a complicated object whose production,
reproduction and use reflects all of the culture's fundamental tenets (see
Figure 1). Left/right and east/west symbolism important elsewhere in the
culture (Damon 1990, Chapter 5) is critical for it. To dry it people hang its
centre (pwason) to the east, the two ends to the west. A basic principle for
gender relations - complementarity - is encased in its use: likened to
women because it is large, heavy, and slow, when coupled with the speedy
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1U ~-
areas supply critical parts. The shell and stone weights tied to the bottom have
to come from the Sulog area in the south-central part of the island, from a
low-ranked area. Nets constantly wear out and have to be constantly
reproduced. So elders must constantly create new sections. When these are
added to the existing net its extreme ends are discarded and the new section is
spliced into the middle in a ritual (which is like a first pregnancy ritual). The
first cut of the old net has to be made with a shark's tooth that comes from
Budibud, a low-ranked set of villages on islands to Muyuw's southeast. For
those people shark is special, and others reflect that relation by incorporating
a bit of their existence into net rituals. 16 Higher ranked villages specialise in
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distinct, otherwise people would fight over property. I summarise and quote
selectively from Scheffler's account:
The problem of Simbo social structure as it emerges from Rivers' account may be
summarized briefly ... [Wlhat would be defined ... as a personal kindred is also
reported to be a corporate group - a clearly impractical if not wholly impossible
situation, this was soon noted by other anthropologists. Armstrong (1925:45;
1928:40) argued that the tavita, as defined by Rivers, could not be any kind of
group but was rather a category or, in Armstrong's and later Nadel's terms, a
'grouping'. Firth (1936:226-227, 369) later noted, in effect, that it is impossible
for a viable social system to be constructed from the 'building blocks' described by
Rivers; since membership in personal kindreds is nonexclusive, no society or
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order to fit the idea of a social system - formed of, by, from or creating
distinct building blocks. However, if the point of a social structure is
establishing relations, creating exchanges which cannot be 'considered
compensation for injuries' may be just the point - relating differences.
With this example in mind, let us go to the question of Muyuw clans
and subclans, the local categories of which are kum and dal respectively. In
more or less conventional terms, clans contain subclans. While this
conventional terminology would stress that they are both exogamous, the
Muyuw idea of these forms is very formally organised, and it is best to look
carefully, if briefly, at the indigenous ideas.
While normal discourse would stress how the subclan is in the clan,
Muyuw emphasise that there is not one clan, but four imagined to be
positioned around a part of their garden (see Figure 2). One clan is to the
North
Kulabut
West Kubay
Malas East
Kwasis
South
north (Dawet), another to the south (Kwasis), a third to the east (Malas) and
the fourth to the west (Kulabut). People understand this diagram to prescribe
correct marriage relations among the clans, so north gives a woman to south,
and must later receive one back. This relation in fact prevails among all
conceivable combinations. When asked what clans were for, Muyuw told me
they were for marriage. The model prescribes a system of reciprocity between
units conceived to be different as north is to south, east to west, and so on.
This is important because it contrasts with the understanding of subclans,
which people nevertheless associate with the clans. Moreover, while there are a
finite number of clans - four in the model, in fact exactly eight - there is an
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'property' - with worthless food. It is only when they leave those spots by
virtue of the productive associations of the clan/marriage model that a positive
content accrues to individual subclans.
Given this, the Muyuw situation differs from the one described by Fox
by virtue of the fact that the separateness/unity dialectic is held simultaneously
in the relation between the clan model and subclan notions. There is a
contradiction here. Origin accounts that stress isolation on a discontinuous
landscape featuring an incestuous unit with ridiculous food, describe units
which are contained in the synthesising clan model located in the centre and
epitome of Muyuw productivity - the garden. The contradiction is mediated
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through mortuary rituals which pass the values of the present to succeeding
generations.
It is in the public forum of the mortuary ritual where questions of
property arise. Details of these rituals may be found elsewhere (Damon 1983c,
1989b, 1990, Chapter 4). The critical issues here include the fact that many,
many people, over and above those who are required to attend, witness these
rituals. Hence the ritual managers lay out enormous stocks of food.
Consequently these activities - some five or more being held every year
across the island - define annual productive cycles, and bring together for a
week or more major portions of what is considered Muyuw if they are small
and representatives of much of the Kula Ring if they are large. The ritual
firewood discussed earlier comes into play in these rituals, and in two ways.
Firstly, for the ritual itself massive amounts of wood have to be collected to
accomplish all of the cooking, and the most prestigious foods should be
cooked in fires using the designated firewood. Secondly, the collection of
people that forms to make some of the most important gifts had to have been
created by young married women making smaller gifts of firewood to the
group. If they have not made such gifts over the weeks and months leading up
to the mortuary ritual, they will not be able to garner sufficient support to
effect the display deemed necessary.
The demonstration involves men connected by a marriage - brothers-
in-law, proximate and alternate generations as well - giving pigs and
vegetable food. If a man of group A puts on a ritual, all the men married to his
mothers, sisters and daughters are obligated to give him pigs and vegetable
food. Long lines of people form to carry the things up to the ritual owner's
house. These include pigs; long poles to which pieces of cloth are attached as
if they are flags, along with tobacco, money, and individually tied yams or
taro,; and bundles of sago and many, many baskets of yams and taro. For each
62 FROM REGIONAL RELATIONS TO ETHNIC GROUPS?
pig a trumpet shell is blown. The prestation is, and is supposed to be, a public
transfer of wealth from one set of persons, via a married woman, to another. It
is at this juncture where the question of value, of energy formed by and
moved through specific social relationships, becomes critical. For valuable
resources of many kinds are in fact held by subclans. However, these
resources - for example, good garden land and orchards of many kinds -
are always a matter of flux, depending upon the giving and receiving of pigs
effected in mortuary rituals. A subclan's resources are always a function of its
relations to other subclans, visibly displayed in public demeanor and formal
ritual procedures, and these are always reversible. If you are married to my
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sister you may in fact have me in debt by virtue of pig exchanges, and
therefore I may have to show deference of various kinds, including giving
over land my subclan owned. But there is no reason why this relationship
might not be inverted next year, in a decade, or after we are dead and our
children have cleared and changed the relationship. Productive property of
any positive significance has no standing outside of such considerations. What
this means is that, if we wish to call subclan resources private property, the fact
and possession of private property emerges out of the social forms, the
witnessed gifts instituted in the mortuary rituals. In this sense, of course, it is
public property, conditioned by the performance of the mortuary rituals.
turns out, their origin spot was a set of islands they consider worthless2 1 off the
eastern end of the main island. They thought it was ridiculous for them to
consider their origin myth as an unmediated claim to any kind of land,
valuable or not. 2 2 In 1996 when I stayed for a few days in the village near
those eastern islands people talked about the fact that they now considered
themselves on land owned by somebody else - my friends in the other
village. People thought they had no basis for legitimate social action, and
contemplated leaving should the 'owners' return. In 1982 another man
looked at me plaintively and said that in the past the Kula and mortuary rituals
determined who owned what, not myths. This is critical, because he is
recognising the function of public effort - individual and collective - in
determining the place of things in the social order. And he is recognising that
he is being asked to live with the idea that a kind of pre-social existence,
unmediated by the dialectics of social life, was instead becoming the basis for
resource distribution. What is going on here corresponds exactly to what
Dumont described in the passage quoted earlier. Rather than 'property' being
an attribute of publically recognised debt, that is, social relations, among
people engaged in a determined productive order, the new order is trying to
see how it can get 'Private property [to] appear, not as a social institution, but
as a logical entailment of the individual [group's] self-sufficiency'.
As it turns out, with the routinisation of the Government's policies, in
principle at least a third of the island's population will be disenfranchised
from the island's resources - because by origin myth those people came out
of the ground elsewhere. The laughter that some origin myths used to generate
will, and in some cases has, become tears.
By my returns in 1991, 1995 and 1996 and 1998, my knowledge of
these transformations and the situation itself had furthered. Firstly, I learned
that in 1978 an Australian who had been long resident on the island thought
64 FROM REGIONAL RELATIONS TO ETHNIC GROUPS?
of land, on which landowners are affixed. 2 3 This is now usually done with real
or invented stories about the movement of this or that ancestor over the
landscape. This subverts the clan model of marriage and the purpose of the
mortuary rituals, whose exchanges are modelled on the clan model described
in Figure 2. One of my best friends and teachers from one subclan subscribes
to the idea that his subclan came out of the ground on top of a mountain -
there they had broth from boiled coral for their food. 2 4 That unit now lays
claims to a stretch of land nearly 20 kilometres in length and up to 10
kilometres in width, extending from the mountainous southeast through most
of the southeastern quarter of the island. After listening to the stories
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sustaining these claims in 1996, about which I had heard nothing from these
men's 'grandfathers' in 1974 and 1975, I returned to discuss the issue with
their father. Before I got in the door he laughingly but bitterly said 'What
stories did they tell you now?' His accent on 'stories' (leliw) gave the word
one of its senses, which is 'just words'.
III. CONCLUSION
The old man's bitterness was from seeing a social order pass by him. That his
sons might become wealthier by virtue of mineral and timber royalties would
not displease him. And I would not like to suggest that the people in this
typical place in Papua New Guinea are not partly the agents of their own
transformation. But the reason for this overt destruction of the value
transformations of a different social order is clear: the Government, now as an
agency for the accumulation of capital on an international scale, feels
compelled to help create a social system which operates according to a
recognisable form of law. And this 'law', this social order, is one where
discrete units own discrete things and can, by their interested consideration of
pluses and minuses, trade a 'this' for a 'that' at the end of which all parties
will conceive of themselves as equal, unrelated to one another, but tied to
traditional customs, histories, or blood - and they will be ethnic groups.
This story is not a new chapter on the stage of history. The nineteenth
century in the United States experienced a similar transformation. The idea of
a social whole, a hierarchy, gradually disappeared. 2 5 It was replaced by
attempts to define people by their internal, not social, states. Physical
Anthropology as a discipline was created in this environment. So were the
great divisions of the United States social order, depending on the time or
place, White/Black, American/Chinese, White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant/Catholic
66 FROM REGIONAL RELATIONS TO ETHNIC GROUPS?
(or Jew). This was an order in which those defining what the culture was
assumed there were discrete groups - and a lot of effort went into defining or
finding them. The anthropology I have critiqued in this account, represented
by Scheffler's paper and also Barth's book, are mere extensions and correlates
of that idea about order.
Yet I do not think the idea of an 'ethnic group' is an adequate one for
describing the social conditions where I did my research, and, I suggest, much
if not all, of the Indo-Pacific region, before the coming of the European order.
Instead there was a different system, or systems, built out of the idea that order
derived from differences, and the more differences, perhaps, the better. The
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coming of the Western order has seen an overt attempt to transform that
previous order. And it has done this by enforcing the idea that there were
originally distinct persons, groups, and ultimately, countries. There is no
question that this simple idea leads to a kind of wealth unparalleled in recent
history. But the history of the twentieth century does not make it clear that this
is a social order we want to pass on to our children.
NOTES
This paper is a revised version of one delivered to the Fourth Senior National Seminar on
Sociology and Anthropology, 'Ethnicity: Sociological Approach and Cross-cultural
Understanding', in Kunming, Yunnan Province, Peoples Republic of China, from June 24
to July 4, 1999. I thank conference organisers, and especially Professor He Shao-ying, for
asking me to participate. Thanks also to the University of Virginia's East Asian Program
and the Weedon Foundation for a grant to attend the conference. Drs James Wilkerson and
He Ts'ui-p'ing, Naran Bilik and others in Kunming did much to make this paper and
participation in the conference socially significant and intellectually stimulating.
1 Recent decades of excitement generated by mining and timbering activities are not new
in Milne Bay Province. They parallel the events of exactly 100 years ago, and I can see
strife looming up that parallels the consequences of the European involvement then. See
Nelson 1976 for a review of the island's earlier history.
2 The processes I describe are not unique to this island nor Milne Bay. See Filer 1997 for
a review of similar cases.
3 One of the difficulties in contemporary historical linguistic research is that it is marked
by the ethos of a social order defined by what I - and Barth - mean by 'ethnic groups.'
So although Chinese-language speakers, Sanskrit-based speakers, and Austronesian
speakers have been interacting for millennia, language analysis strives to find uniqueness
of each original language. See Ross, Pawley and Osmond (eds) 1998. In suggesting some
criticism of this work I do not mean to disparage the extraordinary accomplishments of
these scholars. Please see note 10.
4 Professor Gao Lishi's remarkable book (1998) On the Dais' traditionalirrigationsystem
and environmentalprotection in Xishjangbanna confirms this suspicion. Western Yunnan
FREDERICK H. DAMON 67
14 In the designated chapter Marx discusses how people in the capitalist mode of
production understood exchange relations, saving for later chapters how he thought they
actually worked. These are very carefully formulated depictions which anthropologists
should study. I have used them to contrast Kula exchanges in a number of publications,
the most thorough of which is Damon 1993.
15 Those social systems remain concerned more with relative rank than property. So
ranked relations between people are paramount, those between people and things merely
derivative. Among the miners who have visited Muyuw recently this social quality is
impressed upon them - agreements are never final.
16 Shark is a favoured food and the curve of sharks' noses is used to model the shape of
Budibud sails; other areas use the leaves of Calophyllum inophyllum, a tree called kakam.
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