Constructing Regional Worlds in Experience: Kula Exchange, Witchcraft and Gawan Local

Events
Author(s): Nancy D. Munn
Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Mar., 1990), pp. 1-17
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2804106
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 CONSTRUCTING REGIONAL WORLDS IN EXPERIENCE:

KULA EXCHANGE, WITCHCRAFT

AND GAWAN LOCAL EVENTS.

NANCY D. MUNN

University of Chicago

Focusing on certain cultural practices in which spatiotemporaliy distanced events become meaning
honzons of an actor's immediate situation or 'present', this article uses a single case to explore some
aspects of the construction of a regional, lived world. The case denves from an inter-island kula transaction
in the northeast Massim region of Papua New Guinea, and shows how, through witchcraft assumptions,
Gawans incorporated this event into later local Gawan events and relations, vanously infusing the latter
with translocal meanings. In analysing some of the ways in which events were brought into connexion
(and renewed connexion) with each other over a six-year penod, I suggest a particular theoretical
framework for viewing such micro-histoncal, symbolic processes.

Introduction

In his well-known study of nationalism, Anderson (1983) examines certain cultural

forms and processes through which social relationships can be apprehended with people
whom one has never seen. Anderson's concern is with those particular forms consti-
tuting the experience of translocal and transtemporal relatedness that he regards as
central to the development of modern national consciousness.
However, Anderson's study suggests a more general anthropological problem in-
volving the means by which relatively distanciated social worlds, events or relations
emerge within the experience of one's immediate world. Regardless of whether the
persons and places involved are permanently or temporarily distanced from the subject,
we may ask how, from any given position, apprehension of a distanciated world is
built up through cultural processes that bring it into awareness as a horizon of the
present. In this usage, the 'present' or the 'immediate' refers to the spatiotemporal
position of a subject; similarly 'distance', which is defined relative to a subject's
locatedness, may be temporal as well as spatial, and relatively close or recent, or relatively
far.
Put in these phenomenological terms, this problem is related to Giddens's (1979:
38) concern with 'aspects and modalities of presence and absence in human social
relations'. As in Giddens's view, 'presence' refers here to a 'time-space notion just as
absence can refer to distances in both time and space from a particular series of events'.
However, in contrast to my approach, as well as to Anderson's, Giddens's treatment
of distanciation does not consider symbolic (meaning-forming) processes whereby
distanced events or relations become meaning horizons of an actor's present.

Man (N.S.) 25, 1-17

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 2 NANCY D. MUNN

In this article, I explore some ways in which regionality is constituted in experience

as part of a lived world. My intent is to stress that for the subject a regional world is
not given, but lived, as Williams (1977: 129) has put it, 'in singular and developing
forms' and created in the 'living'. Instead of considering the formation of a regional
order through the structure and functioning of given social forms such as types of social
organisation, exchange or communication (see for example Werbner 1977; Smith
1976), I am concerned with its ongoing formation in certain experiential syntheses
that actors create in practices, and the events that transpire in their terms. Thus I focus
on how specific events engage apprehensions of a wider social milieu beyond that of
the 'moment', that is, on particular ways in which the subject's present forms a
'network, branching out in listening posts to somewhere else' (to use Hobson's 1987:
110 free rendering of Derrida 1974: 136).
Since this 'somewhere else' is temporal as well as spatial, the initial problem of
regionality is brought into a unifying framework with the issue ofindigenous 'historical
consciousness' or 'historical memory': the experiential formulation of the past within
any given present. Two issues of immediate interest to anthropologists experimenting
with different ways of describing and analysing ethnographic realities (cf. Marcus &
Fischer 1986: 94 sqq.) are thus combined within this model.
My example derives from the kula exchange system of Papua New Guinea (see fig.
1), and consists of a case in which an inter-island kula transaction and relations between
partners had subsequent outcomes in events and relations on Gawa island in the
northeast sector of the kula ring. I attempt to show how the wider inter-island world
was formed as the horizon for certain events on Gawa, that is, how the local events
were infused with translocal meanings variously developed over the six-year course
(the time span for which I have evidence) of the local situation. The local events are
what, for the most part, I take as the 'listening posts'.2 However, the notion of 'local
events' is not to be confused with the analytically distinct notion of 'presentness', the
subject-centred, changeable reference point of 'locatedness'. Obviously, translocal
events could also be considered the 'present', or the 'listening posts', in a given instance.
For the purposes of this article, I use the terms 'local' and 'translocal' in a specialised
sense. Since Gawans regard Gawa island as their homeland and define themselves as a
single community relative to the wider social field of other islands, I take this unit as
my general referent for 'local'. By 'local events' I mean those occurring on Gawa, and
entailing social interactions and organisational activities among Gawans. Some of these
events, such as the illnesses figuring in this case, are not intrinsically kula-focused;
others, like the Gawan project for organising a major kula competition discussed later,
may focus on the future production of kula transactions, and in this sense take a
translocal or inter-island direction. By 'translocal events', I mean those engaging
participants from different islands, which involve kula transactions or occur in their
context; such events may take place on Gawa or on other islands. The many other
kinds of inter-island events and transactions are outside my purview here.
The term 'translocal' is to be understood as distinct from 'regional'. As my earlier
points indicate, I regard regionality as created in the experiential synthesis of local and
translocal. As will become clear, this synthesis occurs through microhistorical processes
in which Gawans carry forward certain past events (spatiotemporal 'moments') and
configure certain futures in their present experience.

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 NANCY D. MUNN 3

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FIGLUI-E 1. The kula exchange re91 'on showing routes in the 1970s. From Munn (1986:4).

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 4 NANCY D. MUNN

This brings me back to the problem ofhistorical consciousness. Rather than focusing
on historical narratives, or 'present conceptions of the past' (Morphy & Morphy 1984:
460), I am concerned with some ways in which, in a particular case, Gawans connect
given events with other events in and through culturally meaningful practices, so that
what one might tentatively call an 'event history' (a specific nexus of events) develops.
My concern is with the process (the modus operandi in Bourdieu's terms, 1977: 18) by
which Gawans create certain spatiotemporal connectivities in experience, and with
the specific forms taken by this process in a given case. The opposition between
historical events and the historical representation of events does not apply to such a
history, which is (as Comaroff & Comaroff put it in another context 1987: 205) 'as
much the making of history as it is consciousness speaking out'.
I do not of course claim to present the events in the following case in their full
complexity, despite the detail of the account. Further, these events, and the modes of
forming regionality they exemplify, are only part of more varied events and practices
operating in everyday life that form regionality in Gawan experience. My primary
intention is not, however, description per se, but exemplification of a perspective that
may be used to illuminate something about the construction of lived worlds.

The case of Manutasopi and Silas's illness3

In 1974, during my first field period on Gawa, Silas, an important kula man, fell ill,
and a public curing meeting (kawrawora) was held outside his house to enjoin witches
(bwagaw) to stop their killing activities. People who feel they are suspected (as well as
others) speak at such meetings, denying complicity in the witch attack and exhorting
the witches to desist; however, suspects do not confess, and their names should not
be publicly stated (Munn 1986: 217 sq.).
In the present case, certain major kula men, speaking about their shell transactions,
asserted their lack of interest in obtaining a well-known, highly valued armshell called
Manutasopi that the patient had transacted in an irregular manner that year. These
speakers could have been in competition for Manutasopi because each had a separate
partnership with John, the Boagis islander who had decided to give the much desired
shell to Silas and to the latter's exceptionally influential northern Kitavan partner.4 For
instance, Thomas, a senior kula man and the most important witchfinder and curer
on the island, pointed out that his own kula path (ked) with John was not one along
which he could expect such high-standard shells as this one. Furthermore, he had
warned Silas and the Kitavan not to make the irregular arrangement with John that
allowed the shell both to bypass the Muyuw partner on their (Silas's, the Kitavan's and
John's) common path and, in addition, to be taken immediately to Kitava without
coming first to Gawa. People felt that Gawans might be angry, since having Manutasopi
on the island would have contributed to the Gawan name in kula.
At this meeting, Silas's recent inter-island kula transaction was publicly imported
into the interpretation of his current illness through mediating witchcraft assumptions.
Witch attack on those who obtain kula shells others desire, or who are regarded as
acting illicitly in particular kula transactions, is a covert negative potential of these acts.
This potential derives from the general Gawan view that those who do not receive
what one has or what one gives to others may be angered into witch attack.5 As Leroy
(1979: 185) has pointed out with respect to exchange more generally:

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 NANCY D. MUNN 5

two persons [do not] exchange a gift in total isolation; they always retain awareness of the wider
relations ... into which the single transaction merges... Person A cannot confer a gift on B without
being aware that he could have done so instead on B' or B" or others.

Since a high-valued kula shell is likely to have been of interest to more than one person
from any given commnunity around the ring, the sequential path of its actual travel
should be considered the product of an exclusion as much as of a selection of recipients.
But whereas the agency of the recipients is objectified in the shell's path, witchcraft
inferences operating as 'the constantly charged scanner[s] of ... social relatedness'
(Taussig 1987: 393) switch attention to the agency of the excluded: in the present
case, the Gawan men who did not receive Manutasopi but rmight have (cf Munn 1986:
222).6 Connexions developed within the Manutasopi transaction, going otherwise
publicly unmarked, thus emerged as possible sources of continuity between it and the
present illness. In the meeting, the protagonists were local competitors rather than
inter-island transactors, and an inter-island kula event of the recent past was viewed
as the possible cause of a current intra-island illness.
Just as the earlier transaction is now apprehended within the local situation of illness,
so the illness is invested with a directional tension towards an inter-island event of the
imrmediate past; in other words it acquires a particular spatiotemporal horizon of
meaning. Indeed, the patient's body itself acquires this horizon, as will becorne more
evident shortly. In general, we shall see that the trajectory of this case is infused with
the power ofwitchcraft assumptions to draw certain kinds ofpast events (in this instance,
inter-island events) into the present of other events involving serious or long-term
illness.
This connective power, however, does not derive simply from the Gawan assump-
tion that such illness implicates a hidden agent angered by some previous7 transrmissive
or retentive act of the patient. Rather, this implication itself depends on the view that
acts of transmnission or retention engage a possible negativefuture event activated by
someone they exclude. This person's hidden anger is a 'subjective potential' (Munn
1986: 60) of the act (whether or not such a potential is noted at the moment) which
can secretly carry the past forward into a later 'objective' outcome: namely, the negative
bodily state of the person (or occasionally of his or her immediate kin) felt to be
responsible for the anger. Since witch action, like hidden anger itself, is invisible, it
creates itself visibly only as disordering signs-disconnected from the actor and action
producing them-on the bodies of others. Hence the negative potential of any par-
ticular originating act may frequently be identified only through searching backward
from these presently visible negative signs. Yet it is the potential for thefuture, embedded
for Gawans in certain types of act, that is the presuppositional base of this power of
witchcraft assumptions to draw the past into the present through retrospective inter-
pretation.
In short, at a given moment, any event is infused with an ambience of potentialities
or 'futurity', as well as pasts. Using Husserl's (1962; 1964) language and broadly applying
his basic framework for the experience of temporal process, we might say that the
event's 'essential [temporal] constitution' (1964: 29) involves both 'retentions' of the
past and 'protentions' of the future.8 These may change as the contexts or 'presents'
of an event's apprehension change, and as it engages different or added pasts and futures.
At the time the Manutasopi transaction took place some Gawans probably perceived
it explicitly as protending future disruptive consequences, including witchcraft: recall

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 6 NANCY D. MUNN

Thomas's assertion, at the kawrawora meeting, that he had attempted to warn Silas
against it. To the extent that the illness is felt to have been caused by the transaction,
it becomes the later realisation of these protentions (which need not of course have
been realised, or realised in this way), as Gawans, in effect, look backward to create a
specific historical nexus.
The creation of this nexus was mediated by signs of a different kind from the overt,
opaque signs of bodily disorder. These signs emerge from within the hidden body
interior. Envisioned in dreams by the patient or witch-finder/curer, or materially
drawn out of the body by the latter, they involve connective, and thus illuminating
images that in this case identify Silas's illness with the otherwise disjunct Manutasopi
transaction. Such signs can fix (or tentatively fix) a connexion between already realised,
spatiotemporally and substantively separate events by making them over into a 'new'
event in which they are realised as one. Although this connective realisation provides
an interpretation of already given events, it does so with the 'self-evidence' of
immecdate sense expenrence.

It is particularnzed as an object that is present to [a subject] ...as being, self-evidently, 'this way' (Lass
1988: 62).

Moreover, the special deictic mode of the signs involved-the fact that they 'point'
to the interior of the body, their source gives a unique authority to this process, in
that the new event is framed as having an intrinsic identification with the bodily person.
Gawans themselves view dreaming as 'seeing' (kin) during sleep; seeing is the
prototypical form of knowing (kakin). Dreams in particular are regarded as crucial
means of giving visibility to the invisible witch and witch activities.9 In the present
case, as we shall see, dream events seen directly by the dreamer and later verbally
communicated to others create a visible form of the witch's action, linking it to Silas's
illness. As noted above, the witch's action is otherwise perceptible only in disordering
signs whose connexion to this action cannot be perceived. Similarly, a witch-finder's
act of abstracting objects from the patient's body reverses what the witch has done
covertly in an overt act that draws the hidden 'outside'. The illness of the patient and
the acts of the witch are thus visibly connected by events of transformation and
interpretation that have the power of 'self-evidence'.
Gawans told me that the choice of the Manutasopi case as the most likely cause of
the illness derived from the patient's diagnostic dream; or in another, related view,
from a witch-finder's extraction of the dangling decorations on kula shells from Silas's
body, a sign that witches had fixed the decorations inside him, causing his illness. It
was as if Silas were holding in his kula, and witches had, in turn, knotted it inside his
body (cf Munn 1986: 226). In one version of the patient's dream, witches took
decorations from a kula armshell (probably suggesting that they wanted the shell).10
According to my informants, Silas therefore felt he was being bewitched because of
an armshell, namely Manutasopi.
Since both the dream images and the objects that the curer was said to have taken
out of Silas's body are identified with the dreamer's internal bodily being, we can say
that the inter-island transaction in its witch-subverted form (that is, as a failure to
transact) is embedded within Silas himself In this way, his body engages an inter-island
horizon of meaning, and the recent kula event is materialised in subverted form within
the present.

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 NANCY D. MUNN 7

The connective form of these dream events is illustrated more fully in another dream
version. I was told that Silas said he had dreamed of a man and woman telling him to
go out of the house to prepare food for his kula visitors, John and another kula partner;
they took his hands and, leading him outside, told him he would die. The dream
events are here understood as both a prediction of possible outcomes and a disclosure
of the links between recent events and Silas's current illness. In effect the transaction
of Manutasopi on Boagis is reflected in the inter-island dream event located on Gawa
in which two people (who are probably the Gawan witches) tell Silas he will die. The
dream mediates between translocal and local events by dialectically reworking the
Manutasopi event in terms of its negative potential: its future of death from Gawan
witches. It is as if the Manutasopi transaction realises its future turned inside out to its
'shady side' as Gawan metaphor might put it, of local illness and possible death.
By turning a past event into its negative future, these trans-spatiotemporal dream
images show to Gawans the subverting operations of witchcraft, thus opening this
dialectical process to experience. This point is further illustrated in the standardised
images of another dream revealed at the meeting by a man known to have witchfinding
powers. In this dream the patient's house became a canoe; sailing to Boagis island
(John's home), it was filled with armshells. Gawans explained to me that this meant
witches sailed in this canoe to Boagis with the Gawan kula traders.11 The house's fixity
on Gawa is subverted as it takes on sirnilarities to a form well-known to Gawans: that
of a witch canoe whose witch sailors from Gawa and other islands kill the sick and
load them on the canoe. Both Silas's present illness and its diagnosed past cause-his
kula journey to Boagis for Manutasopi-as well as its possibly fatal future, are joined
in the patient's house as witch canoe. Moreover the house, like the patient's body in
the curer's diagnosis, becomes a container of armshells (suggesting 'holding' rather
than giving).
As in Silas's dream mentioned earlier, the house, which is now part of the immediate
scene of the meeting, acquires an inter-island horizon: namely, the Manutasopi trans-
action in its negative form of witch canoe. Informants explained that the speaker was
enjoining Gawans to stop bewitching Silas so that the 'house' will not sail-that is,
Silas will not die. Thus the dream is part of a further dialectic aimed at positively
transforming the negative witch-induced future now implicated in the illness (cf. Munn
1986: 234). This type of operation is a general aim of the kawrawora, and I return to
it later.
Given the curer's diagnosis and the patient's dreams, the predominant interpretation
of this illness linked it to the Manutasopi transaction, most speakers mentioning the
shell's name in referring to the illness. But some suggested this sickness might also have
resulted from attacks by witches who had previously made Silas ill. Gawans pointed out
to me that if a 'new' (kweivaw) witch attacks, previous (kutabwaabogwa) witches might
join them. Sirnilarly, a grudge from a previous act can be reactivated by a new event
reminding these witches of the earlier one. For instance one Gawan, explaining a
speaker's remarks, said that Silas may have been bewitched because, having won an
earlier kula competition (uvelaku), he received the gifts from the display frame erected
at the competition; the initial causative act was 'from the past' (kutabwaabogwa), but
the witches 'remembered' (raruway) today when he acquired Manutasopi. The 'deci-
sion' (kareiwaga) to attack derived from this previous anger. In this instance, the
Manutasopi transaction became a mnemonic for the earlier kula competition that was

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 8 NANCY D. MUNN

the originating cause.

Gawans think an illness or death could derive from remembered anger over long-past
events (Munn 1986: 223 sq.). An earlier rather than a more recent grievance may be
the cause, or may combine with a more recent grievance. The remembered anger of
the excluded other gathers possible connexions of a current illness to 'previous' as well
as more recent acts or events. Without specifying chains of sequential acts, the standard,
widely used time-frame of 'old' or 'previous' (kutabwaabogwa), and 'new' or 'more
recent' (kweivaw), formulates a sense of connectivity back into the past by pointing to
previous grudges perhaps mnemonically revived or sustained by memory within the
present.
Just as the current illness may be caused in part by past witches so also a future illness
or attack on the patient could later be linked to the current one (or its postulated
cause). This generative principle of temporal connectivity in Gawan witchcraft is not
irrelevant to subsequent occurrences in the present case, to which I now turn.

Further local development of the event history

Although Silas recovered from his illness in 1974, he became ill again some time in
early 1979, recovering before I returned to Gawa in October 1979. But the Manutasopi
transaction had once more emerged as the vaguer, more distant horizon of a longer
event trajectory. It was now bound up with a conflict between Thomas, the speaker
at the 1974 meeting identified earlier, and the affines of his younger clan brother,
Peter, from whom Thomas ordinarily received garden produce as part of the marriage
transactions for the former's wife.
The root of the conflict was as follows. Thomas felt that he had been accused of
witch attack by speakers at a kawrawora meeting for Silas's 1979 illness; the rationale
for his interpretation was linked, as we shall see, to the Manutasopi case. Blame for
this accusation fell particularly on Daniel, an important kula man and clan head whose
sister's daughter was married to Thomas's clan-brother. According to my informants,
Daniel had said that 'senior men' (tamumoya) were responsible for Silas's illness.
Although this was a non-specific categorical accusation common in Gawan witchcraft
speeches, Thomas, feeling that it was directed at him, angrily left the meeting. Since
then, he had also isolated himself in some respects from the wider community.
Because of this supposed accusation, Thomas had refused Daniel's marriage gifts for
Peter's wife, angering Peter who had moved from his own hamlet next to his brother's
to Daniel's (his wife's mother's brother's) hamlet. Peter's response thus mapped into
Thomas's own residential locality and lineal support group a breach that paralleled the
effect of Thomas's own acts of self-isolation with respect to his affines and the wider
Gawan community, and which further internalised the conflict that had now become
an intra-clan, intra-residential group problem embedded in the wider affinal conflict.
Given the connexion (to be explained later) between Thomas's sense of accusation
and Manutasopi, we may say that the Manutasopi case, which had begun with trans-
actions between partners from different islands, had now-through a metamorphic
process in which successive forms are dialectically generated by witchcraft assump-
tions-penetrated even more deeply into the intra-island social space of Gawa.
Furthermore, Daniel himself was taken ill in October 1979, and it was rumoured
that Thomas had said that Daniel's 'eye would be painted with dirt', that is, that he
would die.12 Thus the earlier 1979 illness of Silas became part of the horizon ofDaniel's

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 NANCY D. MUNN 9

later illness and the current conflict between Thomas and Daniel. The central agent
of these connectivities was in fact Thomas, who felt himself accused and whose
aggrieved acts precipitated these linkages. Although the rationale for Thomas's assump-
tion of accusation is certainly complex, there was an immediate reason for it that came
to my attention in a public court (yakara, literally 'denial') called by Thomas in
November 1979 because of current alleged insults to him by a kinswoman of Daniel
and others, and the rumour mentioned above. At this meeting, Thomas, bringing out
the historical background of the situation, mentioned the prediction a Kitavan made
to him when Gawans went to Kitava on a kula competition perhaps early in 1979. As
informants discussed with me later, the man suggested that Thomas would be accused
of bewitching Silas (who was apparently at this time ill on Gawa) because he (Thomas)
should have received Manutasopi.
Thus, the Manutasopi incident that had been activated as part of the meaning of
Silas's 1974 illness was reactivated in his later illness; and it was again brought into
public awareness in a speech relating to Thomas's current grievances. Moreover,
through public speaking, Thomas reactivated the Kitavan event as a horizon of the
immediate local conflicts discussed in the 1979 court. We may also note that Gawan
assumptions that witches remember past grievances further facilitate the connexion of
later negative events to earlier ones. The Manutasopi transaction is being drawn along
as a more distant horizon ofpresent events, becoming repetitively identified with Silas's
illnesses, and indirectly with Daniel's as well.
We have here something akin to what Hobson (1987: 111) describes as 'a network
of return calls: movement back to reactivate discoveries which in their time had been
a movement forward'.13 Moreover, in the case of the Kitavan prediction, what appears
as a movement of awareness backward from a given time to reactivate the Manutasopi
transaction is the means by which the 'forward development' (to use Husserl's words,
1970: 355) of the event history takes place. Considering the Kitavan's 1979 statement
from the perspective of its occurrence during Gawan kula on Kitava, we can see that
as a prediction, it is a special example of a 'return call' made to the past that carries
the past forward in consciousness into the 'present' (on Kitava) and the immediate
future of the later kawrawora meeting for Silas on Gawa. Conversely the present is, in
effect, drawn backward, acquiring this particular past within its horizon. Later, on
Gawa, Thomas himself actualised this prediction as he walked out of the meeting,
drawing both the Kitavan event and the Manutasopi incident embedded in it forward
into Silas's current illness. In this instance, the 'return call' is the medium by which a
'forward development' of the history takes place. New kula dimensions from inter-
island relations thus enter Gawa combined with earlier ones and reverberate within
the local situation.

The uvelaku competition

By the time Daniel died in May 1980, the conflict between him and Thomas had
relaxed, but the relation between Thomas and the former's clanspeople was still
distrustful. The internal conflict now entered into Gawan attempts to organise the kula
competition (uvelaku) that would repay the one of 1979; in this context, it had subtle,
fragmenting effects upon the decision-making process. Taking on new destructive
forms, it resonated in a context in which Gawans were planning inter-island transac-
tions-'looking outward' towards inter-island relationships.

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 10 NANCY D. MUNN

To understand this new turn, we must consider the organisation of the uvelaku
competitions, which operate in terms of a spatiotemporal cycle involving the reciprocal
implication of opening and closing competitions. The winner of an opening (vaga)
uvelaku sponsors the next one, which must be held for shells coming from the opposite
kula direction. For example, an opening necklace competition on the northern island
of Kitava sets up expectations for a future closing competition for armshells on one of
the southern islands such as Muyuw or Yegum, which in turn engages a reference to
the past opening competition in the north. Thus the form of the cycle is the same as
the basic kula reciprocity pattern. No specific timing is entailed in the cycle; the exact
moment of the second competition depends on multiple factors. After this, another
opening uvelaku may be set up independently in either direction, but as we shall see,
an attempt may be made as part of the closure to hold a coordinate opening uvelaku
to keep the cycle from 'finishing'; if this takes place, the new opener then moves in
the opposite direction to the opener of the previous uvelaku. Attempts to generate
continuity are also integral to kula transactions themselves (see Campbell 1983; Damon
1983; Munn 1983; Weiner 1988). Uvelaku involve the basic kula mode of forming a
repetitive sequence.
Table 1 shows the spacetime cycle and current social organisation of Gawan com-
petitions, in which men from clans of two of the four phratries form a single sponsoring
and co-sponsoring cohort: a man of one of the opposite two phratries is to be the
main winner and receives (along with others of both these phratries, i.e. his cohort)
the uvelaku prizes and feasts (Munn 1986: 66 sq.). The recipients pay off their common
debt to the donors only as sponsors of the next competition.
The 1979 necklace competition held on the northern island of Kitava had been
co-sponsored by Silas (whose illness was apparently coincident with the uvelaku he
sponsored) and won by Thomas. But Daniel's phratry was the co-sponsor of the
projected kula competition, and Daniel, a major kula man, had been (with his clan)
the main co-sponsor. The conflict between Thomas and Daniel eroded the co-oper-
ation and easy consultation between the sponsoring phratries necessary to organise the
uvelaku. In short, the event history developing from Silas's illnesses was now imported
into the cycle of kula competitions and affected the 1980 attempts at organisation.

TABLE 1. Social organisation of kula competitions.

A C Thomas
Phratries*
B Silas D Daniel

1978/9 A Sponsors C Winners

B Co-sponsors D Co-winners

1980-81 A [Winners] C Sponsors

B [Co-winners] D Co-sponsors

*Phratries are designated by capital letters. (The term 'phratry' refers to the social category Malinow-
ski called 'clan').

However, additional earlier events at the kawrawora meeting for Silas's 1979 illness-the
one held just after the uvelaku won by Thomas on Kitava-bind this history into the
uvelaku cycle in another way. At this meeting,14 Peter (presumably at this time acting

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 NANCY D. MUNN 11

as Thomas's representative) brought two coconut seedlings with sprouts and two
without sprouts as part of the effort to induce the witches to stop attacking Silas. It
was explained to the people that the coconut with longer sprouts signified the future
return competition for armshells Thomas would undertake; the one with shorter sprouts
signified an opening competition for armshells. Daniel and his phratry would sponsor
the latter concurrently with the closing competition so as to keep the uvelaku cycle
going. The unsprouted coconuts signified that if Silas died neither uvelaku would take
place.
In the present allegory, length appears to convey relative age (the relative length of
growing time): the senior, closing competition has been 'growing' since the opening
competition, while the opener is being newly projected. They suggest a differential
future potential of growth and a differential reaching into the past. The closing uvelaku
to the south has already been entailed by the recent winning of the previous opener
on Kitava, while the second opener (also in the south), which is not entailed in the
previous one, is being newly projected. The unsprouted coconuts, of course, project
no life continuities.
The hortatory and promissory uses of the coconuts at the kawrawora meeting join
Silas's illness and his life potential to the uvelaku organisation and the cyclic reproduction
of Gawan competitions in inter-island kula transactions. The image of a continuity
from the immediate past into the future that derives from the event cycles of kula
competitions appears within the present as a desired alternative to the negative tem-
porality of Silas's possible death and the witch activities implied in his illness.
Conversely, the death of Silas would now become, as well, the temporary 'death' of
current uvelaku plans. Thus the illness is projected in Gawan consciousness as having
repercussions (positive or negative) on the local organisation of the next uvelaku, which
is directed towards the creation of translocal kula transactions. In this way, the illness
is carried along on the particular spatiotemporal cycles set up by kula (here, the kula
competitions) and it 'moves forward' on them to have relevance when the next uvelaku
is planned. Again, kula becomes part of the horizonal meaning of Silas's illness (here
as its future rather than its past), through projecting a desired positive transformation
rather than a negative causal interpretation as in the Manutasopi case.15
As we have seen, Silas did not die, but Daniel, who was to sponsor the opening
uvelaku, did. The obligations set up at the kawrawora were not forgotten at the late
1980 kula project (indeed, that is how I learned of them). During a special visit Thomas
and others made to Muyuw in an exploratory procedure for their uvelaku project, one
Gawan referred to this event in a discussion with an important Muyuw kula man.
Explaining to him the problems of the current situation,he said that Thomas was now
'afraid', because it was the responsibility of the co-sponsoring phratry (especially
Daniel's clan) to affirm preparation of the new opening uvelaku. Yet the latter's senior
clansmen, agreeing in principle to the initiation of the uvelaku project, had not spoken
of the new opener.
Thus two crucial occurrences at the kawrawora meeting become intertwined in
another form within the uvelaku project: the inter-clan tension, deriving from Thomas's
assumption ofaccusation, affects (among other things) the willingness ofthe co-sponsors
to carry out the positive promises made at the kawrawora.
Strains affecting Thomas's ability to organise the uvelaku continued even though a
public peace-making had been made. At a meeting sometime prior to the exploratory

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 12 NANCY D. MUNN

kula trip, Silas threw betel nut at the feet of Thomas as a sign of peace, saying their
quarrel due to Daniel's supposed accusation at the 1979 kawrawora was now finished.
Gawans were thus publicly reminded of this occurrence in the context of a meeting
for the uvelaku preparations, in an effort to finish its ongoing negative effects.
As is characteristic of Gawan meetings concerning major community projects, this
one combined rhetorical projections regarding desired ends of the current undertaking
with attempts to clear any subterranean conflicts by enjoining people not to bewitch
others. After witchcraft warnings were voiced, some men spoke about the expected
kula competition, rousing people by pointing to the competition between Gawans
and their immediate northern neighbours on Kweawata for shells in the southern
communities. For example, the comments of a Kweawatan man, who said that he
would obtain armshells before certain other Gawans, were jokingly denigrated. In
response to the report of the Kweawatan's assertions, some men asserted that particular
Gawans would acquire certain named shells on the expected kula journey. Although
viewed as rhetorical fictions, such assertions draw the coming kula transactions into
immediate consciousness.
Thus the desired future kula transactions and the space of inter-island relations are
evoked through reporting the Kweawatan's recent conversation on Kweawata about
potential kula transactions,16 and the transactions are viewed as a competition between
Gawans and Kweawatans rather than simply between Gawans. The positive transfor-
mation of the divisive internal conflict from the past with its source in the illnesses
and assumed bewitching of Silas (and ultimately in the Manutasopi transaction that
now appears to have receded from direct concern) is developed further in the projection
of the joyful inter-island competition. Silas's illness and the kula competition, which
we have seen joined in other ways, are again brought together in a positive nexus.
This rhetorical procedure did not fully overcome the divisiveness, or assure the uvelaku 's
performance in the next collective kula sailing, but along with related activities it 'tried
out' (as one man once put it to me) the possibility of performing the uvelaku. Thus
Gawans do not simply reach back into the past to draw relations into the present
(creating a continuum), but as we have also seen in other meeting contexts, they
attempt to stop the expected destructive outcomes of certain past events (the negative
potentials of the present) and to prefigure positive futures (cf. Munn 1986).

Conclusion

This article has been concerned with certain aspects of the ongoing formation of a
regional spacetime or 'world'. Asking how a given 'present' becomes a medium of
what is 'not present', I have focused on the importing of translocal kula exchange
events into the immediate Gawan experience of local events; the latter events thus
acquire this wider world as their horizon. Of course, at any given moment these local
and translocal events may already be imbued with meanings from each other. For
instance, Silas's second illness came to include his first illness as part of its past, but the
latter was already imbued with the Manutasopi transaction, and this translocal kula
meaning was carried along and reinforced with new kula input in the second illness.
In experience, an event is not simply 'local' or 'translocal' since its recognised pasts
(and futures) may be both. Indeed, syntheses of the local and translocal (whether
kula-related or involving other kinds of inter-island connexions) go on in different
ways and contexts in Gawan everyday life. We may say that at any given moment,

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 NANCY D. MUNN 13

local and translocal dimensions mutually inform each other and are meshed together;
and such syntheses are themselves the grounds and media of ongoing processes of
synthesis.
In calling the particular connective operations examined here an 'event history' I
refer at once to the process producing the connexions between events, and to its
product. The relations between events are developed in the practices of everyday life
through infusing the experience of a given event with pasts (or possible pasts) and
futures. Thus the unit of the event history is not simply a 'happening' but a happening
infused (or becoming infused) with more time and space (more events or potential
events) than itself
The cultural structure of this process involves specific ways in which pasts and futures
are embedded in particular events or general types of event (such as, in the present
instance, an illness or a kula transaction) in a given society. Thus 'cultural structure'
does not consist here of a logic of received cultural categories, 'a priori concepts' that
appropriate events, as in Sahlins's (1985: 145) well-known neo-Kantian model. Rather,
it refers to a society's varied ways of forming the spacetime of event relations in
experience.
Two characteristic Gawan modes of linking events emerge in my example: those
of witchcraft and kula exchange. These are not entirely separate, since we may say
that Gawan exchange events in general, and kula in particular, can engage two basic
types of potential agency: the subversive agency of the excluded other or witch, and
the desired agency of the included other or recipient; as I explain below, the latter is
the key to the cyclic exchange structure of kula.
It is primarily witchcraft that has driven the particular history described here, creating
its dialectical metamorphoses. I have suggested that the power of witchcraft as a
spatiotemporal connector derives most fundamentally from its investment of retentive
or transactional acts with negative potentials-notably, the actor's serious illness brought
about through the 'excluded other'. Conversely, any such illness may be interpreted
as the realisation of this negative future, and via diagnosis and public meetings become
imbued with some specific past or pasts as its possible cause. Thus 'the witch' is a
dialectical operator that connects events by bringing to the fore within one the covert
negativity in another.
As we have seen, Gawans attempt to stop the witch-engaged event sequences by
'finishing' the continuative power of hidden anger: they treat death as the negative
future of illness to be avoided, posing against it the positive future of regaining health.
In its overall form witchcraft works by a negative dialectic: on the one hand, the witch
has subverting effects upon events; on the other hand, when witchcraft is an active
medium of spatiotemporal continuities, efforts are made to stop its historical power.
Thus not all historical operations continue the past in the present (or into the future):
some procedures attempt to cut off undesirable pasts felt to be currently active.
In this article, I have only briefly discussed the connective form of kula, which I
examine in detail elsewhere (Munn 1983; 1986). It suffices to append here some
necessarily simplified comments to amplify my argument. In kula, a given transaction
is variously imbued with protensions of later transactions: basic expectations are that
a received shell will be moved onward through later transactions that continue a
directional 'path' ofrecipients; and that opening shell transactions implicate later returns
from the opposed direction.17

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 14 NANCY D. MUNN

The capacity of shell transactions to entail future transactions is developed through

the powers of persuasion and consent. For instance, the transaction of an opening shell
is a persuasive act intended to gain the recipient's consent to make a future return, at
the least, of an equivalent shell of the opposed category. When the latter shell arrives,
it implicates the persuasive power of the past opener within the present, and so should
be given back along the opener's route. Although the persuasiveness of an opening
gift is 'finished' by a closing gift, the emphasis is on reactivating this continuative power
by new opening gifts. In contrast to the attempts to stop the continuative power of
the witch's anger, the impetus in kula is towards ongoing activation of the positive
agency based on consent.
Overall, this way of embedding futures and pasts in transactional events yields a
repetitive event structure, a particular kind of inter-island cycicity, although these
descriptions do not convey the uncertainty and spatiotemporal complexity involved.
In the present event history, this cycicity was used in an effort to shift a local event
(Silas's illness) from witch-inspired potentialities into positive outcomes, by having its
future hooked into the promised performance of an opening kula competition. As we
have seen, these Gawan competitions are keyed to the continuative mode ofinter-island
kula. Through this mode, Silas's illness was drawn forward to become a relevant past
at the planning of the next closing competition when the opener was to be arranged.
On a more general closing note: it should be obvious that although I speak of
connexions between events, or modes of linkage and continuity, I do not mean that
the kind of event history suggested here entails a linear time. On the contrary, as is
suggested in another context byBourdieu's argument (1977: 95 sqq.) opposing practical
time and linear, synoptic calendars, the presupposition of a situated actor precludes
linear temporality. 'It may be convenient', as Ezra Pound (cited in Longenbach 1987:
13) has put it amusingly, 'to lay out [historical time] anaesthetized on the table with
dates pasted on here and there'-as I have also done for narrative convenience here.
However, the temporality of practices is developed from the action of situated agents
who are actively creating the relations of particular events at various 'moments', that
is, in a given 'present'. Thus at any given moment the meaning horizons of events (for
our purposes here, their retentions and protentions) are contextualised as 'of the
moment'; and the moments themselves emerge 'gradually and intermittently' (Bour-
dieu 1977: 105).
This view of temporality (or spatiotemporality) has been central to my perspective.
Underlying the specific issues of the construction of regionality and indigenous event
histories is the general anthropological question in which they are founded: what
frameworks can we develop to conceptualise the ongoing constitution of a lived world?
My approach here has been to attempt to show one aspect of the formative processes
that create a lived regionality on Gawa-processes that themselves go on in the course
ofliving. I leave the article as an exploration of this problem with, I hope, some positive
future or 'lively forward movement' (Husserl 1970: 356) still in it.

NOTES

Field research on Gawa was supported by the National Science Foundation. I am grateful to partici-
pants in departmental seminars at the Universities of Minnesota, Michigan State, the Institute of Social
Anthropology (Oxford University), the London School of Economics and the 1988 Melanesian Con-
ference at the L.S.E. for comments on earlier versions of this article; I am especlally indebted to MNscha
Penn. My thanks also to Rafael Sanchez, Jean Comaroff, and to Man's anonymous readers for helpful

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 NANCY D. MUNN 15

suggestions. As always, my thanks to the Gawan people.

Giddens's focus on presence and absence in his ideas about space-time (his 'time-space') derives
philosophical inspiration from Heidegger (cf Giddens 1981: 29 sqq.). This might suggest some interest in
the 'horizonal' formation of experience, but in his treatment of space-time, Giddens relies heavily on
Goffman's interactionism and Hagerstrand's time-geography (e.g., Giddens 1979: 198 sqq.; 1984: 110
sqq.), which predictably turn him away from this concern.
2 Although in this article I take (local) events as the 'listening posts', one might also focus on how
material objects entering from outside or distant places into a locality create a relatively long-term con-
crete presence through which translocal spacetimes, or more vaguely, the sense of 'other places/times',
are apprehended or imagined. (See for instance the discussion by Helms 1988: 114 sqq. of goods 'derived
from symbolically charged geographical distance', and Bunn's 1979 account of exotic imports and curio
cabinets in eighteenth-century England).
3 I have used pseudonyms for the names of all islanders. Gawans are familiar with biblical and other
western names and many have Christian names (most of which are not widely known); therefore the use
of this type of pseudonym seemed reasonable (see also the choice of pseudonyms in Weiner 1988).
Although most of the sensitive material in this case was public knowledge on Gawa at the time, I am
reluctant to fix names to some of these occurrences in writing, as they were undoubtedly painful to those
directly involved at the time. Nevertheless, Gawans and other islanders in the northeast section of the
ring who know something about the events set out here may still be able to identify some participants.
Thus my use of the pseudonym can be understood in Gawan political terms as a karaabay-a figure of
speech that covers up while yet revealing a little that serves in public contexts especially, to speak of
sensitive matters in a tactful fashion.
4 For some details on the kula transactional background of this case, see Munn (1983: 294). Damon
(1978: 92) also comments on the effects of the Manutasopi transaction in Muyuw.
5 Obviously, some types of giving are particularly prone to witch attack because they are more overtly
conflict-ridden, or because the objects are claimed or wanted by more individuals. The present case
exemplifies such a transaction. Moreover, kula exchange in general is imbued with the possibility of
witch attack because of the complex transactional politics and the high value of the objects being trans-
acted.
6 Gawans might also suspect someone from another island of witch attack in a kula-related illness. A
more general tendency, however, is to 'regard witchcraft as being caused primarily by other Gawans'
(Munn 1986: 216).
7 The attack could also, of course, be caused by an object held before and concurrently with the
illness: for example, if a patient possesses a pig at the time, it may be supposed that this apparent reten-
tiveness is the source of his or her trouble.
8 Certain distinctions critical to Husserl's argument are glossed over in this generalised application of
his terms 'retention' and 'protention' to sociocultural and historical processes. Thus in his discussion of
time consciousness, Husserl (1964: 57 sqq.) distinguishes the primary constitution of temporality-in
which retention (primary remembrance) and protention or expectation are integral to the process of
forming each passing 'now'-from conscious recollection or secondary remembering of what was once
'now'; the latter is a reconstructive process of the imagination. The secondary memory recaptures the
primary time-creative or continuum-creating process at another level. In this conscious remembering of a
discontinuous past the expectations or protentions of the primary time-creative process are also included
(although, as Ricoeur 1988: 36 sq. points out, Husserl gives less attention to expectation than to reten-
tion and recollection in his analysis).
9 These witch-revealing dreams also have certain associations with verbal spells that are stored within
the body and thought of as emerging outside it in speech. Thus witch-finders or curers (or the patient
himself if he knows appropriate magic) may induce diagnostic dreams through spells. Silas's dream, dis-
cussed below, probably involved the use of a spell. Although they are essentially verbal potencies, spells
operate through a concrete imagery and are linked with relevant substances that may then be their visible
performance media. Spells, dreams and objects the witch-finder takes from the patient's body are thus
closely associated, and all in somewhat different ways play out relationships between the hidden, or
invisible, and the visible.
10 The surmise that taking the shell's decorations suggests that the witches desired the shell itself is my
own: Gawans did not make it explicit to me at the time. I base it on my knowledge of the significance
of detaching decorations in other contexts. For instance, snatching shell string decoration off another
clan's canoe is a licensed theft signifying admiration of the canoe's beauty. Admiration may be benigu but

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 16 NANCY D. MUNN

it is also associated with feelings of jealous desire for what another possesses (Munn 1986: 102 sq.). The
admired object is, in effect, 'desirable', and the snatching of its beautification expresses this desirability.
But I have also observed the Gawan owner of a canoe snatch off the shell decor because its overseas
recipients had taken too long with their final returns. In this case, the Gawan expresses his angry claim as
an owner-builder of the canoe by stripping the new owners' canoe of the shell decor the latter had
attached to it. Thus snatching a piece of decor may suggest desirous admiration or angry claims.
11 Informants told me that this account referred to a dream, although the speaker did not say explicidy
that he had dreamed it: this apparently was understood. As I learned more fully later, the notion of a
canoe of witches is a standard one (see Munn 1986: 218 sq.); consequently my Gawan informants were
quite surprised when I asked them to explain the allusion.
12 Daniel himself told me that Thomas had never said anything like this, remarking that words had
been 'twisted'.
13 Hobson is discussing Derrida's concept of history. I apply the idea rather freely to my own data.
14 I was not on Gawa when this meeting occurred. See below for the source of my information.
15 The image is also transformative in another sense. Gawans polarise death and kula. One epitomises
grief, loss and the 'inwardness' of the island community; the other happiness, vitality and inter-island
connectivities. When there is a death, kula shells should not be transacted by mourners. The death of a
major kula figure will stop any community-wide kula plans until the man's clan agrees to their resump-
tion (Munn 1986: 171, 66). Thus the transformation figured in this process also involves moving from
the negative to the positive pole of a standard opposition.
16 Some previous transactions were also humorously noted in the Kweawatan's speech. For example,
the Kweawatan said that Thomas and the Kweawatan uvelaku leader had transacted the same two major
armshells (presumably at different times), so that now they should compete with each other. Thus Ga-
wans were also reminded of past transactions via this rhetorical account of the Kweawatan conversation
(which may, of course, have been apocryphal).
17 Not all shells are expected to move on. For example, a shell becoming the recipient's kitomu
(possession) may be expected to stop with him. In addition, the realisation of any of these expectations in
a given instance is always uncertain. In this sense, negative expectations-for example, that one may not
get a return shell for one's opener-are also operative.

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La construction de mondes regionaux dans 1'experience: echange et

sorcellerie Kula et e'venements locaux Gawans

Resume
Se centrant sur certaines pratiques culturelles dans lesquelles des evenements spatio-temporellement
distances deviennent des horizons de signification de la situation immediate ou presente d'un acteur, cet
article utilise un cas unique pour explorer quelques aspects de la construction d'un monde regional, vecu.
Le cas provient d'une transaction Kula entre iles dans la region Massim du nord-est de la Papouasie
Nouvelle Guinee, et montre comment par des suppositions de sorcelleries, des Gawans ont incorpore
cet evenement dans des evenements et des relations locaux et plus tardifs, insufflant a ces relations des
significations intercommunales. En analysant pendant une periode de six ans certaines des facons par
lesquelles des evenements sont amenes en relation (et des relations renouvelees) les uns avec les autres,
je suggere un cadre theorique particulier pour considerer ces processus symboliques, micro-historiques.

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