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BIG MEN AND
GREAT MEN
Personifications of power
in Melanesia
edited by
MAURICE GODELIER
and
MARILYN STRATHERN
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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge
New York Port Chester Me/bol/me Svdne)'
EDITIONS DE LA MAISON DES SCIENCES DE L'HOMME
Paris

2"
ig Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge
.'/l E;; The Pitt Building, Trumpingron Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP
\. II: 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011, USA
'\. 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia
"'''-:.::-0'- ami Editions de la Maison des Sciences de I'Homme
54 Boulevard Raspail, 75270 Paris Cedex 06
Maison des Sciences de I'Homme and Cambridge University Press 1991
First published 1991
Printed in Great Britain at Redwood Press Ltd, Melksham, Wiltshire
British Library cataloguillg ill publicatioll data
Big men and great men: personifications of power in Melanesia.
I. Melanesia. Social structure
I. Godelier, Maurice, 1934- II. Strathern, Marilyn
305.0995
Library of COllgress cataloguillg ill publicatioll data
Big men and great men: personifications of power in Melanesial
edited by Maurice Godelier' and Marilyn Strarhern.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Political anthropology - Melanesia. 2. Political leadership - Melanesia.
3. Power (Social sciences) - Melanesia.
I. Godelier, Maurice. II. Strathern, Marilyn.
GN668.B541991
306.2'09995-dc 20 90-1312
ISBN 0 521 390184 hardback
ISBN 27351 0350 1 hardback (France only)
WD
Contents
List ofillustrations
Notes on contributors
Preface
Acknowledgements
Map
-""/ Introduction
MARILYN STRATHERN
PARTI
1 From great men to big men: peace, substitution and
in the Highlands of New Guinea
PIERRE LEMONNIER
2 Great man, big man, chief: a triangulation of the Massim
JOHN LIEP
3 Soaring hawks and grounded persons: the politics of
rank and gender in north Vanuatu
MARGARET JOLLY
PART II
'-">4 Punishing the yams: leadership and gender ambivalence
on Sabarl Island
DEBBORA BATTAGLIA
5 Great men and total systems: North Mekeo hereditary
authority and social reproduction
MARK MOSKO
page vii
IX
Xlll
XVll
XVlll
1
5
7
28
48
81
83
97
v
VII
22
62
67
261
263
88
100
101
103
111
XVIII
53
57
page 26
33
65
65
Non-competitive and competitive forms of exchange
Regular male grades in South Pentecost
Central actors in rank ceremonies in three regions
Relation between labour and values accrued
An invidious but revealing comparison
Hypothetical transformation of a great-man system
into a big-man system
A representation of the three political types
The im, or household dwelling
The mal, or men's house
Leadership: models reconstructed across time and
social categories
Quadripartite tribal structure
Quadripartite moiety structure
Quadripartite subclan structure
Quadripartite gender structure
Maps
Map of Papua New Guinea
3.1 Vanuatu
3.2 The distribution of the graded society
1.1
3.1
3.2
14.1
14.2
2.1
3.1a
3.1b
4.1
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4
Tables
Figures
Illustrations
1.1
VI Contents
I:
l
6 The cryptic brotherhood of big men and great men in Hahita 115
DONALD TUZIN
I: 7 Complementarity and rivalry: two contradictory principles
in Yafar society 130
II
BERNARD JUILLERAT
11
;[1
.'
8 How Oro Province societies fit Godelier's model 142
~ I
~ I
ERIC SCHWIMMER
\1
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PART III 157
I
-::y
9 The fractal person 159
I
ROY WAGNER
I 10 The flute myth and the law of equivalence: origins of a
principle of exchange 174
GILLIAN GILLISON
~ 11 One man and many men 197
MARILYN STRATHERN
12 'Interests' in exchange: increment, equivalence and the
limits of big-manship 215
RENA LEDERMAN
13 Post-Ipomoean modernism: the Duna example 234
NICHOLAS MODJESKA
14 Big men, great men and women: alternative logics of
gender difference 256
DAN JORGENSEN
PARTlY 273
-'/
15 An unfinished attempt at reconstructing the social processes
which may have prompted the transformation of great-men
societies into big-men societies 275
MAURICE GODELIER
Bibliography 305
Index 321
xu Notes on contributors
Tambaran (1980), and co-editor, with Paula Brown, of The Ethnography
of Cannibalism (1983).
Roy Wagner, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, has
published on the Daribi of the Papua New Guinea Highlands (The Curse
ofSouw 1967,Habu 1972, and Lethal Speech 1978) and on the UsenBarok
of New Ireland (Asiwinarong 1986). His two works of anthropological
criticism are The Invention of Culture (1975) and its sequel, Symbols that
Stand for Themselves (1986).
Preface
The societies of Melanesia have been a constant stimulus to anthropologi-
cal theory. No other region of the world has had quite its sustained impact
on the discipline - and one that in recent years seems if anything to be
gathering momentum. Yet Melanesianists have been curiously reluctant to
extend their own syntheses to the region as a whole. That requires a local
theoretic, and theoretical contributions tend to come either in the form of
programmatic articles or as a selective and thus domesticated framework
for ethnographic monographs. Although several collected essays have
appeared, some notable, these generally pose an ethnographic problem
that is then worked out through the various localised contributions. What
has been lacking is debate that starts with theoretical issues common to the
region. This book does exactly that.
Its orjgin is a workshop convened in Paris in 1987 by Maurice Godelier
and myself to consider a thesis initially developed in Godelier's comparison
of the Baruya from the so-called Highlands fringe with societies from the
central Highlands of Papua New Guinea. His monograph, The Making of
Great Men, draws its theoretical inspiration from a semi-outsider's early
attempt at synthesis, Marshall Sahlins's seminal yet necessarily abbrevi-
ated comparison of Polynesia and Melanesian chiefs and big men. Sahlins
makes the figures of prominent men paradigms for entire polities. In effect,
Godelier argues that within Papua New Guinea differences between entire
social systems are made evident through such personifications of male
power. He offers a pivotal contrast between the figures of big men and what
he calls great men. Chapter 8 in his book, 'Great men societies, big men
societies: two alternative logics of society', sets the agenda. The workshop
intended to find how far the correlations which Godelier formulated so
clearly in his own work held elsewhere in Melanesia.
Anthropological understanding of the region has for long been domi-
nated by conventional distinctions between the Highlands and Lowlands
of Papua New Guinea, and between the apparently egalitarian nature of
XIII
these societies and their seaboard and island counterparts who have chiefs,
systems of rank and graded societies. These quite radical differences have
always been an embarrassment to any attempt to describe Melanesia as a
whole, not least in their echo of Sahlins's particular Melanesian/Polynesian
contrast. It was important to include Lowlands and island societies in our
purview, and the volume extends Godelier's ideas geographically and
culturally.
The results were productive, and in the best sense a surprise. The dimen-
sions along which we sought to differentiate societies turned out in many
cases to be discernible axes of differentiation within societies. At the same
time, unexpected similarities appeared. The conventional distinctions
between Highlands, Lowlands and island societies were not the barriers to
comparison they seemed. This raises a significant challenge to traditional
methods of cross-societal enquiry in general. It is not just that typologies
are revealed to have limits, but the systemic nature of the differences and
similarities between these societies question our understanding of cultural
forms. The recent orthodoxy that cultural regions such as 'Melanesia' are
mere artificial fabrications of the anthropologist does not allay it. Rather,
it is as though these societies invite us to make contrasts that they then repli-
cate on various scales for our edification; as though a gross difference
between 'Polynesia' and 'Melanesia' were also being acted out in front of
our eyes between the tiny islands of the Massim. The invitation is replica ted
when it also looks as though the very opposition between big men and great
men societies can be found - as in one notable case documented in this book
- within a single set of siblings.
A 'Melanesian' perspective merely stops the replication at one point. The
justification for doing so lies in one resultant insight. The triangulation (big
men, great men and chiefs) that informs many of the contributions here
appears as the effect of dislodging the original terms of a binary contrast.
But the third term is not so much dialectical outcome or mediating compro-
mise or segmentary product as a remainder, what is left over after a two-
way comparison is completed. Chiefs compared with big men leads to the
discovery of great men; big men compared with great men uncovers 'odd
men' who are neither, and so on. It would be trivial to suggest that 'more'
instances would obviate the strategy. The interesting question is what in
these societies elicits the analytical strategy from us. The book conse-
quently makes no apology for privileging two terms (big men/great men)
since any such pair would have similar analytical effect. It has, however,
taken us (as anthropologists) the breadth of our regional scope to perceive
this.
MARILYN STRATHERN
Manchester
June 1989
This is then no ordinary set of conference papers whose coherence has to be
justified after the event. The individual h p t e r ~ of this volume offer a pro-
gressive and sustained argument which takes the reader through a sequence
of positions, culminating in Godelier's reformulation of his original thesis.
The strength of this enterprise can be attributed to three things.
First, the problems which the book addresses are not narrowly conceived
as simply concerning styles of political leadership. The contributors have
been chosen for their wide spread of interests - although all have first-hand
fieldwork experience in Melanesia, they are also known for their writings
on political economy or kinship, or gender relations, or the analysis of
ritual and the exposition of symbolic forms. Secondly, they comprise
scholars who have contributed to recent debate, the more senior being
included because of current rather than earlier work, and the more recently
published because their ethnographic writing has evolved in the context of
contemporary issues. They bring a sense of the questions that should be
concerning anthropologists in the 1990s, though these are not merely for
anthropological edification. The reformulations offered here realise a par-
ticular kind of commitment to the peoples of this region; for the scholar
there is no terminus to the work of understanding. One does not stop with
this or that model- because the effort of comprehension must not stop. It
is hoped that this commitment will be conveyed to the reader in the way in -
which the different chapters carry one another's ethnographic insights.
Finally, although Godelier's work opens and closes the book, this is far
from an act of homage. On the contrary, almost every chapter takes signifi-
cant issue with Godelier's original ideas; together they are the un-making
of his theory of great men. But the critiques are positive, not negative, and
crucial to this has been his own participation in the debate.
The focus which Godelier's work originally presented has not been only
decomposed but recomposed. In order to convey that sense of movement,
the book adopts an unusual format for edited collections. The conventional
'theoretical-introduction-plus-ethnographic-cases' formula simply makes
each an appendage of the other. Here, by contrast, following a brief
explanatory introduction, the chapters are carried forward by their own
momentum. The rubric at the head of each are in the editors', not the
author's, words.
xv Preface
Preface XIV
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Acknowledgements
The workshop held at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and which gave
rise to these papers was made possible by the generous assistance of the
MSH and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; our
gratitude, evident then, is repeated here. We appreciated the company and
contributions of Shirley Lindenbaum at the time. Individual chapters have
benefited from the incisive comments of the Press's (initially anonymous)
readers, Christopher Gregory and Michael Young. Our thanks are collec-
tive. Nicholas Modjeska undertook to have the map drawn, for which we
must thank the Audio-Visual Services Unit at Macquarie University,
Sydney. However, only Marilyn Strathern knows how much we also owe
to Jean Ashton in Manchester for her processing of the manuscript.
Editorial misjudgements remain Strathern's.
XVII
Introduction
MARILYN STRATHERN
One of the figures that Melanesia has given to world ethnography is that of
the big man. Yet the prominence of this figure in certain societies of the
region has been inevitably juxtaposed to its absence from others, or to the
presence of chiefs or forms of rank that thereby seem aberrant. In supplying
a specific counter-type, however, Godelier's 'great man' does more than
elaborate a political typology. It leads him into specifying the conditions of
social reproduction, and thus a general basis for societal comparison.
Big men are produced in systems that promote competitive exchanges,
the transfer of women against bridewealth, and war compensation pro-
cedures that allow wealth to substitute for homicide. Great men, on the
other hand, flourish where public life turns on male initiation rather than
ceremonial exchange, on the direct exchange of women in marriage and on
warfare pursued as homicide for homicide. Beyond these institutions, then,
lies a difference that Godelier locates in the fundamental way in which men
transact with one another. In his words, the relevant question is whether
exchanges between groups and individuals depend on a quest for non-
equivalence, and thus incorporate principles of calculated disequilibrium
or unequal exchange (as in the substitution of human lives for wealth; or
whether they rest on principles of equivalence and on mechanisms designed
to restore equilibrium (wealth for wealth, life for life). The implications, he
argues, go beyond the nature of exchange. Where things substitute for
human life, the reproduction of social relations (including relations of kin-
ship) comes to depend upon the accumulation of material wealth. This
feature of big-men systems is absent from great-men systems. There, since
the circulation and redistribution of wealth is not an essential factor in
social reproduction, it is not essential to relations of domination between
people and local groups. Domination is achieved through the ritual and
other powers that great men have at their disposal, and through a male
ideology promulgated in initiation rites that sets men's general power
against women's.
Godelier looked to the Papua New Guinea Highlands societies with their
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2 Big men and great men
prominent big men for comparisons with the great men he found on their
cultural borders among the Baruya. In doing so, he has created a newcentre
of theoretical interest, complementing that of the recently denoted Moun-
tain Papuans (J. Weiner 1988). In turn, to see big men from the perspective
of great men gives these formedigures a different cast. The differences do
not disappear; rather, we re-perceive their nature. This is of some signifi-
cance for general anthropological theorising about the nature of sociality.
The big man had been taken as prototypical of a type of group organ-
isation, so that his presence or absence elsewhere classified the society
under review. Godelier's break with this mould has accomplished several
things:
1 it has given a name to a figure prominent in people's presentation of
themselves, but quite different from big men; typologies can no longer
proceed along the presence/absence axis, with an embarrassed nod at
'chiefs';
2 it has broken with the Highlands-centric definition of what is interesting,
namely the activities of groups, and the public occasions on which they
appear;
3 it has broken with the assumption that big men are above all political
leaders and that to describe their activity is to describe political life.
For in tending to equate the activities of big men with group structure,
Highlands anthropologists have also tended to endorse a long-standing set
of assumptions in Anglophone anthropology at large, namely the equation
of groups with social structure and of politics with society.
This proclivity has had profound consequences for the analysis of social
life. And evidence from the Papua New Guinea Highlands has seemed to
sustain it to the last. Quite apart from the inroads of alliance theory, or
feminist anthropology, or studies of the political economy, or even an
appreciation of those other Papua NewGuinea societies where ritual rather
than ceremonial exchange orders relations between men and where myriad
other counterindications show how big-men systems are far from typical of
Melanesia as a whole, that figure ofthe Highlands big man has appeared
irreducibly concrete. For the first time we are in a position to re-assess the
nature of these central systems through the very construct which has
seemed to give their group structures such distinctiveness and solidity.
It is intriguing that much the same could be said of the 'chiefs' who are
taken as so characteristic of many seaboard and Massim peoples. From the
perspective of the difference between big-men and great-men societies, this
book offers an approach into these other Melanesian systems, as it does
into those which appear either to produce no such figures at all or - as in
the ranked grades of Vanuatu - to produce multipliers of them.
r
)
Introduction 3
Texts, these days, do not survive without subtexts. A number of contro-
versies run through these pages. One concerns an established debate over
the admissibility of historical reconstruction and the necessity for hypoth-
eses about evolution and social change. Some of the contributors would
have liked to have seen a resolution. Indeed, they present far more material
in the way of suggestive critique than Godelier deals with in his conclusion;
instead, that returns us to the specific problematic with which the book
began. There is also an editorial shaping to the collection which forms a
subtext of sorts. The chapters are arranged so as to indicate two other con-
troversial issues, raised briefly in the preface.
If the historical debate is anthropologically well established, the gender
debate is perhaps less so. An explicit question is raised against the unthink-
ing gender that we take to be so self-evidently male in the figures of big men
and great men, and an implicit one against the accounts of social systems
which would epitomise sociality in such a gendered form. There is a stra-
tegic parallel here with the anthropologists' MelanesialPolynesia con-
undrum, where the 'regions' are more frequently contested (e.g. Thomas
1989a) than the axes of our contrasts. It was implied that the internal
scrutiny of one of them (in this book, Melanesia) could offer an indirect
commentary on their analytical pairing. In a similar but more direct way,
gender configurations from this part of the world allow us if we would but
look - and against wisdom acquired from perspectives elsewhere - to con-
sider indigenous analysis of male-female relations through the apparently
singular personifications of one sex alone.
A new debate is also adumbrated. It comes from an old one: the nature
of the comparative enterprise. But here what is opened up are questions
concerning comparability that definitively eclipse decisions about units of
analysis and dependent and independent variables. They touch on general
features of human practice in the reproduction and replication of social/
cultural forms. They come through our analyses as the chaotic reappear-
ance of shadow problems on the borders of our purviews that seems to
imitate or repeat the very problems we set out to encompass. So the same
problems may appear 'within' our units of analysis as seem to lie right
'beyond' them. The result is a sense of bifocalism. By way of example: on
the one hand a difference between restricted and generalised exchange
appears to contrast entire societal types, yet on the other to exemplify
clusters of attributes coexisting within a single system. Thus a global com-
parison of societies is faced with the chaotic knowledge of internal differ-
entiation within anyone, and any fine internal discrimination is faced with
the magnitude effect of radical global divisions that make their co-eval
4 Big men and great men
operation seem a logical impossibility. Yet our analyses yield this insight
with reluctance. For as a conclusion it is itself an analytical rather than a
theoretical critique; and one with which anthropological theories of human
organisation have yet to deal.
r
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PART I
Godelier's schema are applied to three areas of Melanesia - the Papua New Guinea
Highlands, the Massim on Papua New Guinea's seaboard and the islands of North
Vanuatu. From each of the overviews it emerges that both big men and great men
and in some cases chiefly styles can be found within the same region.
5
CHAPTER 9
The fractal person
ROY WAGNER
Wagner re-opens the Highlands material via his own Austronesian perspective
from NewIreland. He poses a question about the different kinds of anthropological
understanding that have been brought to the depiction of great men and big men.
Big men have been seen as exemplars of sociological activity, as mobilising social
forces, for they appear to change the scale of men's actions from an individual to a
group dimension by virtue of the numbers they command. But great-men systems
force us to comprehend a pre-existing sociality, and a pre-existing totality, of which
any aggregate can be only a partial realisation. This totality is neither individual nor
group but a 'fractal person', an entity whose (external) relationships with others are
integral (internal) to it. However diminished or magnified, the fractal person, keep-
ing its scale, reproduces only versions of itself. The great man thus represents the
'scale' of his culture rather than a scale-change to accommodate anthropological
attempts to ground it in principles beyond itself. Ifwe have here an indigenous social
science, the question becomes how then to conceive big men from the point of view
of understandings of this kind that great-men systems are able to elicit from the
western social scientists.
We are indebted to the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci for the notion of
hegemonic ideas (1971), of concepts that have come to be taken so much
for granted that they seemto be the voice of reason itself. Such ideas are not
subconscious or out-of-awareness for the same reason that their validity is
not subject to question; they are the very form taken by our consciousness
of a problem or issue. Hegemonic ideas, then, are no more subject to proof
or disproof than are Kuhnian paradigms, for in both cases entering the dis-
course is tantamount to replacing the question of whether things work that
way with one of how they work that way. Hence anthropologists with an
investment of research interest in the hegemonic motif, say, of the necess-
arily social dynamics of human thought, might be expected to fault and
misunderstand a challenge to the motif in terms of its failure to provide a
convincing 'how', without perceiving the irrelevance of their objections.
The opposition of individual and society, a product of western jurispru-
dence and political ideology, is not merely coincidental to the hegemony of
'social' thinking, but identical with it. It is based on the necessarily ideal,
and practically unrealisa ble, notion of the 'social concept', and the necess-
arily substantive, physical and material, notion of the person as object.
159
Thus the ideal of 'corporateness', an ostensible merging of individuals into
a single social 'body', becomes, in its failure to achieve complete realisation,
a substantive group of individuals. And the notion of a totally integrated
'culture' of collective representation within the individual becomes, in its
failure of realisation, a mere 'culture-concept', an ideal. The point is not
simply that a flawed and unrealistic opposition of thought and substance
reproduces itself as measurable social fact, that social groups and idealised
cultures are mass-produced as a map of socio-cultural variation and prob-
lematics. It is, more importantly, that a naively hegemonic dependence
upon individuality and plurality underlies and articulates the manner in
which idealised concept and substantive object are brought into play. This
dependence makes the fact-and-problem-producing failures of concept to
be fully realised, of substantive object to the conceptually tractable, seem
like stubborn fact, seem to be the very fabric of social reality.
Thus to make a statement such as 'no society works perfectly', or even
'the reason no society works perfectly is just that its members expect it to
do so' is to describe the expectations of anthropologists themselves rather
than those of their subjects. For what is described is the manner in which
social scientists work to make their subjects interesting, statistically vari-
able and problematic. It is by no meansdear that the subjects think of them-
selves in this way, or think of their social interactions as interesting because
they,can be mapped into paradigms of social groupings and individual
variability.
The idea of a social mechanism or that of the individual as its natural
resistance did not grow indigenously in Melanesia; it was brought there
together with other mechanisms by self-conscious 'individuals'. And so the
proposition that a society might work or not work is the same sort of sur-
prise in indigenous terms as that an automobile engine should work or that
it might not work. But the failure of an automobile engine, or of the society
of western construction, does not entail a complete overhaul of our
assumptions about mechanics; it entails an overhaul of the engine, the
model, before the mechanics get to work. A hegemonic of individual/
society mechanics, with its underpinnings of the particular/general, shifts
automatically from questions of 'why?' into questions of 'how?'.
Hence a discovery that, at least for some Melanesians, the part/whole
distinction and its systematic entailment is inapplicable, does not auto-
matically imply that those Melanesians belong to a race of mathematical
wizards. If such a discovery suggests that the individual problem- and
person-producing failure of social concept, and the system-producing
failure of individual autonomy, are wrongheaded constructions of the
Neither individual nor group
The anthropologist has often been obliged, even pleased, to construct
social forces out of the evidence of a big man assembling, say, his resources
a moka. As longas hecan be seen to be making a kind of solidarity, help-
109 the group to happen, the imputed sociology has an immediate and
obvious realisation. The question posed by the idea of the great man is that
of what to do when society and its solidarity are already in place. Then, of
course, the big man's efforts have to be reconsidered or re-entitled he is not
. '
enactlOg the answer to a sociological question, because that question has
already been answered. But if we should suggest that he is realising his own
individual aspirations, the projection of western political economy has
another easy answer. Sociology is then seen to emerge from the conjoint
effects of individual compet\tion.
Anyone who has ever tried to determine the definitive locus of
161 The fractal person
wrong 'engine', this may simply mean that Melanesian thinking is too
elegantly simple, rather than too complex, for western expectations. An
engine with no moving parts at least avoids the nemesis of friction. And fric-
tion may well be the effect that social scientists have mistaken for social
leverage.
Or so at least the received conception of the big man would suggest: an
emperor of social friction who uses society against itself to reinstate the
essential individual at the top of the heap. In his .identification of the
phenomenon of the great man, Godelier posed a profound challenge to our
understanding of Melanesian societies. Introduced as a type or another
kind of leader, the great man provides a counter-example to the big man
that familiarity and overuse have inflated far beyond Sahlins's (1972)
sophisticated characterisation. But typology alone can only trivialise the
challenge, which takes its weight and authority largely from the context of
Baruya ethnography. For The Making of Great Men proposes a vivid
antithesis to the self-excusing notion of 'loosely structured' societies that
has entertained ethnographic speculation for many years. The larger chal-
lenge is that of a more holistic manner of thought than that implied in struc-
ture, and the great man is its holistic counterpart.
Is man his equivalent in another kind of society, a more open,
and loosely organised one? Or is this type-casting of the big
man itself the error of another way of approaching society, and therefore
not a typological contrast at all? Let us consider an ethnographic locus
classicus.
Big men and great men 160
'individual' and 'corporate group' in the planning and making of these
competitive exchanges, fairly soon realises that individual and group are
false alternatives, doubly so implicated because each implies the other. It is,
after all, difficult or impossible to define the successful (or unsuccessful)
maker of moka as either individual or group, because the big man aspires
to something that is both at once. One might say that the Hagen big man
aspires to the status of great man - that the moka produces variant
examples, equally valid however successful or unsuccessful, of the great
man. It is a matter of the realisation of something that is already there, as
the pigs and shells are already there.
Would it make any difference, then, to argue that the status and the
society are never really there, that the image is always realised for the first
time, or even that it may never be realised at all? None whatsoever. Hagen
society is there or not there whether or not the moka is realised, the big man
remains a' big man regardless of the form of his achievement. If this were
a matter of 'making' society, then the failure of a moka would make a
difference.
I have borrowed an illustration from Hagen society (d. chapter 11),
and purposely made our normal projection of motivation and agency
into its actors oblique and difficult for a very specific purpose. This is to
develop, in the course of this essay, Marilyn Strathern's concept of the
person who is neither singular nor plural. In introducing her idea, Strathern
(1990) borrowed from Haraway (1985) a most ingenious application
of the classic science-fiction term 'cyborg' - the integral being who is
part human and part machine. For my purposes, and for reasons that
shall become apparent presently, I shall re-entitle the concept as that of
the fractal person, following the mathematical notion of a dimension-
ality that cannot be expressed in whole numbers. I shall not be concerned
with the degree of fractality here, the terms of the ratio or fraction, but
simply define the concept of a fractal person in contrast to singularity and
plurality.
Although the idea of fractality may appear abstract, it is in fact no more
so than singularity or plurality, or statistical analysis. Its effects are
altogether familiar to the fieldworker - as the problem, for instance, of the
big man's aspirations being at once individual and corporate. It is that
problem, apprehended as a solution. It lies at the root, too, of what is com-
monly misconstrued as the 'extension' of kin-terms, exemplified in the
Siane usage (Salisbury 1964) whereby any daughter of a unit to which the
class of 'father' had given a bride becomes a hovorafo ('father's sister's
daughter'), a potential spouse. As Salisbury correctly deduced, father is not
necessarily identified with a so-called primary kin term here, and is neither
singular nor plural. The term has a fractal implication, equally applicable
to both situations.
Afractal person is never a unit standing in relation to an aggregate, or an
aggregate standing in relation to a unit, but always an entity with relation-
ship integrally implied. Perhaps the most concrete illustration of integral
relationship comes from the generalised notion of reproduction and
genealogy. People exist reproductively by being 'carried' as part of another,
and 'carry' or engender others by making themselves genealogical or repro-
ductive 'factors' of these others. A genealogy is thus an enchainment of
people, as indeed persons would be seen to 'bud' out of one another in a
speeded-up cinematic depiction of human life. Person as human being and
person as lineage or clan are equally arbitrary sectionings or identifications
of this enchainment, different projections of its fractality. But then enchain-
ment through bodily reproduction is itself merely one of a number of
instantiations of integral relationship, which is also manifest, for instance,
in the commonality of shared language.
Is this not, then, a mere generic, a mathematical fiction like the 'modal
personality'? It would be indeed if I were concerned either to generalise or
particularise the relation between general and particular. But integral
relationship is not a matter of general and particular, nor of how one of
these might be made over into the other. The argument is not one of com-
parative reality or practicality, but rather one of how one's realities or prac-
tical iss4es are situated with respect to relationship. The only issue that
need detain us is that of howMelanesians themselves would seemto situate
them.
The issue requires evidence, and the best evidence I can think of pertains
to the way in which Melanesians indigenously speak of, order and concep-
tualise existence as identity. This entitlement of existence is quite simply
that of naming, for it is after all names, rather than individuals or groups,
that 'go on high' in the moka, that command awe, attention and responsi-
bility in the Kula, that serve, as 'big' or 'small', for the identities of what we
are predisposed to call groups -lineages, clans or whatever. Regardless of
their range of denomination, whether personal or collective, names are but
names, but it is a name that is at once the individual and collective aspir-
ation of the big men. A Daribi friend once observed, 'When you see a man,
he is small; when you say his name, he is big'.
The example I shall use is that of Daribi naming. ADaribi name, nogi, is
always an instantiation, and also a simplification, of the relation desig-
nated by the participle, poai, of the verb poie, 'to be congruent with'. Two
persons, or a person and a thing, that share a name are tedeli nogi poai, 'one
name congruent'. Two beings that share the same kind of skin are tedeli tigi
162 Big men and great men
----,-
I
i
I
I
I
The fractal person 163
164 Big men and great men The fractal person 165
ware poai, 'one epidermis congruent'. Anything designatable by a word
stands in a poai relation through any conceivable point of resemblance.
Furthermore any two persons or objects that each share any conceivable
point of resemblance with a third, are related as poai through that third.
Poai is univers'ally commutative, and because a poai relation can simply be
bestowed, through the giving of a name for whatever reason, it is also uni-
versally applicable. Poai eats the world, and it also eats itself. For when an
infant goes unnamed for an intolerable period of time after birth, usually
out of fear for undesirable consequences of naming, it will acquire the
designation poziawai, 'unnamed'. The infant acquires an immediate poai
relation with all things unnamed (non-congruent), but, of course, since
poziawai is a name, it acquires another with all things named.
The infant, in short, becomes an embodied hinge between the world of
names and that of unnamed things. And though poziawai is by no means
uncommon as a name at Karimui, this is no reason to accede to one patrol
officer's private musings that the Daribi are a prime example of negative
thought. For it turns out that the designation poai is virtually as popular as
a personal name. Unhinging as these examples may prove, they serve to
direct our attention to the social recognition of the name, the only real grip
afforded the Daribi on an otherwise frictionless surface.
Essentially, any recognition or bestowal of a name is always the fixing of
a point of reference within a potentially infinite range of relations, a desig-
nation that is inherently relational. As an instantiation of poai, it always
implies, through that relation, something that is both less (one of many
potential relations) and more (a class, a range of objects or beings) than the
person designated. A man, for instance, named for the cassowary, can
claimsuch words as tori, kebi and ebi as his names, since they are all equally
names for the cassowary. Also, since the cassowary is poetically and col-
loquially the ebi-haza, the 'cassowary-animal' through its non-avian pro-
clivities, the man could well claim haza, 'animal', as a pagerubo nogi, a
(somewhat droll) basing-name or nickname. And if, as is usually the case,
the man was named for someone else, or someone else is named for him, the
name is always a section, like the conceptual person or body, taken from a
genealogical chain and implicating that chain.
Hence the particular points of convergence that other Melanesian
regimes of naming may share, or may not share, with Daribi naming are
somewhat beside the point. As long as words are polysemic (and naming,
of course, makes them so), and people relate by reproduction, any system
of identities developed by sectioning and referencing such a relational field
is intrinsically fractal- apparent differentiation developed upon universal
congruence and interchangeability. And since denomination is our surest
map or model for the apprehension of identity, the case for the indigenous
conceptualisation of fractal units is manifest. It is 'individual' and 'group'
that are arbitrary, imposed and artificial.
The concept of currency, money that demands accounting in terms of
singularity and plurality, is likewise a non-fractal imposition upon a regime
of exchange based on sectionings taken from human productivity and
reproductivity. Pigs, pearl shells, axes, bark cloaks are already relational
and implicated in the congruence that underlies the remaking of human
form, feeling and relationship. Shells and shell wealth (which Daribi think
of as 'eggs' through which human beings reproduce) are engaged in the
reciprocity of subjectives involved in display and concealment, just as axes,
meat and other adjuncts of production and reproduction place human sus-
tenance and replication in reciprocal exchange. When such relational
points are treated as representational, as commodity-aggregates on the
model of currency, or when the currency substituted for them is taken
literally, integral relationship is denied and distorted. Minus the congru-
ence that keeps the scale of their essential unity through all permutations of
categorisation, names become merely representational categories of social
designation and classification. And minus the sense of their essential unity
with body and life-process (in their subjective as well as objective enhance-
ment), items exchanged become the mere 'wealth objects' of a like categor-
isation - a 'representation' of human values through utility, a 'classifi-
cation' of utilities through human value.
Money, as the cutting edge of the world-system, entails the counting of a
resource-base. Where the resource is itself relational, the commodity, so to
speak, of relation, it will exert its own reflexive effect upon the terms .of
assessment. Hence bridewealth and childwealth inflate prodigiously in the
attempt to make assessment into a form of relating, spending represen-
tational literalism in the service of what is fundamentally a rhetoric of
assertion.
Is the 'economic' image of the big man merely the effect of this rhetoric
when magnified via the literalising commensuration of objects and their
assessment? Thus our very image of the big man inflates him through the
imputation of his own inflation, whereas his distinctive indigenous attri-
bution is as a rhetorician (Reay 1959: 113-30). For ultimately the final
arbiter of money as well as law and court cases, ethnography as well as
indigenous status, is talk. And talk, a concept that is generally inclusive of
language for Melanesians, is by no means the same thing as description,
assessment, information or language itself. It is the medium of their frac-
tality, that which expands or contracts the scale of recognition and articu-
lation to fit all exigencies, making language equal to all occasions by
166 Big men and great men The fractal person 167
j
1
making those occasions over into talk. Hence talk is like a poai relation
intrinsic to thought. Law and money, singular and plural, individual and
group, even ethnography, aresupposed to be the places where it comes to
rest, but talk about lawand money, even ethnography, never rests, and talk
itself, as Goldman's recent study of Huli rhetoric exemplifies (1983), never
dies. This is the fractality of the Melanesian person: the talk formed
through the person that is the person formed through the talk.
Neither singular nor plural
When the arbitrary sectionings cut from the whole cloth of universal con-
gruence are taken literally as data, they become the social categories that
we identify as names, individuals, groups, wealth-objects and information-
bearing sentences or statements. Taken at face value this way they lose any
sense of fractality and merge with the western hegemonic of social orders
constructed of substantive elements, cultural systems made of represen-
tational categories. This does not mean that the fractal possibilities of scale
retention are not there, for they are evidenced by the poai relation and its
many equivalents. But it does carry a strong guarantee that the indigenous
awareness and use of these possibilities will be discounted, overlooked or
misread as rustic attempts at social construction.
To put it into the structuralist terms that have become an argot of the
social anthropologist's craft, the possibility remains that social and cultural
phenomena might be collapsed along a number of axes to yield scale-
retaining understandings of unsuspected elegance and force, the generalis-
ing forms of concept and person that are neither singular nor plural. This
would implicate Benoit Mandelbrot's fractal dimensionality, perhaps the
general case of holography, as a 'fractional dimension' or dimensional
'remainder' that replicates its figuration as part of the fabric of the field,
through all changes of scale. Fractality, then, relates to, converts to and
reproduces the whole, something as different from a sum as it is from an
individual part. A holographic or self-scaling form thus differs from a
'social organisation' or a cultural ideology in that it is not imposed so as to
order and organise, explain or interpret, a set of disparate elements. It is an
instantiation of the elements themselves.
The phenomenality of meaning provides an apt parallel; there is no such
thing as 'part' of a meaning. Though we may well persuade ourselves,
through grammars, sign-systems, deconstructive ploys and the like, that
the means by which we elicit meaning can be eminently partible, the mean-
ings so elicited do not and cannot have parts. It is not simply a matter of the
cliche about wholes being greater than the sums of their parts, for if a mean-
ing has no parts, there is no sum to compare with the totality. One might as
well conclude that the whole is less than the sum, for it is only one. When a
whole is subdivided in this way it is split into holographs of itself; though
neither the splitting nor its opposite amount to an 'ordering' function.
What we call an 'order' belongs to the world of partibility and construc-
tion.
This calls to mind a more extended Melanesian example, that of
Mimica's remarkable study of the conceptual mathematic of the Iqwaye,
an Angan-speaking people who live near Menyamya. Mimica (1988)
describes an essentially recursive counting system, which includes only two
numbers, one and two, and is computed on the digits of the hands and feet.
Acrucial facet of the mathematic is that digits are understood to be assimi-
lated to the final number reached, a holistic sense of sum or totality for
which Mimica borrows the German term Anzahl (1988: 102). Thus, for
instance, the five digits of the hand become 'one', in the sense of ' one hand',
because they are assimilated to the final 'one' in the series 'one-two-one-
two-one'. 'Ten', the 'one' at the end of the second hand, is also, of course,
o n e ~ except that this is hand number two. The feet are likewise differen-
tiated ('one foot', 'two feet'), except that the unity at the conclusion of the
second foot becomes, oddly enough for an even number, one: 'two hands,
two feet: one man'. Then we start again with the first finger of the first hand,
counting it as 'twenty', or 'one man' instead of 'one finger'. When we have
counted tyventy of these twenties, or 400, the Anzahl is once again 'one', as
is 8,000 and so forth.
In fact, infinity is also 'one', not so much through some privileged access
of the numeration, but simply because it is always counted on the body,
which always closes on one. But the reason for this also closes with cos-
mology, and with the kind of universal congruence or integral relationship
evidenced in the poai relation and in genealogy. According to Mimica
(1981), the Iqwaye cosmos was originally embodied as a single man,
Omalyce, folded in on himself, with his fingers interdigitated between his
toes and a penis/umbilicus connecting abdomen and mouth. Only when the
ligament was cut, and Omalyce unfolded, did plurality/reproduction, as
well as the fingers and toes onwhich to count plurality, come into existence.
It should not be a surprise, then, to learn that numeration and genealogy
have the same congruent basis for Iqwaye, that they characteristically name
their offspring (in order) for the digits of the hand.
Now suppose that a western demographer came to make an accurate
census of the Iqwaye. No matter what number might be reached, and no
matter how painstakingly and accurately the census is carried out, it will
invariably be deficient by Iqwaye standards. For the Iqwaye totality, the
168 Big menand great men The fractal person 169
Anzahl instantiated by Omalyce, includes also all the Iqwaye who have
lived in the past, and all those to be born as well (Mimica 1988: 74). How-
ever high the number, it will ;llways be less than the number embodied by
Omalyce, which is, of course, one. Each Iqwaye person, then, is a totality,
Omalyce instantiated, but any number of them is less than that. For
Iqwaye, in other words, counting/reproduction keeps its human scale,
which is by no means comparable to the abstraction of western number.
The holography of reproduction grounds another extended example,
that of the Gimi of the Eastern Highlands described in chapter 10. Initially
Gillison delineates this holography through a kind of metonymic con-
flation of the contained foetus with the penis contained in copulation. Like
the penis, the foetus has an opening at the top, the unclosed fontanel,
whereas the mouth is covered by a membrane (Gillison 1987: 177); the
foetus 'grows' in the womb as the penis swells and erects in the sexual act,
and it 'eats' the proffered semen through the fontanel (Gillison 1987: 178).
But the substance it eats flows from the head of the father, himself a
matured 'foetus' and thus a penis, down through his urethra, so that the
'head' of the foetus eats the metonymic 'head' of the father. Gimi note that
the entire male body becomes flaccid, penis-like, after intercourse.
A man is, then, a penis with a penis; but so is a woman, according to
Gillison, save that her penis is within her body, even before impregnation.
For Gimi understand that a female foetus is impregnated by its father as it
is formed, that 'the means. by which the Gimi female is conceived and made
to grow inside the womb are the same as her "impregnation" ... [s]he is
congenitally pregnant with her father's dead child' (Gillison 1987: 186).
This incestuous miscarriage is her internal penis, to be displaced by the
monthly visits of the moon's giant penis, causing a bloody discharge of the
miscarried substance, and then by that of the husband or lover, instanti-
ating itself metonymically as another foetus.
The set of substitutions constituting a woman's internal penis, from the
holographic foetus within a foetus to menarche to that of impregnation and
pregnancy, is also the coming into being of legitimate procreation and kin
relationship out of its incestuous opposite. Its social legitimation in mar-
riage has a familiar ring, for along with the bride and her implicit
internal penis, her father secretly bestows an 'external' penis. This takes the
form of a hollow bamboo tube filled with cooked meat, with an outlined
but uncut 'mouth hole' that is decorated with a pattern also tattoed around
the bride's mouth before marriage (chapter 10). The groom must remove
the cooked meat and give it to his wife to eat, then excise the mouth-hole
and play the tube as a flute. A 'penis' that is a female 'foetus' already preg-
nant with substance from the bride's father, the tube has been 'fed' through
its 'fontanel', the hole in its end, whereas its embryonic mouth is still
covered by a membrane. And it is identified with the bride when cut, vagina
for mouth-hole, and was made by the bride's father as a replica of his own
flute, its 'mother', which he plays in his own men's house.
The appropriate recompense for this externalised pregnant foetus is a
return payment made upon the birth of a child, for the child's head. This is,
returning to the beginning of the example, the metonymic 'head' of the
father again, though like the bamboo tube it carried a number of equipotent
analogic strains, all divergent facets of a single motif. In Gillison's words:
Gimi kinship is created, in other words, by an arduous process of differentiating one
life-giving thing. This 'thing' is either alive and moving upward as seminal fluid or
killed and flowing downward as menstrual blood, but it is always derived from and
synonymous with the Father's penis. (1987: 198)
It is important to keep in mind that the arduous process of differentiation
is as much a part of the holography-like the penis that makes itself a foetus
to replace another foetus within an enlarged 'foetus' - as the motif itself.
This can be seen in a third example, taken from my work among the Usen
Barok of Central New Ireland (1986). Barok constitute each of their
exogamous matrimoieties in terms of the relation between them: a moiety
contains the nurturance of fatherhood proffered by the other, and begets,
penetrates and nurtures the containment of the other. It is this relation,
rather than the moieties themselves as social bodies, permutated through
the transformation of the feasting cycle, that gives legitimacy to all transfers
of status or property.
Barok orang, traditional feasting leaders, say that two things are repli-
cated over and over in everything they do, kolume and gala. Kolume is
containment, as the womb contains a foetus or the earth a corpse, and is
concretised ritually in the stone-walled enclosure of the taun or men's
house. Gala is the elicitation of inception and nurturance, as the penis
penetrates to fertilise or the knife to distribute, and is realised ritually as a
rooted tree. But this imagery itself, an iconography that Barok call iri lolos,
'finished power', is the kolume, containment, of the whole, as feasting, the
elicitory process by which its meanings are realised, as its gala. The Barok
term for feasting is 'cutting pig'.
It is the relation between kolume and gala, then, that both constitutes the
moieties and relates them. Understood in the broadest sense, kolume as a
containing iconography, gala as the elicitory protocol of feasting, however,
it is clear that each of these modes is in turn constituted by the relation
between them. For the iconography contains images of both kolume and
gala, each of which is, through the action of the other, further resolvable
170 Big menand great men The fractal person 171
into kolumelgala. Thus the ground within the taun enclosure is cut by a
tree-trunk (the threshold log of the men's house) into feasting and burial
spaces, whereas the upright tree-trunk is cut by the ground into a subter-
ranean (burial) and an above-ground, fruit-bearing (nurturant) half. And
the protocol of feasting begins with a kolume of feasters surrounding the
food, and proceeds to the gala of cutting the pigs and consumption - a basic
format to be enacted in either a kolume (closed) or gala (open) variant.
The relation kolumelgala 'keeps its scale', as the mathematics of fractals
would have it, regardless of the level of magnification. Kolume and gala are
fractal motifs that, very much like genders, stand between whole and part
so that each can equally encompass the total relation. The clinching demon-
stration comes in the transformational final mortuary feast, the Una Ya
('base of the tree') Kaba. The tree-image of gala is inverted, the pigs for the
feast arrayed atop the burial section, the roots; atop the pigs, in the position
of the tap-root (the tree's 'apical ancestress'), the winawu, or neophyte
orong stands. Kolume and gala are shown to be equally effective if their
roles are reversed, and thus identical; a single image is made of the apical
ancestress's encompassment of the people from the past and the winawu's
encompassment of them in his future potential. In a sense, the winawu is a
great man, an encompassing rather than a statistical leader, who outflanks
memory from a future position.
The three examples of holography are drawn from different language
fam'ilies and represent different geographical locations in Papua New
Guinea. There is considerable evidence that the phenomenon is
widespread. A notable instance is Mosko's study of the Bush Mekeo
(1985); chapter 5 shows that for them, as among the Barok, a single relation
replicates itself throughout a ritual format. But if holography has a signifi-
cance in this discussion, it is not as an ethnographic phenomenon but rather
as a mode of understanding.
Neither part nor sum
In no case is the holography a matter of direct presentation; it is not per-
ceived in the material so much as it is re-perceived as the sense of indigenous
intention to show phenomena in their self-constitution. Thus the Iqwaye
'make people' in counting, and likewise for them making people is a
counting-out, or instantiation or re-numbering of Omalyce. The Gimi
female embryo is already pregnant with a holograph of her father's penis,
with the transitivity of replication that, via its transformations, becomes
continuity. The gala of Barok ritual feasting elicits and nurtures the con-
tainment of its own relation to kolume, and hence of the moiety relation-
ship, which becomes the simultaneity of memory and reproduction.
Nothing is built up and nothing dissected in these examples; they are
neither construction nor deconstruction, but simply a further replication of
fractality in the ethnographer's understanding. One might say that the
indigenous holography is re-interpreting the anthropologist's ideas, and in
the process re-interpreting interpretation itself.
Reperception implies that the holography will not be apparent in the
kind of organic thought that distinguishes kin terminology as 'social' (or
'cognitive'), factionalism as 'political', horticulture as 'technological', or
that postulates an integration of groups, functions or categories into a
larger social fabric. The crucial element is the fractality that prevents the
differentiation of part from whole, that keeps the imageries of understand-
ing from collapsing into the individuals, groups and categories that con-
structionism bundles into wholes greater than the sums of their parts. Thus
it matters very much that we follow the indigenous modalities here, the
analogic cross-sections through which the whole grows itself. Without the
instantiation of the Anzahl, and a special sense of the body, Iqwayan count-
ing is but a mathematical mistake; ignoring the transitivity of its impreg-
nation and the transformations worked upon it, Gimi reproduction is just
a neat set of native categories, and missing the exacting protocols of feast-
ing, Barok kastam is merely a Durkheimian solidarity-feast, a happening
that could take any number of other forms.
The hqlographic totalisation of the conceptual world evidenced in these
three examples amounts to a recognition of personal fractality through the
realisation of its relational implications. As such, it is not a 'construction'
or even an 'interpretation' on the plane of explanation, for it is not
mobilised as a forced uniting of disparate elements, a realisation of mean-
ing via the unaccountable methodological magic of scale-changing.
A big man, in the standard and inflated anthropological cliche, becomes
the organiser of sociological 'force' in his agglomeration of others' debts as
status, whether this status is seen as that of an integrator or simply a power-
broker. He undergoes a personal magnification when he changes from an
individual to a sociological scale. What is often termed the sociology of
small-scale societies produces its object as well as its solutions through the
means of scale-change, the successive grouping of individuals and individ-
uation of groups. Each facet of the assumed social structure or organisation
involves such a shift - from individual or household to lineage or village,
from lineage to phratry or society, region to areal integrate. And once this
principle is established as basic, as an analytical strategy, with the big man
as indigenous integrator and scale-shifter, a rationale for change of scale as
legitimate theoretical strategy is fixed in place. Special terminologies are
172 Big men andgreat men The fractal person 173
pressed into service to focus attention on the form of reduction or scale-
change intended - behavioural, psychological, symbolic, economic or eco-
logical. The result is that as many forms of heuristic 'order' are attached to
the subject as scale-changing heuristics can be imagined: that once system
and order are assumed to be what society is doing, the anthropologist is
given carte blanche to propose alternative heuristics.
Indigenous forms of thought and action thereby cease to be their own
subjects in the process of becoming many subjects, a virtual kaleidoscope
of scale-shifts. At the core of this strategy is the hegemonic dogma of the
disparate and distinctive quality of the individual in relation to any form of
generalisation or grouping, any system, that might be applied. It under-
writes and guarantees systematising as the basic task for anthropologist as
well as subject.
But the evidence presented here indicates that for some Melanesian
peoples at least the forms of social and cultural conceptualisation keep their
scale through all ritual and pragmatic permutations. For in such a fractal
or scale-retaining conceptualisation the concept itself merges with the
space of its conceiving, and there is nothing to be gained by remapping the
data onto artificial and introduced scalings. If most social and cultural
problems depend upon the western hegemonic for their very imagining,
this suggests that the exigencies of living and thinking in many Melanesian
cultures are rather different than social scientists have understood them to
be.
The task of the great man, then, would not be one of upscaling indi-
viduals to aggregate groupings but of keeping a scale that is person and
aggregate at once, solidifying a totality into happening. Social form is not
emergent but immanent. If this cal1s to mind Louis Dumont's powerful
evocation of holism in the Hindu caste system, with its fractality of
Brahmanic unity, it also resonates with Marriott's concept of the 'dividual'
person - the person, like the society, that is whole and part at once.
In the end we come down to a question of pieces that are cut differently
from the fabric of experience than we might expect them to be. Fractality
deals with wholes no matter how fine the cutting, and it is for this reason
that I have insisted on the themes of scale-change and magnification. For
the issue of great men and big men is ultimately one of magnification. The
big man as a product of ethnographic inflation is the result of statistical and
sociological magnification, an apparent gatherer and disperser of persons.
But the fractal conception of a great man begins with the premise that the
person is a totality, of which any aggregation is but a partial realisation.
The totality is, in other words, conceptual rather than statistical. The great
~ n non gender-specific, is great as a particular instantiation or configur-
atlOn of a conceptual totality; one can have kinds of great men as one can
have variants of a myth.
Godelier's study of the Baruya has given us a number of eloquent exemp-
lifications of this point. But I should like to close with a final example from
the Usen Barok of NewIreland. The Barok orang, beginning as a neophyte
winawu, is a leader of feasting, articulator of the cycle through which the
holographic totality of iri lolos is made manifest for all to witness. Indeed,
the Kaba feast, in which the manifestation is realised, can only be held
'because the orDngwishes it, and for no other reason'. Put more simply, the
orang 'kills pigs' for the cutting-of-pig that defines feasting. The umri, the
traditional Barok war leader, 'kil1s men' for another kind of feasting, that
of theararum taun, a 'closed' or kolume variant of the public feasting cycle.
Ararum feasts, held in a space defined by the convergence of feasting and
burial functions, are restricted to salup, men formally defined as already
deceased by having undergone their mortuary feasts while stil1 alive. They
are already ancestors, great men like orang and umri, and thereby variants
of a single myth or holography.
196 Big men and great men
"marry their sister, commit incest, and have no need of any other woman
in order to reproduce life" (Godelier 1986a: 158). The Gimi 'law of equiv-
alence' and rules of marriage allow men and women to achieve this desired
impossibility, I suggest, to 'get back' or 'keep' the Parts of Themselves they
'exchange away', to renounce a Sister or Brother yet to acquire a "sister"
or "brother", 'overturning' the mythic Past but 'reinstating' it in new terms.
In Gimi social life as I describe it, reciprocity is the most immediate form
not only of 'integrating the opposition between the self and others' (Levi-
Strauss 1969: 84) but also of creating that opposition as if it did not, or need
not, exist; as if "the joys, eternally denied to social man, of a world in which
one might keep to oneself" (1969: 497; original emphasis) could be
attained as the very essence of the social contract.
NOTES
1 Throughout the text, inverted double commas are used around words or phrases
actually uttered by the Gimi or another author. Inverted single commas indicate
that a word or phrase is meant symbolically rather than literally, as part of my
interpretation of the Gimi meaning. Gimi say appears in the text only when it is
followed by the actual words of an informant which aptly summarise the views
of others or by my summary of direct quotes from several informants. The same
literalness is invested in phrases such as one man explains or one woman com-
pares. My own interpretations are indicated to be such.
In recording and discussing Gimi myths and informants' exegeses, I capitalise
mythic characters, key objects and organs as a way to distinguish them from ordi-
nary kin categories, ritual actors or artefacts. By capitalising the mythic personae,
I represent them not merely as 'ideal types' but as condensations or abstractions
of the incestuous fantasies that Gimi attach to primary relations and that, accord-
ing to my interpretation, they enact and 'undo' through ritual.
2 The following account of events inside a men's house is a compilation of reports
by Gimi men of four initiations that occurred during the period of my fieldwork.
Many informants' comments and explanations were inspired by tape recordings
made by David Gillison, a photographer and ornithologist.
CHAPTER 11
One man and many men
MARILYN STRATHERN
If Gimi substitute parts of themselves for other parts at different moments in time,
we should be looking more generally at how people substitute one set of relations
for another. And if it is persons who embody relations, it follows that 'persons' can
appear as substitutes for or as though they were composed of other 'persons'. This
is true equally of great men and big men, but to different organisational effect.
Baruya initiation sequences and Hagen marriage arrangements provide a cross-
societal contrast that enable us to see these persons figured as the outcome of differ-
ent perspectival strategies. Each is a focus for the way people think about them-
selves, but where (Baruya) great men present an external world as it appears from
within a body of men, (Hagen) big men present an image of how such a body might
look from the outside. This chapter also suggests that it is perspective which makes
the difference between perceptions of equivalence and non-equivalence in trans-
actions. There are consequences for competition (chapter 1) and increment (chapter
4): great men in a non-equivalent relation to a body of men add their powers to those
internally equivalent among themselves, whereas the big man, equivalent to a clan,
adds non-equivalent external wealth to it.
In taking big men or great men as a focus for analysis, Melanesian
ethnographers are not simply pinpointing a phenomenon of interest. They
have been presentedwith a phenomenon of interest, so tha t their interest in
turn must include the focusing activity of their Melanesian subjects. For
prominence is the chief characteristic of the two figures. Each seems an
epitome, a concentration of characteristics, making visible what other men
might be; he therefore stands out. At the same time, in the sense in which all
men might think of themselves as big men, all men stand out; whereas great
men seem to distribute specialist functions between themselves, and indi-
vidually stand out by virtue of a particular competence.
Ethnographic description regularly gives certain 'institutions' or social
conditions prominence. Whether we embark from the perspective of over-
seas trade or inland garden magic, analysis then proceeds by demonstrating
the 'principles' that govern the interconnections between them. This was,
of course, Godelier's procedure in elucidating the making of great men. The
conduct of male collective life and marriage arrangements form the basis
for his own comparative interest in the presence or absence of a principle of
equivalence in exchange transactions. The institutions that enable big men
197
198 Big men and great men One man and many men 199
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I
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to dominate by their transactional generosity also mean that men generally
in these societies are able to treat others in a manner great men reserve only
for outsiders (1986a: 173). The difference is conceived as logically irre-
ducible. Hence great-men and big-men systems in this comprise 'alternative
logics of society' (1986a: 162).
If big men or great men are indeed a focus in people's lives, figures whom
they regard as prominent, we might ask what form indigenous analysis
would take. It is unlikely to take the form of the singling out, classifying and
correlation of institutions typical of anthropological procedures. Were
Sabarl (chapter 4) or North Mekeo (chapter 5, and Mosko 1985) to be
believed, or for that matter the Gimi who have just been described (chapter
10), it may well proceed by decomposing or undoing these figures to reveal
the elements of which they are composed. But whereas the anthropologist
would in turn see these elements as corresponding to social correlates or
cultural parameters, indigenous exposition would show that the figures of
these men contain or are contained by and thereby encompass further
figures: the man is composed of other men.
The man is composed of other men in a double sense. On the one hand
both big men and great men exemplify or replicate certain qualities which
all men might claim - so that prominence in collective life, whether in cer-
emonial exchange or initiation ceremony, gives public life a definitively
mas,:uline cast. To so act is seen to be a capacity which males collectively
evince. They thus present men to themselves in an exaggerated, masculine
form, as Godelier persuasively demonstrates for Baruya. On the other
hand, and like all persons (d. M. Strathern 1988), each man also figures a
composite of heterogeneous relations, derived from and containing within
himself the capacity for diverse relations. Men's capacity thus includes
their ability to enter into relations with different others. The effect of these
relations is to particularise individual persons by virtue of their specific ties.
If big men or great men encompass this diversity within, then perhaps they
manifest as a characteristic internal to themselves what each man may also
conceive as a possibility inherent in the creation of any external relation-
ship.
These assertions about indigenous analysis are intended to point out that
we already have certain commentaries to hand, though do not usually
regard them as such. We might think of such analyses as making evident
people's inner capacities - revealing their ability to act thereby reveals the
relations of which they are, so to speak, composed. Indeed, my exogenous
analysis of such commentaries is forced to collapse the conventional
analytical difference between persons and relations. Put abstractly, we
could imagine persons as relations, and vice versa. Itmay help the reader to
keep this equivalence in mind in the subsequent account.
Where the ethnographer seeks for a correlation between institutions or
principles, then, the Highlander may well be seeking evidence of people's
effectiveness in interaction with others. Both the enactment of collective life
and the creation of particular relations through marriage and other trans-
actions could be considered scrutinies of this kind. Godelier is absolutely
right to place such emphasis on them; they 'analyse' the capacities which
big men or great men encompass.
My suggestion is intended to underline a specific set of differences between
big-man and great-men systems. For it becomes obvious that the promi-
nence of the two figures is not the same kind of prominence. They are not
composed of the same kinds of men.
The big man presents a singular form; whatever the heterogeneous
relations of which he is composed, these are internal parts of a figure
imagined as a unity. Great men, however, may be constitutionally divided
(seen to contain a pair of characteristics), and comprise among themselves
the several parts of a collectivity of great men whose specialist and hetero-
geneous powers cannot be reduced to a single form. The singularity of the
big man and the multiplicity of great men prompts comparison with other
images such as the pig in Vanuatu (chapter 3) with its many references to
persons i.n various stages of differentiation.
Now if social life (indigenous 'analysis') consists in making the internal
capacities of persons visible, then it rests on techniques of revelation which
must also continually externalise and thus re-present these capacities in
new forms. The singularity of the big man is shown to contain within it
those multiple heterogeneous relations which enable him - or his clan - to
make more relations. For example, the capacity to act as 'one man' in
relation to one's exchange partners can be seen as a displacement or sub-
stitution for other relations already there, such as those of domestic kin-
ship. One form ('clansman') thus appears out of, and here as a transform-
ation of, another form ('affine'). Hence the converse that A. Strathern
(1988: 195) notes for Hagen big men, that the 'centre man' can also appear
decentred. The possibility seems absent from the Mountain Papuan Foi he
cites in contrast. As far as great men are concerned, the emergence of a spe-
cialist great man from an ordinary man is focussed on the development of
an individual person, as is the emergence of fathers (men) from sons (boys).
Against the multiplicity of specialisms, the ordinary man/great man retains
his masculinity, a singular form transformed from within.
200 Big men and great men One man and many men 201
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Taking Wagner's point (chapter 9), I try to apply a similar understanding
to both big men and great men, for they are both totalities of a kind. Yet in
so far as they are not composed of the same kinds of men, then different
sequences of substitutions suggest divergent 'analyses'.
From the perspective of a great-man system, it is people's capacity to
substitute non-equivalent items that becomes diacritical of the big-man
system. The significant question which Godelier poses in his book is the dif-
ference it makes when gift and countergift do not have to be identical (a
woman for a woman, life for life) but may be mediated through wealth (and
d. Modjeska 1982). If we follow the aesthetic proposition that forms can
only be made to appear out of other forms, it is clear that we need to do
something like an indigenous analysis ourselves on those identical ('equiv-
alent') forms. What relationships do they reveal within them? We should
not expect that the points at which people replicate identity (woman for
woman, man for man) and the points at which they substitute one figure
for another (wealth for women, fathers for sons) will be the same in the two
cases.
There are three observations. First, we have to ask what figure it is that
the big man or great man composes. Out of what forms does the single form
of the man appear? The concrete image of the individual does not necess-
arily imply the same kind of 'one-ness' in both types of prominence.
SecC?ndly, if forms appear as transformations or analogies of others, and
thus as substitutions for them, it is not surprising that we have difficulty in
holding constant the correlates of big-men and great-men 'systems'. Yet we
should not be misled by the coexistence of seemingly radical different
modes of action, or rather, should take them not as obstacles to our com-
parisons but as constitutive of them. I illustrate the point with reference to
marriage in a big-man regime (Hagen) and the dual values of equivalence
and non-equivalence that flow from affinal transactions. Finally, equiv-
alence and non-equivalence are more profitably understood as compar-
isons of relationships than of things. The possibility of such comparison is
intrinsic to Melanesian perceptions of social action; an act is definitively the
substitution of one relationship by another. The transformation of persons
thus comprises the aesthetic form action has made visible.
This chapter accordingly pursues one of the contrasts between the
Baruya, as Godelier describes them, and the big-man system of Mount
Hagen in the Western Highlands, as amply described by Andrew Strathern
as well as myself. The contrast is not to be captured as the presence or
absence of a principle of equivalence in transactions, but rather as the point
at which equivalence is or is not asserted. What in Hagen makes wealth
exchangeable for women is the perceived analogy between this particular
clan's different productive efforts as opposed to that one's. It is the clans
who are equivalent. In Baruya, it is the brides who are equivalent, and
homicides may well be analogous to brides in this regard (d. M. Strathern
1978a). Perhaps what makes one woman similar to another is men's
emphatic capacity to differentiate themselves internally: affines are dis-
tinguished by a mutual relation of inferiority and superiority (d. Godelier
1986a: 173). These relations transform into sisters and wives what other-
wise takes a singularity of form; 'women' appear equivalent in all respects
bar their marital orientation, the social direction, so to speak, they take.
Their 'equivalence', we might say, manifests the difference that men's
activities make to this direction.
I briefly consider some of the ways Baruya initiation creates inequalities
between the members of a single male body, and the consequent non-
equivalence to men's transactions. The capacity for men of the whole
Baruya tribe to so differentiate and transform themselves is a capacity
embodied in the collectivity of great men. Hagen marriage transactions
provide some evidence in turn for their own supposition that competition
between clans arises from their equivalence. A consequence is the percep-
tion of clans as singular units, and the Hagen big man simultaneously
stands out from and stands among other men as a homologue of such a unit.
Fathers from sons
As a point to which he returns in chapter 15, Godelier likens the Baruya
cross-generational transmission of semen between men in the context of
initiation to generalised exchange in marriage practices. There is a counter-
part transmission of milk among women.
For those who somewhat mechanically contrast societies characterized by the
restricted exchange of women with generalized exchange societies, as if the former
were ignorant of the principle on which the latter rest, the example of the Baruya
clearly offers a means of rectifying their view. Although the Baruya prefer the prin-
ciple of restricted exchange of women in order to establish relations of kinship
between lineages and individuals, they apply a kind of principle of generalized
exchange of sperm between all the men not belonging to the sphere of the exchange
of women in order to establish manhood and male domination. Both principles of
exchange thus exist in their thought, but are applied to distinct areas of their social
life. (1986a: 54-5)
Godelier does not accord the same analytical weight to restricted and
generalised exchange as he does to equivalence and non-equivalence in
transactions; yet not only do 'alternative logics of society' seem to be at
work between societies, on the former dimension they seem to be at work
202 Big men and great men One man and many men 203
within the one. The phenomenon is endemic in Melanesian studies, as the
first chapter as well as others in this book attest. 'It is almost as if counter-
poised anthropological models appear together in the actors' reality'
(Lederman 1986: 65; author's emphasis). She notes howMendi prestations
switch in the course of the same event from a Hagen-like group display of
wealth to the clamour of a Wiru-like dispersal among individual exchange
partners. The phenomenon is of interest in the present context.
It is not that we interpolate difference (alternation) where none exists in
indigenous thought, but that we misrepresent the nature of the difference
by conceiving of it as irreducible (as logic). Radically contrasting models of
interaction within the one society may in fact dissolve into one another.
Nowattempting to map principles or institutions on to one another - this
marriage practice on that marriage practice - awkwardly suggests that dif-
ferent types should not really occupy the same space. Or else, as Tuzin
(chapter 6) suggests, that we should try to identify a metalogic. But if one
form can only appear out of another, then Melanesian aesthetics give us
their own cue. As Godelier remarked, principles 'coexist' in people's
thought. We can conceive of different modes occupying the same time in an
anticipatory sense. If one leads to another, then one is presaged by, or con-
tained by, the other, their difference also a matter of the sequencing of
moments. Alternation is in the first place a temporal phenomenon. We
might recall the sequencing of the divergent fates ofIlahita siblings (chapter
6), which myth makes visible as dramatic opposition. I put the point in
more general terms.
Social action is made visible through the general aesthetic device which
presents the enactment of a capacity as a movement between conditions.
Tuzin's earlier observation, for instance, on the relationship between
domestic and ritual life in Ilahita is pertinent: while the 'felicity of domestic
relations must constantly contend with ritual prescriptions designed
specifically to undermine marital and filial attachment ... in practice these
codes have a ready tendency to invade each other's domain' (1982: 351-2).
Battaglia (1985) notes apropos the ritualisation of feeding relationships on
Sabarl that symmetry and asymmetry in affinal relations, far from classify-
ing different types of kinsfolk, are points in a life-long process whereby one
becomes 'covered' by the other. Relations may be regarded as at once
reproducing and subverting others. 'The men's cult', writes Jorgensen
(1983a: 63) of Telefolmin, 'obviates domesticity by substituting its own
metaphorized version of kinship, which it eventually dissolves.'
Indeed, if we look more closely, what seems true of the difference
between restricted and generalised exchange seems in turn true of the dif-
ference between equivalence and non-equivalence in transactions. Each
appears as a transformation of the other. Consider the temporal language
provided by the form of Baruya initiation.
As cult members,Baruya men regard themselves as united. Yet this sol-
idary male body evinces its unity through internal differentiation. Within
this sphere, a man is nourished by the equivalent substance that nourished
his nourisher, although there is no direct reciprocity between persons. On
the contrary, the lack of equivalence between the persons of the seniors and
juniors is there created through their internal relations of domination and
subordination.
Every asymmetrical, superior-inferior relationship between the donors
and recipients of semen can thus be interpreted as part of a wider cycle in
which those who give nourishment acknowledge the fact that they have
been nourished in the past themselves. All unmarried men, Godelier
observes, help the sons of men already fathers to grow. They thus give back
what they themselves in turn received from those older men who grew
them. But the return could not of course be made until these men had left
the men's house to father the sons who are the new initiates. Transactions
thus separate the men. The transmission of semen takes place between per-
sons who are definitively separated by the intervals of the ceremonies -
between the men who were formerly initiated and their juniors who are
completing their own initiation, and thereby due to become fathers, by
inducting the sons of these men into the ceremonies. The induction antici-
pates the same transformation of these sons into fathers themselves. Donor
and recipient are rendered distinct by their place (their time) in the
sequence. And in a society where sons grow into fathers, and the growth of
fathers is shown in their sons, it is particular sequences that separate the
particular persons of parents and offspring.
Yet again, if we look more closely at the 'equivalent substance' it is not
as homogeneous as first seems. While in one sense it is the 'same' male
semen that circulates through the generations of initiates, we also know
that it can appear in two forms, male and female. Its external analogue is
women's milk. More than that, the one may also be seen as encompassing
the other, in the sense that milk appears as semen in female form (and if the
parallel with Sambia holds [d. Godelier 1986a: 52] then semen may be
cognised as milk in male form).
Whether boy or girl, a person is thus nourished by two substances. One
corresponds to the material they in turn will be capable of transmitting; the
other comes to them in a transformed state. Timing again keeps particular
contexts apart. From the boy's point of view, he drinks 'milk' at one stage
of his life, 'semen' at another. But the result is to endow him in dual form;
he both grows as a consequence and is provided with a transactable entity
204 Big men and great men One man and many men 205
with which he can grow others. The same is true of the girl, whose last drink
of milk accompanies her preparation as a receptacle for semen, and her
eventual parturition. The sequence thus indicates a substitution of one
relationship (in the boy's case, men's relations with women; in the girl's
case, women's relations among themselves) by another (men's relations
among themselves; women's relations with men). If equivalence and non-
equivalence can be translated into equality and inequality, these values are
similarly substituted for each other. Peers (equals) among themselves, the
young men claim future superiority (an unequal relationship) over all
women; for her part, the bride-to-be is required to put aside her (relatively
equal?) feminine relations with women in acknowledging the claims of a
future relationship of conjugal subordination.
Far from being an embarrassment to men's purpose in male initiation, I
suggest that the dual composition of the sexual substance - its male and
female form - is crucial. For the possibility of making cross-sex relations is
instrumental to the accomplishment of these ceremonies. It is only through
them that the son will finally give evidence of fatherhood.
But that is in the future. In the meanwhile, not only is the initiate grown,
his skin raised, but he himself must grow the body of men of which he will
become part, as the Sabarl child grows the mother (chapter 4). Increment is
imagined here as a result of encompassment; the body of males contain
within themselves something which makes their outer form swell, namely
~ 'female' offspring they enclose, in much the same way as Baruya see a
pregnant woman swelling with a 'male' (semen-fed) foetus. If the person of
the Baruya initiate is an increment to the body of men, then the 'boy' (son)
to be 'man' (father) must first come as an addition to them, and thus not a
man. How is this accomplished? The initiate is detached from a nexus of
domestic cross-sex relations - not detached from women so to speak but
from men's relations with women; this androgynous being is departicu-
larised, reduced to a single measure, first in female form (female to the male
seniors) and then in male form (the senior who inseminates juniors in turn).
In this second unitary state, he is ready for marriage. The first state antici-
pates the second; as Herdt (1981) would say, the one is preparation for the
other. For a male can re-engage in cross-sex relations with females outside
the cult ins'ofar as he has already shown the productivity of their analogue
within - in the counterpart 'cross-sex' relations he has had with males
there. Meanwhile, the substitutions of female for androgyne, and then male
for female, within the cult, appear from a view outside as the substitution
of the one kind of man (father) for another (son), and thus as an enlarge-
ment or replication of same-sex relations among the body of adult men.
The term increment recalls the wealth which comes to a Hagen man's
skin through ceremonial exchange. The donor detaches a part of himself
('male' or 'female' depending on context) which returns to his person as
prestige through a decorative manoeuvre that imagines the opinion of
others as a gleaming accoutrement of his outer body. It is added to his per-
son. The recipient remains the external figure who becomes the source of
the return gift. With reference to Battaglia's critique (chapter 4), in Baruya
initiation, by contrast, the donor detaches a part of himself (semen) that
returns to him not as a personal adornment but as the assimilation of the
recipient to his enlarged identity as a member of the whole Baruya tribe.
Now Hagen ceremonial exchange is conducted with socially different
others (invariably beyond the subclan if not clan). What is conceived as an
all-male body thus increases through the addition of attached wealth as
parts that are not equivalent to the whole. Non-equivalence lies less in the
visible absence of likeness between items than in the social separation of
their origins. Indeed, it is the exchanges that keep the origins discrete, that
define the fact that incoming wealth is 'different' from wealth produced by
the recipient clan. The incoming wealth is not isomorphic to the recipient
body, cannot be assimilated as an aspect of its own singular identity, and
therefore appears as an addition. The difference may be represented as the
addition of female objects to the male body. Conceived as a wealth-
producing entity each clan is an equivalent entity; whereas to conceive one
as producing wealth for another creates them as non-equivalent. I now
wish to suggest that at a certain stage Baruya initiates are also socially dif-
ferentiated from their seniors. This perception of non-equivalence between
senior and junior is crucial to the effectiveness by which the one grows the
other.
Godelier describes the kwaimatnie objects which give certain great men
(ritual experts) the right to perform initiation ceremonies. The objects are
paired, like flutes elsewhere in the Highlands, into male and female. They
symbolise the fact that no lineage can itself turn boys into men, in
Godelier's phrase, but requires the cooperation of others. In the cer-
emonies, the kwaimatnie-man thus stands to the initiates as a source of dif-
ferentiation between the lineages that produced them. He mediates
between Sun and Moon, indicating the separation that has to be sustained
between the social origins of the initiates' mother and father. For Baruya
differentiation takes a weak form in group terms. Marriages often occur
between closely related units who have replicated their unions over the
generations, and rather than by reference to group origins, the separation
is minimally presented as between male and female or between elder
brother, younger brother (sun and moon). Both axes of differentiation
appear in the ceremonies. The intervention of the kwaimatnie makes the
206 Big men and great men One man and many men 207
junior initiate socially different from his male seniors (younger to older).
He is simultaneously presented as the (female or androgynous) product of
male-female interactions, to be absorbed by their male body in a non-
equivalent state to them.
Concomitantly, standing against this body of homogeneous Baruya
male 'children', with their red headbands, all of them sons of the sun, the
kwaimatnie-men thus hold in themselves heterogeneous capacities, their'
divergent kwaimatnie substances, the pair that is also a couple. They
increase and multiply men. Kwaimatnie-men appeal to the fact, as Godelier
tells us, that both fathers and mothers want their sons to grow. The
coupling that anticipated the son must also anticipate the father.
To summarise the sequence of the substitutions: one sexual substance
displaces another in time, the all-male body of men substitute their
relations with the initiates for the initiates' relations with their mothers, the
senior boys, of course, anticipating the relations with their wives to come;
the kwaimatnie-men who oversee the rituals then substitute for the efficacy
of the senior boys' inseminating acts the efficacy of their paired male and
female objects. Although the end result may be claimed as replication - the
body of men (sons of the sun) has grown through growing men (fathers-to-
be) within itself - there are crucial times when neither the novice initiates
nor the ritual experts are isomorphic with or equivalent to the body of
males in their all-male form.
,If we regard Baruya as enacting two 'logics' of sociality, these are not
types in a taxonomic sense; they are momentary stages or performances,
always appear as two - action being visible as movement between alternat-
ing conditions.
Each condition is known only through the form it takes; it has to have a
certain appearance. The aesthetic conventions (the 'forms') are those of
gender, so it looks as though time and again the alternation is between
same-sex and cross-sex relations. The difference can be generalised as that
between collective (same-sex) and particular (cross-sex) action. I would
assert that the perceived equivalence or non-equivalence that we may
discern in people's dealings with one another - whether in the objects they
exchange or in their own persons - is an exemplification of this aesthetic.
A clan and its brides
If one form appears out of another - the Baruya male appears out of a
male-female entity (the novice androgyne, the kwaimatnie couple) - it is
also the case that one form may be regarded as a version of or analogy for
the other. Thus initiation ritual as a whole not only transcends domestic
values but also recreates them internally. Asingle transaction may capture
this re-versionary process, as Maclean's (1985) analysis of Maring bride-
wealth makes clear.
The one event mobilises both a balanced exchange between men of the
two allied clans, the bride's kin making an immediate return payment to the
groom's, and an unequal exchange predicated on domestic kin relations
(specifically the brother-sister tie), where the bride's close kin receive a net
surplus. Maclean argues that the political and the domestic are 'but two
moments in the single process of reproduction'; moreover, 'while political
and domestic relations clearly appear as interdependent in Maring mar-
riage, they also clearly evoke each other in an antagonistic way' (1985:
119). Balanced reciprocity between clans is, he says, necessarily mediated
through the main protagonists, who are personal kin in asymmetric
relations with one another; conversely, these domestic relations are sus-
tained through unified clan relations. The brother's specific relationship
with his sister is juxtaposed to his general relationship with the other males
of his own clan. Each (set of relations) thus anticipates the other, in the
sense that the brother cannot dispose of his sister without mobilising his
clansmen, and clansmen depend on the specificity of the domestic tie which
gives them an object to dispose. The collective event pivots on a particular
marriage.
These contradictions may meet in one person. Maclean stresses the sub-
versive element in the competing nurturant relations a woman has with her
husband and her brothers. The reproduction of clans is dependent on the
maintenance of close personal relations with affines (1985: 119) and the
'moment at which the conditions of reproduction appear unambiguously
dominant in relation to the conditions of production at the same time pro-
duces the conditions of their own subversion' (Maclean 1985: 125).
But Maclean's contradictions are also alternations; the one condition is
staged or revealed in relation to the other, and thus entails a specific per-
spective. The contrast between the Maring brother's relations with his
sister on the one hand and with his clan brothers on the other depends on
the direction, so to speak, in which he is oriented. From the point of view
of domestic relations, partners appear as equals; from the point of view of
clan relations when they transact with one another as donors and recipi-
ents, they make patent their inequality. The oscillation between the equiv-
alence of exchange partners who enter a relationship which converts
mutual benefit into self-benefit and their differentiation as unequal donor
and recipient is a question of perspective.
Since a relation can only 'appear', that is, take a recognisable form, if it
is seen to come from another relation, such sequencings are sometimes
208 Big men and great men One man and many men 209
presented in indigenous analysis as though what were at issue were two
types of sociality, and I have suggested that the difference between them is
commonly generalised as that between collective and particular relations.
We might imagine each in turn as affording its own perspective.
Each o ~ n t of sociality requires the other for its visibility, being either
a version or a transformation of it, existing as the other's counterpart, as
having happened or about to happen, as anticipated or encompassed. Yet
from anyone person's point of view - that indeed being what constitutes
the one person's point of view- only a particular sequence will have taken
place. This is true whether the person is a group or an individual. We might
say that from a collective perspective, female agnates are equatable with
female spouses, or wives displace mothers, or milk is the same as semen,
while from a particular perspective, a man's wife is not his mother/sister,
and a child is nourished first by a woman and then by a man. It is no
contradiction really that the collective Hagen clan can be seen as composed
of diverse, particular relations; at the same time, those relations of domestic
kinship eclipse clan identity by virtue of their own canons of mutuality.
Indeed, each relation may perpetually seem to interfere with the other, for
each suggests a counterpart position outside that from which a person is
acting at the moment. Following the Maring case, I take marriage arrange-
ments to make the point.
:While Hagen marriage is always organised in such a way as to prevent
the repetition of unions with affines, so that there are no debts set up by
marriage, no prior claims on brides, no betrothal and no sister exchange,
men can present themselves as though clans were exchanging sisters, as
though there were debts between them, as though the one owed women to
the other.
Marriages are arranged between sets of kin bound in particular relations
to one another; their asymmetry is sustained by an unequal exchange of
wealth. But the whole operation is conceived quite differently from the
perspective not of the lineage or subsubclan that negotiates the wealth
transfers but from that of the clan. From this latter perspective, one
exchange is seen to fit into a pattern of exchanges and one marriage to
contribute to the reciprocal marriages between clans in which men con-
front one another in unitary, collective form. But there is more to this
divergence than simply a narrower and wider viewof relationships. I would
argue that one type of sociality is being used as an analogy for the other.
Insofar as persons hold both perspectives at once, each is capable of appear-
ing in the other's form, with the other's attributes.
When a collective person such as a Hagen clan draws on the idiom of
woman-exchange to imagine its relations with other clans, it is not aggre-
(
l
gating individual events into a whole. It is borrowing a particular aesthetic
form. For the purpose of deploying this idiom is to recall the asymmetrical
and particular relations that exist between close kinsmen and affines, that
is, to borrowan image of non-equivalence. This is then re-deployed in inter-
clan relations as though equal clans could be made unequal by the kinds of
marriage transactions between them. It is not just the women which men
count; the number of wealth transactions is significant, and prestige is
awarded the wife-takers (bridewealth-givers) rather than wife-givers
(bridewealth-takers). The appropriated marriage idiom is thereby recast
into an idiom appropriate for inter-group rivalry, namely competitive
exchanges of wealth.
Analogy works both ways. The close kin who negotiate the marriage,
and who set up relations of non-equivalence between themselves as affines,
draw in turn on the idiom of clanship. Determining the spouse according
to the rules of clan exogamy will bring in other clan relations as relevant to
the negotiations, that is, they politicise an otherwise domestic transaction.
The divergent perspectives of the affines becomes transferred to the
woman's own inclination in the matter and the way she perceives that each
side has discharged its obligations. Affinal relations between the men, in
contrast, rapidly become homogenised into the mutual perspectives of
moka partners, as though their same-sex tie overrode the cross-sex reason
for the relationship.
In adopting or anticipating the viewpoint of relations yet to be enacted,
people can both look out from and look in on themselves. It is that focus
that creates the possibility of perspective. Perhaps the big man provides a
focus from which, as a body of men, the Hagen clan views itself from the
outside, how it appears from the position of its affines and enemies. If so,
kwaimatnie-men (and other great men) perhaps provide a focus from
which Baruya males view the world outside their body, as a position that
exists within. For where the Hagen clan can only unite itself in external
marriage transactions with other clans, the Baruya tribe is able to divide
itself and differentiate internally between the marital interests of its various
members. The singularity of the one image and the multiplicity of the other
is self-evident.
One will, many powers
Let me return to Godelier's interest in non-equivalence. The substitution of
wealth for persons is an instance of the general process of sequencing that
turns one kind of person (relation) into another. The point to pursue here
is that the turn does not occur automatically. Melanesian agency is
210 Big men and great men One man and many men 211
indigenously construed as the attempt to transform relationships - to use
the products of the household for clan affairs; to turn (patri) clan sisters into
men's wives or, elsewhere, the work of (matri) clan brothers into yams and
children. Consequently the agency we tend to attribute to big men as self-
interest, political aggrandisement or striving for prestige is inadequately
likened to possessive individualism in so far as that misses the transform-
ation of the big man himself.
Out of the many intentions and orientations that a man entertains in his
mind, the big man presents a single purpose, literally 'one mind' in the
Hagen idiom. The transformation of 'many minds' into 'one mind' consti-
tutes an attempt to focus sequences of action upon the self. His single pur-
pose thereby attracts the regard of others. We might say that the perspec-
tives of these others are being oriented, aligned. As Munn has written of
Gawa: 'experience is being formulated in terms of a model of choice, for the
actor is regularly confronted with ... possibilities whose realizations (i.e.
in one direction or the other) are being grounded ... in the determinations
of the personal will' (1986: 273). What each does for himself, the big man
does for the clan, and there is a further effect of that single purpose. As
though they were the outcome of his own will, he becomes the self that par-
ticularises events.
A Hagen man takes action to turn his far-flung affinal network into a
value for his agnates, to make one kind of relation appear from the vantage
p ~ t of another. For this action to be visible, he must himself appear as a
different kind of person. Here lies the significance of wealth; the big man
creatinghimself 'wealth' also creates his person in another form. His affines
are seen by his clansmen as sources of wealth for the clan, a switch in per-
spectives that he presents in different aspects of his own person - ties of
domestic kinship have become avenues for ceremonial exchange. The
switch is of course in the first place a substitution not of things but of
relations.
Now if one relationship consequently appears as the outcome of
another, then that other stands to it as cause or origin, as affines are seen as
a source of wealth that enables the Hagen clan to make moka. Hence the
particularising effect of enactment; to be the cause of another's acts is to
have acted at a specific, prior moment in time. A debt causes a fresh
exchange because of the occasion of the recipient-to-be's previous gift as a
donor, and that particular sequence is in temporal terms irreversible. Con-
versely, a clan can only have had a collective effect in its external relations
when it acts to particular intent. I have argued that Hagen men routinely
present symmetrical inter-clan connections as though they were based on
the particular asymmetries of domestic kinship.
Indeed, non-equivalence between clans is crucial to the effectiveness by
which the one is perceived to 'grow' the other. Growth, manifested as pres-
tige, requires dependency on exchange partners and men act to elicit this
condition for self-increment. The recipient must be coerced to receive, to be
cast as the cause of the relationship (the debt which must be met), and thus
a contributor to the donor's growth. Hagen clans, taking a perspective on
themselves as independent, equivalent agents, equally entertain the per-
spective by which they seem unequal and dependent upon one another.
This is not an incidental contingency of competition, but a contrived aes-
thetic manoeuvre. Polarisation into unequal donor/recipient relations is
as important to their sense of productivity as the long-term equalising
outcome of eventual reciprocity. That other clans similar to one's own
also contain one's future wives itself contains both perspectives in one
Image.
Independent, separate clans thus engage with one another to their anal-
ogous profit by coming together on both a same-sex and a cross-sex basis.
Parity is evinced in the exchangeability of the objects at their disposal, that
is, their capacities to exchange are equivalent. At the same time, transactors
must be polarised into a temporal non-equivalence. A gift can only be
extracted from its source if it is detachable from it, and a source is created
by actions that took place at another point in time. To force others into
being the prior cause of activity is, as Munn observed, to force them to take
a perspective on oneself. And one clan enters into a non-equivalent relation
with another in creating a focus for its particular achievements in the figure
of one man.
The Hagen big man presents the entire clan as a homogeneous collec-
tivity. He is its capacity for unity. At the same time, in so far as his single fig-
ure is created out of all the diverse interests of individual clansmen, he turns
these particular interests into collective ones. But he is not merely the con-
duit through which an internal relation is substituted for external ones
(individual householders, embedded in their own matrilateral-affinal net-
works, becoming a body of clansmen). I have suggested that the fact that
collective unity is represented as the outcome of his single will or mind also
enables the clan to then act as a particular and productive other in its
external relations. This particularisation is evinced in the specific events of
political history and marital alliance. Thus through its external marriage
relations, the Hagen clan produces two types of members - male (brothers)
and female (sisters and wives); the possibility of the clan appearing
internally in a collective state is achieved through privileging one of these
types and eclipsing the other. By externalising its female components, the
clan emerges as singular and as male, and thus transformed.
212 Big men and great men One man and many men 213
Lederman remarks for Mendi (chapter 12), that the coherence of the clan
in unitary action is a deliberate achievement. Pace Godelier, it is not that
the big man concentrates within his person diverse functions that among
the Baruya are distributed among many. All that is concentrated, so to
speak, is the will to act. And that can only exist in the singular. The big man
represents no group; the group exists in the fact that many wills are seen to
have composed into one will, one action, and thus one man.
What then are we to make of the Baruya? The body of Baruya men create
within themselves the difference between many men, between male and
female cult members, and between the great men who contain multiple
possibilities within their persons. Instead of eliminating multiple possi-
bilities in favour of one, they are sustained in their multiplicity. Thus the
holders of kwaimatnie are joined in an unequal relationship between the
guardian of the ritual and his helpers; and the warrior is never equalto his
counterpart; he will meet an enemy in single combat from which only one
will emerge.
The figures of the Baruya kwaimatnie-men, shamans, warriors and so
forth do not stand as one man. They are not isomorphic with a male collec-
tivity. On the contrary, they have transformative functions that divide
rather than unite the body of men, decompose it into its separate elements.
The kwaimatnie-men hold objects that are both male and female; male
shamans have female counterparts who mediate between different
worlds; warriors contain within conflicting qualities of
loyalty and betrayal, protection and despotism; and male hunters pursue
a female cassowary. In other words, these figures embody differences
that are not reducible to unity. There can be no single great man. Big
men and great men do not contain within themselves the same kinds of
relations.
In Hagen, the one man is likened to one clan, is its homologue, showing
in his transformed person the way in which multitudinous and diverse par-
ticular (kinship) relationships can be eclipsed in the pursuit of a single pur-
pose. At the same time, these very externalised diverse interests contribute
to the big man/clan's growth and must be harnessed. A clan adds these
relations to itself. The Baruya counterpart to this 'one man' is not really the
great man; it is the whole body of initiating and initiated men. The sons of
the sun show that among their collective selves they have the internal
capacity, hold the power, to transform cross-sex into same-sex relations,
sons into fathers and back again, for incremental effect. The contrast
between the two cases might be imagined as what is taken for granted as
requiring action.
The unity of Baruya men as an entire collective body is achieved by the
simple stroke of building a single house in the habitation of which social
difference is initially eliminated. Its bones are the posts, its skin the thatch.
Difference is externalised - into enemies, women, non-Baruya. Unity being
taken for granted in this context, multiplicity is subsequently brought
inside - by the great men - to create those productive and particular internal
divisions that will grow this one body. The men divide into older and
younger, hosts and immigrants, owners and non-owners of kwaimatnie,
those who are loyal and those who betray, and above all into male and
female. The external world thus becomes encompassed so to speak within
this internal one.
The Hagen clan, on the other hand, always keeps the external world at a
distance, because it wishes to gain from its extra-clan contacts accoutre-
ments for an outer skin which would not otherwise be visible. Since these
appendages in the first place originate in what it has previously detached
from itself (wealth, women), the clan's taken-for-granted state is multiple
or heterogeneous: unity is achieved, made to appear, on spectacular
occasions. Clan unity becomes the result of action so to speak rather than
its precondition. It appears as the acts of an agent, as the successful trans-
formation of one state into another.
In sum, the Hagen big man, standing in a relation of equivalence to the
body of male clansmen, enhances the possibility of the clan claiming a dis-
tinctive non-equivalence in relation to analogously composed bodies. For
he is both more than and less than the clan. The clan is enhanced in only one
of its forms, as a singular rather than a composite or heterogeneous body,
and thus it is a homogeneous transformation of it which enters into particu-
lar relations with others. Great men stand in a relation of non-equivalence
to the body of Baruya. They contain both between and within themselves a
diversity of capacities; given the homogeneous capacity of Baruya men in
their collective state, the great man differentiates between categories of
men in order to substitute for an external relationship with females or
enemies an internal male heterogeneity. That external relationship appears
within the body of men as a division of powers between cult participants.
Under such circumstances, there can be no distinctive external engagement
on a clan-like basis.
The argument turns on a single point. If we are interested in the figures
of the big man or great man, then we are interested in what people construe
as a focus of activity. The place that focus will have in the 'logics' of differ-
ent social lives cannot be predicted from the form itself, that is, from the
appearance of prominence. Grounded against different assumptions of
what can be taken for granted, they manage somewhat different perspec-
tives of the person. That person is, of course, a fractal person (chapter 9). I
214 Big men and great men
have considered two presentations of it. One is a figure who holds within
his own will a precariously demonstrated capacity for unification in the
face of external relations, while the other is one conduit among many who
hold between them the powers necessary to accomplish equally hazardous
internal divisions.
CHAPTER 12
'Interests' in exchange: increment"
equivalence and the limits of big-manship
RENA LEDERMAN
From the perspective of Mendi, however, also emphatically a big-man society, it is
the unities of Baruya and Hagen - rather than Hagen and Mendi - that corne to look
more alike. This chapter effectively re-challenges any simple correlation between
great men/big men and equivalence/non-equivalence in exchange strategies. Leder-
man examines Mendi notions of increment: mandatory incremental gifts are
embedded in kinship transactions in such a way as to produce generalised exchange
structures which enchain people through personal rather than clan relations. Com-
petitive exchanges, by contrast, concerning clans acting as groups, work to strict
accountability in terms of equivalence. This interplay between personal network
and political group demonstrates that the collective or unitary appearance of
'groups' has no special finality. If big men represent these units, they only represent
their own efforts in making them appear. Lederman both details the political
realities of personal and group action and reintroduces the issue of historical
extrapolation between different social forms in the Highlands.
By presenting 'great men' (along with the social order which produces
them) as typical, Godelier has effectively removed the 'big man' from his
central, definitive place in Melanesian ethnography to a new position of
relative peripherality. At least as much as other recent revisions of the
classical ways anthropologists have played the region (e.g., B. Douglas
1979), that disorienting turn has created new openings in the act of closing
older ones.
In this chapter, my intention is to explore a few responses to that move-
ment, on behalf of the big man. On the one hand, I am concerned to clarify
the interests that have been brought to bear in creating the big man's rela-
tive position in the comparative politics of the region. On the other hand, I
draw on my own ethnographic experience withthe Mendi, a central High-
land people, in order to reveal yet another set of interests. Following from
the last chapter, Mendi ethnography enables me to engage one dimension
of the difference Godelier (1982; 1986a: chapter 8) has identified between
the 'alternative logics of society' associated with great men and big men: the
distinction between 'equivalent' and 'non-equivalent' exchanges central to
the contrast between Baruya 'sister exchange' marriages and marriages
215
PART IV
A reformulation of the original questions with which this book set out.
273
CHAPTER 15
An unfinished attempt at reconstructing the
social processes which may have prompted
the transformation ofgreat-men societies
into big-men societies
MAURICE GODELIER
Godelier presents his reformulations as an attempt not to encompass or sum up the
findings of the previous chapters but to open again some of the questions he posed
at the outset. At the same time as bringing us back to these, he brings us back to data
concerning the material conditions of social forms. He pays fresh attention to the
social correlates of warfare, competition and the significance of kinship structures,
in hypothesising the mechanisms of transformation between great-men and big-
men societies and the interest that chiefly societies have for understanding this
development.
Yet this final chapter does indeed summarise an aspect of our endeavour.
Godelier reminds us of the distances between explanatory practices. Anthropol-
ogists concerned with the evolution of society perceive different principles of social
organisation as an affront to logic, and thus as a theoretical problem. On another
'level', as their idiom has it, they perceive social representations as the (alienated)
objects of communication by which people construct society as an object. What we
have perhaps learnt from Melanesians, from their social-science-fiction Godelier
might call it, is the axiomatic nature of their assumption that forms must necessarily
appear out of other (different) forms. It would be as a version or corollary of this
that persons must appear to others as other than themselves. Great men, big men
and chiefs are all visible 'others' of a kind.
In chapter 13, Modjeska chides me for stopping half-way through my
analysis. He felt that, once I had established the existence of two almost
contradictory social logics, that of great-men societies and that of big-men
societies, and then suggested that they were part of a vast and as yet un-
reconstructed systemof structural transformations, I had not dared to con-
sider these two logics as stages of an historical evolution in the course of
which, influenced by the arrival of the sweet potato, the former evolved
into the latter. In his eyes, I was satisfied with having got as far as one could
expect with a structural analysis. That is, I could safely assume that these
two logics belonged to the same group of structural transformations that
could also be considered to belong to a wider set of transformations which
275
276 Big men and great men
An unfinished attempt 277
one day might be extended to include societies based on rank as well as the
chiefdoms of Melanesia.
But the facts, or in this case the ideas, do not exactly correspond to
Modjeska's perception of them. In order to shed light on the problem, I go
back over the various stages of my reasoning.
It is true that I had first attempted to show that a social logic existed in
Papua New Guinea which was as yet unrecognised, as all the light had been
- wrongly - trained on the big-men model of society. This was the logic of
great-men societies, of which the Baruya became one example, whose only
advantage was that I knew them better than others and that they provided
me with an opportunity to isolate this new general type.
Next, it had seemed to me that the logic of power in these societies con-
trasted in many ways with that of big-men societies, but that these two
contrasting logics seemed, by their very opposition, to form two poles of a
vast system of structural transformations, and that, consequently, there
must exist examples of societies which fell between the two extremes, com-
bining certain features of both. I suggested that the Maring, to whom
Strathern refers in chapter 11; or the Gahuku-Gama, among others, might
be located in this middle zone.
I had then advanced the hypothesis that the development of competitive
exchanges and of production in view of these exchanges might have
fostered the transformation of great-men societies into big-men societies.
And so I did not stop, as Modjeska has taxed me with doing, but passed the
half-way mark, since I suggested that these two logics could be considered
to be two stages of an evolution which corresponded to an as-yet-
undiscovered socio-historical process. Among the economic and social
transformations which may have contributed to the transformation of
great-men societies into big-men societies, I mentioned, moreover, the
effects of the introduction of the sweet potato; but I did not adhere to the
thesis that this produced a veritable 'revolution'. I believe that the intro-
duction of the sweet potato merely intensified and accelerated phenomena
which had already developed in other traditional agricultures based on
tubers such as taro and yam. There is, therefore, no reason to see my not
holding the introduction of the sweet potato to be the starting point for
radically new social transformations as proof that I refuse to speculate on
the socio-economic processes which, well before the 'sweet potato revol-
ution', could have brought certain societies in Papua New Guinea closer to
producing a newtype of great men, one who would tantalise and symbolise
the new social structures: the big man. The simple truth is that, conscious
of the difficulties, I merely called attention to this possibility without taking
a stand on it. As an indication of the theoretical difficulties, I pointed out
that the process of generalising the exchange of wealth for women, or for
the death of a warrior or other negative events, covered a far wider area
than simply Papua New Guinea. This is a fundamental question of general
interest, one moreover that Levi-Strauss raised at the end of his Elementary
Structures of Kinship. It is also a question which concerns not merely, nor
even mainly, the analysis of kinship relations.
Now it is my intention to turn to that exercise of reconstructing imagin-
ary socio-historical processes. However, I must make it clear that I am
aware that I am reporting on something that is more of a failure than a
success. But, after all, is not a semi-failure also a small success?
The components of the two logics
It is necessary to reiterate here the essential components of the logic govern-
ing great-men societies and to state what makes it a true logic. I see it as
being based on the existence of relations of correspondence between three
elements of social life: kinship, power and wealth.
I assume that in societies where the principle of the direct exchange of ;ft
women dominates the production of kinship relations, one must also
encounter systems of male (and sometimes female) initiation calling more
upon powers that are inherited or ascribed (ritual powers in particular)
rather t ~ merited or achieved. These systems of initiation function as the
place where the entire society undergoes integration; they are the insti-
tution by which society represents itself as a whole, and where its con-
stituent hierarchies - among men on the one hand, between men and
women on the other - are legitimised. In as much as, in this logic, a woman
is exchanged for another woman, the death of a warrior compensated by
the death of an enemy, there is no need nor place for a direct link between
the production of wealth, the production of kinship relations and the pro-
duction of society as a whole.
My hypothesis attributes a leading role to the nature of kinship relations.
This is for me the starting point for understanding the systemof social logic
(with initiation serving as a sort of mainstay of male power, each man being
obliged to exchange a sister to get a wife); it is also the mechanism for
integrating all groups -lineages, clans, villages - which make up the society
and for representing them as a whole with respect to neighbouring
societies, be they friends or enemies.
Following the same line of reasoning, I assume that, when kinship -+
relations are found to depend primarily on the exchange of women for
278 Big men and great men An unfinished attempt 279
wealth, there should be a development of some system of social integration
and forms of male power centred on a sprawling system of competitive
exchanges which tie local societies into one regional, intertribal network.
These local groups are represented by big men, who symbolise their
capacity toproduce and/or amass wealth and to redistribute it. In this social
logic, there is no longer a place or a need for the big male initiations, as men
and women are both controlled by their (unequal) access to wealth, and
especially to the exchange of live pigs. But, to the extent that male power is
still partly based on the expropriation of female power (the sources of
men's life and growth, or of the reproduction of pigs), one finds in these
societies male cults open exclusively to young bachelors as in Duna, or
fertility cults for married men only as in Hagen. In my opinion, the first con-
stitute a type of society situated somewhere between the great-men and the
big-men types.
But two more remarks are needed to clarify the similarities and differ-
ences between these two logics. The first concerns the nature of kinship
relations, the second, the nature of the principles of equivalence which pre-
vail in these societies.
In both the great-men and the big-men societies of Papua New Guinea,
the descent groups which contract marriage relations and which are repro-
duced by them are usually not totally exogamous units. It is often possible
to marry a distant relative from the same clan. This contrasts sharply with
exogamous moiety systems such as the Bush Mekeo (chapter 5). In these
f systems, alliance is based, as among the Baruya, on the exchange of women;
but because of the strictly exogamous, closed character of moieties and
clans, kinship relations provide, in a more or less mechanical and objective
way, a first general framework for integrating all descent and residence
groups. Kinship cannot play this role, however, if the descent groups are
partially endogamous, half-open, half-closed, as in the case of the Baruya.
#; For example, among the Baruya, when several brothers and sisters from
the same lineage segment are of marriageable age, each brother must marry
in a different direction from the others, and none may reproduce his
father's or his father's brother's marriages. These prohibitions reveal a
deliberate intent to block the formation of closed groups which would
regularly exchange wives from one generation to the next, groups which
would operate as exogamous moieties required to exchange women with
each other. This practice of multiplying marriages in different directions,
which change with each generation, results in kinship groups being
intricated in a complex manner without their ever being integrated into a
common overall framework. Such a framework does exist in great-men
societies, but it is provided by the initiation system.
Asecond remark necessary to the clarification of these various social log-
ics concerns the nature of the principles which guide exchanges. In great-
men societies, the principle governing exchange dictates that the realities
exchanged must be equivalent in quantity and quality. A woman is
exchanged for a woman and the death of a warrior compensated only by
the death of a warrior. The first principle of exchange, then, is that the
realities exchanged must be of the same nature; and the second, that the
quantities must be the same. In big-men societies, on the other hand,
women are exchanged for wealth (pigs, shells, feathers), and the realities
exchanged no longer need to be of the same nature. This opens the way for
differences in the quantities of wealth given or received, for deliberately
unequal exchanges whose aim is the non-equivalence of goods given or
received. Somewhere between these systems of exchange there is room for i
a middle term which combines the two, a system in which the realities
exchanged are of different natures (women for wealth, for instance, as in
bridewealth), but in which the exchange does not give rise to competition,
nor does it obey the principle of non-equivalence of the quantities of wealth
given or received.
Baruya provide an example of a group combining the two principles ofic-
equivalence; Hageners combine the two principles of non-equivalence; and
Bena-Bena, Gahuku-Gama or even Duna can be seen to illustrate inter-
mediate combinations.
Other consequences of marriage differ according to whether descent
group; are exogamous or not and whether kinship groups are closed, open
or semi-open. In societies based on exogamous moieties, such as Mekeo,
the whole tribe is one big endogamous group, and their enemies can never
marry in. In great-men societies, such as Baruya, it is possible - in times of tf-
peace or in order to make peace - to exchange women with enemies and
turn some of these into allies by marriage. Matrimonial alliance becomes
thereby a potential means of dividing the enemy tribe and preparing the
secession of the enemy brothers-in-law from their native tribe and their
future absorption into one's own. At the same time, systematic use of the
principle of direct exchange of sisters, in the framework of a multi-village
tribal group which is integrated by a common general system of initiation,
tends towards endogamy on the tribal level and even more strictly on the
village level. Moreover, village endogamy may be sought deliberately, as in
the case of Telefolmin described in chapter 14, who practise the exchange
of women.
At the opposite pole, big-men societies tend to show a preference for
marrying members of neighbouring friendly, or even hostile, tribes. Bycon-
trast with endogamous tribes, in big-men societies the overall group, a
Marriage and initiation
I have analysed the structural contrast between great-men and big-men
societies, highlighting only the dominant features of the way they function.
'tribe', tends to behave like an exogamous group which receives its wives
from neighbouring groups, who may be either allies or enemies and who,
in any case, are their partners in competitive ceremonial exchange. Thus,
when going from societies which practise the direct exchange of women to
those which exchange women for wealth, the social and geographical dis-
tances separating Ego from his potential matrimonial allies undergo con-
siderable extension. These allies may come from inside the tribal group, or
even the village, they may come from inside or outside the village or group,
or they may tend to come almost exclusively from a distance, and some-
times a great distance if the alliance is contracted through regional net-
works of competitive exchange.
One last remarkon kinship: in great-men societies, the donors of women
are superior to the recipient. In big-men societies, the converse is true: the
donors of wealth, who are the recipients of women, tend to be superior to
the donors of women. This contrast forces us to take a new look at how the
principle of direct exchange of women works and to look more particularly
at one important aspect, the role played in this exchange by gifts of wealth
and services.
The starting point is the fact that a man who receives another's sister in
marriage incurs a debt that nothing can expunge. This debt can be counter-
balanced only by giving a woman in exchange. But the countergift does not
cancel the first debt, it merely balances it. Among the Baruya, the recipient
of a woman is the lifelong debtor of the donor. And this indelible debt is
what motivates the constant flow of gifts - both wealth and services - that
this man will bestow upon his brother-in-law and his allies, a flow which
increases as his wife gives birth to children.
On a theoretical level, this is an essential point: the principle of direct
exchange of women in no way excludes the exchange of goods and services
between allies. Quite the contrary, it includes the obligation to return goods
and services for the woman received. Must it then be supposed that, when
circumstances cause a group to abandon the direct exchange of women, the
traditional obligation to give goods or ser.rices in return for the woman
received persists or becomes thereby the only condition of this exchange,
transforming a secondary, complementary feature of the direct exchange
of women into a first principle, of general application: the obligation to pay
bridewealth in exchange for a woman?
But this is a reductionist approach, and the reduction prohibits correctly
stating the problem of the conditions and processes for the transformation
of a great-men society into a big-men society, if such a transformation ever
happened in the first place. Fromour present position, there is only one way
of formulating the question, and to my mind it is a theoretical dead end,
leading nowhere.
Under what conditions does the principle of exchanging women for
women become transformed into the principle of exchanging women for
wealth? According to this formulation, the transformation consists in the
mutation of a principle. This raises two questions. The first is theoretical:
can one principle change into another? The second is factual: does a
society's functioning rest on one or on several principles? Let us leave the
first question aside for the time being and deal with the second by turning
to ethnographic data on the Baruya, whose example will, I believe, help us
state the problem correctly.
The Baruya in fact make use of two principles of exchange when con- *"
tracting a marriage. On the one hand, they exchange women for women;
this prevails within the tribe, but is also practised with neighbouring enemy
as well as friendly tribes. On the other hand, they exchange wealth for
women, practised with more distant tribes with whom Baruya wish to
establish or strengthen trading relations. This type of marriage is called
apmwetsalairaveumatna, or 'get-together-salt-to-get-a-wife'. Here,
Baruya used to exchange a given number of bars of salt and lengths of
cowry beads for a woman. It is interesting to see that this principle came
into operation with groups located beyond a circle of neighbours living
more or less next door to the Baruya. Within this circle of neighbouring
tribes, political alliances were unstable and today's friends were liable to
become tomorrow's enemies. But outside this zone of turbulence, Baruya
found themselves confronted with strangers who were virtually non-
enemies, and therefore potential friends, with whom they wished to estab-
lish or strengthen friendly and lasting trading relations.
The Baruya also practised, on separate levels, two types of exchange,
which Levi-Strauss has dubbed 'restricted' exchange and 'generalised'
exchange. In the sphere of kinship relations, direct exchange of sisters
belonged to the 'restricted' type. Also of this type was the rule of patrilateral
cross-cousin marriage, which applied whenever the gift of one woman was
not balanced by the countergift of another. One of the daughters of the
woman given in the preceding generation had to marry one of the sons or
nephews of the man who had given her mother in marriage. By contrast, in
the system of male initiation, the circulation of semen - the exchange of life
substances among initiates - belongs to the logic of generalised exchange.
281 An unfinished attempt
Big men and great men 280
282 Big menand great men An unfinished attempt 283
The donors of semen are the older boys; the recipients, the younger. But the
younger boys do not give their substance back to their elders. The
recipients are not at the same time donors, and thus the life force circulates
down from one generation to the next, along an unbroken chain of virgin
boys who are linked by relations of elder to younger and more initiated to
'* less initiated. Generalised exchange of semen does exist, then; but not
generalised exchange of women. To return to a point made in chapter 1,
what is present in initiations is not present in kinship relations.
But there is a hierarchical connection between kinship relations and
J initiation, for a man cannot marry unless he has been initiated. Kinship
relations are not autonomous. The production of a complete social indi-
vidual is based on the subordination of kinship relations to politico-
ideological relations which are more extensive, integrating individuals and
groups into a whole capable of reproducing itself. One condition is essen-
tial if male power is to become established and reproduce itself; the worlds
of men and women must be separated, and men elevated above women in
a world governed by virginity with respect to women and by homosexu-
ality.
Taking a closer look at forms of power, Baruya can once again be seen to
combine two sorts of power: inherited or ascribed and merited or achieved.
Among the first are the magico-religious powers operating at the centre of
all big initiation rituals (of men, women, shamans). In the second group are
to be found the powers of great warriors (aoulatta), great horticulturalists
(tannaka), shamans (at least those, making up the majority, who do not
possess the sacred objects and formulas required for initiating other
shamans), cassowary hunters (the cassowary is seen as a kind of wild
woman who haunts the forest) and the makers of salt, the principal article
the Baruya exchange with their trading partners.
'*- It must be pointed out here that the Baruya tannaka is a great gardener,
a man who has several wives and whose gardens are large and well tended.
He has the means to raise numerous pigs, although does not necessarily do
so. This person, then, possesses some of the attributes which elsewhere
would make him a big man, a man who produces or personally amasses
wealth and redistributes it in the course of competitive exchanges for his
own greater glory and that of his group. If Baruya tannaka produces more
than ordinary men, this is in order that other lineages may dispose of his
production in times of war, whence his prestige. It may be said that he lives
in the shadow of the warriors without taking part himself in hostilities.
He is polygamous, whereas a great Baruya warrior should not have
many wives; for having many wives means lots of children and having to
clear large garden plots to feed them. The great warrior spends his time
laying ambushes and standing armed guard over groups of women as they
garden.
The Baruya do, however, encourage masters of rituals to take several
wives; these are men who have inherited from their ancestors the sacred
objects and ritual lore. They never have trouble finding a wife, even if they
have no sister to exchange (they will give one of their daughters from the
next generation). They will always be offered wives so that they may have
children and the ritual lore be handed from one generation to the next, in
the collective interest of the group. Moreover, in the midst of these warlike
tribes, these men do not go to war or, if they do, stay behind the lines; they
are protected for fear they may die before having passed on their secret. The
masters of kwaimatnie are the most important, the greatest men in the
tribe. Their name is supposed to be kept secret from enemies and neigh-
bouring tribes. They are the heart of the tribe, its secret foundations. This
type of great man is just the opposite of the big man, who strolls up and
down in front of a long line of pigs tied to their stakes, calling out the names
of those who have given the animals and of those who will receive them. A
big man shows himself to all the tribes involved in this competitive
exchange, and his name is on the lips of everyone.
Care must be taken, when using the terms inherited and merited powers,
not to give the false impression that only those powers acquired through
merit are the object of competition and that this does not apply in principle
to t s ~ which are inherited. While it goes without saying that no one is
recognised as a great warrior unless he has killed a number of enemies, it
does not go without saying that a man can successfully claim that his
lineage, and he himself as their representative, are the only ones who
possess the objects and lore necessary for performing initiations.
Among the Baruya, the lineages descended from the original conquerors
all possess sacred objects and play different and complementary roles in the
initiationceremonies. But, with the exception of one of the original lineages
who betrayed their own people and helped the Baruya take over the lands
of the tribe which had welcomed them, the other lineages subsequently
integrated into the Baruya tribe are not supposed to possess kwaimatnie
and play no role in the apparatus of initiation. In reality, however, the
integrated segments claimthat they too possesssuch objects, secreted away
by their ancestors but which could come to light tomorrow were the politi-
cal configuration that is the Baruya tribe to crumble.
But even within the conquering lineages who exhibit their kwaimatnie,
their use is a subject of rivalry. Certain segments which provide the master
of ceremonies with assistants sometimes demand that one of their men take
his place. Most often the ploy falls through, but once again everything
The comparison of systems
I now return to that line of reasoning which assumes that there exist two
separate periods corresponding to two sets of conditions which are
supposed to lead to the transformation of great-men societies into big-men
societies. The analyses proposed in the second part of this chapter are based
on the following facts:
1 Widespread use of the principle of exchange of wealth-for-women, the
custom of bridewealth, is found in those societies in which the pro-
duction and redistribution of pigs has become highly developed, not in
order to contribute to competitive exchanges among local groups but for
the performance of ceremonies for ancestors and spirits. The Duna
(chapter 13) are an example. They have no competitive exchanges or, if
they do, these are not a dominant institution. Now Duna have a sort of
big man, the wei tse. Consequently, the existence of a competitive
exchange network is not the pre-condition for the emergence of big men-
like great men.
2 Furthermore, the development of competitive exchanges seems to
become a dominant fact only in some societies and under some con-
depends on the rapports de force within the Baruya tribe and how much
corrosive pressure marriage alliances with enemy groups can bring to bear
on tribal political unity. Political unity symbolised by the tsimia - the cer-
emonial house built for initiation, veritable symbolic body of the tribe that
brings together all the lineages and all the villages - is built on an ensemble
of latent or declared tensions which have been overcome or suspended for
the time being.
In this case, the ethnographic material on the Baruya provides us with an
example of a society based on the simultaneous interaction of several
principles. Some are dominant; others are equally essential, but playa
secondary role. The transformation of great-men societies into big-men
societies cannot be a problem of one principle turning into another, but of
a change in the relation of dominance between the two. Since Baruya prac-
tise both principles of exchange, the problem is to imagine what processes
managed to extend the field of action of the exchange of women for wealth;
what processes brought about the extinction of the exchange of women for
women. We are again confronted with the problem of imagining the con-
ditions necessary to alter the relationship between two already existing
principles. One expands, while the other recedes. What begins by no longer
being prescribed, ends by being proscribed, a point that recalls Lederman's
discussion of Mendi (chapter 12).
Means of distribution: Baruya
Baruya use three means of transferring and circulating goods, which we
will call 'commercial exchanges', 'redistribution gifts' and 'substitution/
compensation gifts'.
Commercial exchanges are based primarily on the production and redis- :'f
tribution of salt extracted from plants and processed by evaporation into
crystallised bars. Planting the salt cane in fields, irrigating and cutting the
cane are man's work, performed by the owner of the salt field. Filtering the
salt is usually men's work, but nowadays, as the men are often away, the
owner's wife or his daughters may do this job. But crystallising the salt,
building the salt ovens, and such remain men's work and calls for a special-
ist. Baruya trade their salt for bark-cloth capes, stone blades, bird-of-
paradise feathers, cowry necklaces, charms and sometimes even piglets; it
285 An unfinished attempt
ditions. If any light is to be thrown on these conditions, we must follow
Lemonnier's example (chapter 1) and identify the various forms com-
petitive exchange may assume. There are three possibilities: in some
cases, donors compete with each other in giving, but they are not in
competition with those to whom they give; in other cases, donors do not
compete among themselves, but with those who receive; combining these
two forms gives those cases in which donors compete both among them-
selves and with those to whom they give.
3 Finally, whatever may be the form of competition, a distinction must be
made between competition among friendly groups and that among
hostile groups. Hagen (chapter 11) represents the upper limit on the
graduated scale of social space occupied by competition. Hagen donors
compete among themselves and with those to whom they give, and they
prefer to vie in gift-giving with hostile groups rather than with groups of
allies. Therefore, having seen that the functions and importance of the
big man are more highly developed in societies in which competitive
exchange prevails over other means of redistributing wealth, we must
seek the reasons behind both the dominance of this form of exchange and
the development of the big man's attributes.
But competitive exchange is only one of several means of redistributing
goods and wealth. Its importance is to be appreciated by measuring the
space it occupies with respect to all the other forms of redistribution and
of goods coexisting within anyone society. This leads to a com-
parison of the several means of redistributing goods in Papua New Guinea,
and we start with the Baruya, who are a good example of a great-men
society.
Big men and great men 284
286 Big men and great men
An unfinished attempt 287
can thus be exchanged for goods as varied as charms or the means of pro-
duction or destruction, and can be an essential element in sealing political
or matrimonial alliances. Trading expeditions to neighbouring tribes or the
welcoming of outside trading partners are initiatives undertaken by men.
For the exchange value of salt rests on one essential fact: salt contains a
magical force. It nourishes human liver, the site of this force, and is an
essential support of all ritual acts and initiations. To produce salt and
exchange it, for the Baruya, is to produce a magical force and redistribute
it within their own group or in neighbouring tribes.
The items Baruya obtain by trading salt are put into circulation within
the tribe either as 'redistribution gifts' or as 'substitution gifts'. These gifts
are made at critical times in the lives of individuals or the group: birth,
initiation, marriage, death, suicide, war, sacrifice to spirits, intertribal
alliance.
Goods obtained through accumulation and redistribution include
quantities of food (taro, sweet potatoes, greens, game), clothing (bark-
*" cloth capes, aprons), adornments, feathers, shells and salt. Let us take the
example of game. When a woman gives birth, her husband, brothers,
brothers-in-law and other male relatives go hunting and send a large por-
tion of game back to the birthing hut, where the woman is sequestered. She
eats part and redistributes the rest to the women and children of the village.
Even more important are the gifts of game made by the initiated men to the
boys undergoing the rituals marking the various stages of initiation. All this
game-giving clearly means intensified hunting; the big collective initiations
mobilise hundreds of men, who go out for sometimes two or three weeks in
order to amass the huge amounts of game that will be cooked and
redistributed at the ceremonies marking the close of the initiations. Women
participate in these big hunts by carrying into the forest the many sweet
potatoes needed to feed the members of the expedition. They may also
sometimes be used in the course of the hunt as beaters.
Game is, then, essentially a product of men's work and is the object of
redistribution among men and women, on the other hand, at different
stages in marriage, birth and so on; and between men and boys, on the other
hand, during the big initiation ceremonies. But, in the course of these cer-
emonies, great quantities of other goods are also amassed and redis-
tributed: taro eaten at the initiation meals; clothing made by the women,
which they give to the young initiates among their kin; and so forth. There
is some rivalry as to who will give the most food to a newly initiated relative.
And the young initiates take pride in the thickness of their pubic aprons, for
the thicker it is, the more women, kin or in-laws, worked on it.
Substitution gifts are precious objects which are exchanged as a compen-
sation or a substitution for someone's life. Compensation and substitution
are the main functions of this form of gift-giving. Here are some illus-
trations. As we have seen, Baruya sometimes exchange salt and other forms .*"
of wealth as bridewealth for a woman when contracting ail alliance with
trading partners. Moreover, when a woman is murdered or when someone
commits suicide, the tribe presents the maternal lineage with salt or, today,
money to compensate the death and to prevent the spirit of the deceased
from taking revenge. Or when a deadly conflict between two segments of a
lineage forces one of them to seek refuge with allies and request integration
into their lineage, a ceremony is performed in the course of which the allies
make a present of a 'bridge' of salt and other forms of wealth to the lineage
whose members they are about to absorb. This gift also confirms the fact
that the individuals who have left their original lineage have, in so doing,
lost their rights over their ancestors' lands and belongings.
In this category of gifts might be classed the presents given a shaman who
has rid someone's body and mind of attacks by evil forces. Although a
shaman never makes an explicit request, he drops hints to the person he has
healed as to what he would like: bars of salt, bark-cloth capes - not quite
the same thing as payment for a service but almost. A final form of substi-
tution is practised rarely; in certain cases of severe epidemics or series of
mysterious deaths, shamans perform a ceremony during which they bury
the leg of a pig killed for the occasion. This rare example of an offering to
evil spirits implies a sacrifice.
The example gives us an opportunity to clarify the function of pigs in
Baruya society. The exchange of live pigs is also rare. Sometimes Baruya
will exchange a piglet for some bark-cloth capes, arrows elaborately carved
by a neighbouring tribe or even for a stone adze. Or - not a gift but rather
an exchange of services - a woman often entrusts one of her sisters or
female cousins with raising a young sow from which she will get back half
of each litter. Such a reciprocal exchange lessens the risk of losing pigs to
disease. Most pigs, however, circulate in the form of cooked meat. These
gifts of meat go on constantly between blood relations and in-laws. Pork
rarely figures in ritual initiation meals, with the possible exception of
ceremonies which took place in times of war. In this case, it was dangerous
to go hunting because the forest was full of hostile groups. And so the
families of the boys about to undergo their first initiation would kill a pig
and donate it to be cooked and shared at the closing ceremony of the first-
stage initiation (mouka).
Each Baruya family raises pigs which it withholds from the consumption 1-
circuit for several years. A woman usually looks after three or four adult
pigs and five or six piglets. From time to time, especially when the herd gets
288 Big men and great men
An unfinished attempt 289
big, two brothers-in-law, with their wives' consent, each kill two or three
grown pigs. The deboned pigs are all baked whole in one big cooking-pit;
when the pit is opened, the meat is taken out and shared. A portion of the
liver is sent ,to the village men's house for the initiates. The rest is consumed
exclusively by men. The men quarter the pig, and then make up lots, usually
taking into consideration the recommendations of their wives, who are
constantly telling them to whom they must send pieces of meat. The meat
is distributed to all the in-laws, who redistribute it in turn.
These exceptional pig killings are done at the instigation of the families
*'alone, and serve a.bove their in,terests. They are not, however, with-
out some connectIOn with male mitiation and the symbolic practices which
go into the making of the men's domination of women. These connections
appear in the portion of cooked liver that is given to the initiates living in
the men's house as well as in the fact that the tongue and the internal organs
considered impure by Baruya, are reserved for the women. But the primar;
purpose of these redistributions of meat is to confirm marriage alliances
and blood ties. Thus, when the parents of a little boy who is not yet initiated
want to let the family of a little girl know they would like her to be their
bride, they send them portions of cooked meat each time they
kill a pig. If they are accepted, these repeated gifts commit the families to a
future marriage alliance.
1" 'It must be stressed that the raise a goodly number of pigs and
would be perfectly capable of creatmg adequate material conditions for
promoting competitive exchanges of live pigs. But they do not do so
because it is not a social necessity. On the contrary, they emphasise the
circulation of game, a resource whose access is restricted to men and which
tests their powers in the spheres of magic and hunting, two attributes of
male superiority. The same is true for salt, the production of which depends
on the know-how and magic of the salt-makers.
Competitive gift-giving among the Baruya does exist, however. Giving
more, game, more adornments, more aprons, more taro than others brings
prestige to the donors. But this prestige is not transformed directly into
social power, into authority over others. And it is significant that, when
Baruya families kill a dozen pigs that they have saved up for the occasion,
they are very discreet about it. They cook the animals and redistribute the
pieces out of the sight of onlookers. And, in the village, everyone pretends
to be unaware and takes care not to be around when the cooking pit is
opened and pieces divided. Those who have a right to a piece expect it,
but no one will come around for it. In short, there is no social basis nor
space in Baruya society for the creation and development of competitive
exchanges of live pigs.
Means of distribution: Duna
Duna stand in marked contrast to the Baruya. Following from chapter 13,
I also refer to Modjeska's earlier ethnography (e.g. 1982), which I examine
in the light of the preceding distinctions between commercial exchanges,
compensation/substitution gifts and redistribution gifts.
In their commercial exchanges (yoloya), Duna trade pigs for axes, salt,
shells, magic formulas and even land. They keep this type of exchange
separate from transactions implying gifts as a substitutefor human lives or
deaths, such as bridewealth or compensation (damba) for the death of
allied warriors killed in battle.
As far as marriage is concerned, Duna recognise two co-existing prin-
ciples of exchange: the exchange of wealth for women and the exchange of
women for women. The latter is sometimes practised between two men
who not only exchange bridewealth, but give each other their sisters in
marriage. But just what is the principle of bridewealth? For the Duna, the
payment is made up of four sows and some ten smaller pigs to which are
added lengths of shells and other precious goods. Sometimes one of the pigs
may be replaced by shells. The gift is received by the bride's family and is
redistributed by her father to the men who gave him the pigs to make up the
bridewealth for his own marriage.
Modjeska raises some questions about the meaning of this bridewealth,
since among the cognatically inclined Duna, men do not have exclusive
rights over women's work or over their children, and protest that they do
not exchange pigs for the sexual relations they have with their wives. But,
in fact, Modjeska recalls that the Duna expression 'to eat the wife's vagina'
means the redistributing of the wife's bridewealth pigs among the men. It
is true that children 'belong' to the maternal as well as to the paternal line,
and that each spouse has the right to use the other's lands. But one gets the
impression that Duna have a marked tendency to prefer and to consolidate
the relations men share with each other through the male line despite the
cognatic principles that govern their world of kinship. This could explain
why Duna reject any direct and immediate correspondence between the
goods paid as bridewealth and rights over children or women's work. The
only thing they are prepared to recognise explicitly is that they have rights
over the bridewealth that will be paid to each of their daughters. They do,
however, claim the right to do as they see fit with the pigs raised by their
wife and, should the occasion arise, those raised by their mother and sisters.
The production of pigs for bridewealth is, then, one sphere in which there
is a certain amount of male competition. In contributing to the bridewealth
of a friend or relative, for example, they are not only investing in the future
290 Big men and great men
An unfinished attempt 291
but also reap immediate prestige and gratitude. Yet accumulating pigs is
also a necessity in order to intervene in contexts that go well beyond mar-
riage: ancestor sacrifices and compensation for allied war dead. I briefly
recall these various forms of circulation of wealth.
War siphons off some of the pigs produced by the Duna, as pigs are given
to the family of each warrior - friend or ally - who dies in battle. Compen-
sation (damba) is extremely high, up to thirty pigs per death, and no one is
exempt from this obligation. Let us pause here and note that the warriors
whose death receives compensation are allies, not enemies. One wonders if
this compensation might not be fulfilling two functions at once: silencing
the lamentations of the deceased's kin, but also, and perhaps above all,
warding off their anger and keeping these allies from becoming tomorrow's
enemies. Left alone, the situation could easily revert to an eye for an eye and
a tooth for a tooth; the uncompensated death of an ally would be repaid not
with wealth, but with the death of one of your own warriors. In this sense,
the damba is both a compensation and a substitution: a gift of wealth to
compensate the death of an ally today and to prevent a death of your own
tomorrow.
The practice of paying compensation for war dead is, along with male
contributions to the bridewealth of a brother or a friend, one of the bases,
perhaps the main one, on which a man becomes a big man; for no war can
be declared unless some man undertakes to place his pigs at the disposal of
his group for the compensation of the deaths the battle will entail. This man
must, of course, be wealthy (anoa kango) and be able to count on contri-
butions from other members of his local group or groups with which he is
affiliated. This means that he must know how to amass personal wealth
and, when the time comes, have access to the wealth of others. When this
man commits his pigs to the war effort, he is called wei tse: the 'foundation-
of-the-war' man. He is also a warrior, perhaps even a great warrior, but he
need not be a 'fight leader'. He must, of course, be able to convince, and so
he is a good speaker. When two or three wars have been crowned with suc-
cess, a wei tse becomes a anoa yaka pukuo, a 'man-with-a-name'.
For the Duna, then, war played an essential role in the emergence of big
men to the extent that the principle of equivalence, warrior-for-warrior,
death-for-death, did not obtain, and wealth was used as a substitute for
death, and so for human life. Duna apply the same principle of non-
equivalence of the nature of realities exchanged when they give wealth for
women, thereby acquiring the rights over the wealth this woman's
daughters will bring in when they marry.
On the theoretical level, the important point is that war and the ensuing
compensatory payments form a basis for the emergence of a big man with-
out competitive intergroup exchanges proper, since damba payments for
war dead do not involve a payment in return. Compensation/substitution
gifts did exist, but they were never connected into a chain of competitive
exchanges. And yet wei tse lived in a state of competition among them-
selves, the most visible symptom of which were their constant mutual accu-
sations of sorcery. Moreover, if we pursue Modjeska's line of thought, the
Duna never waged war, as was sometimes the case with the Baruya, with
an eye to conquering part of the neighbour's territory. War was used to
avenge insults, accusations of sorcery. One gets the impression that war
was almost an excuse to compensate the allied warriors killed in battle.
Yet marriage- or war-related gift-giving were not the only Duna paths to
prestige and authority. A man could also become a 'man-with-a-name' by
completing the three steps of the Kiria cult, a panlocal cult in honour of the
ancestress of the Duna: this woman left the land of Ok in search of a pig;
everywhere she slept along the way, she marked the spot; there the Duna
later erected houses for her worship, Kiria. I would like to make a few
remarks on the Duna cult system such as Modjeska has reconstructed it for
us here. Modjeska has himself compared this systemwith the symbolic and
religious world of the Baruya as it can be seen in male and female initiation
and I comment on this point as well.
The Duna religious world is made up of a combination of three
ensembles: the Kiria cult, the worship of spirits and ancestors (auwi) and
the Palena cult, reserved for young bachelors. The first two appear to be
interc;nnected, since the officiants of the local auwi cults are liruali, last-
stage initiates of the Kiria cult. The Kiria supplied a framework for ideo-
logical integration and the creation of 'ethnic' solidarity among all Duna,
the equivalent of the Baruya initiation system, symbolised by the tsimia.
It should be noted - and this points up differences between Baruya and
Duna practices in matters of worship, war and marriage exchanges - that
Baruya see themselves as a separate group, opposed to other local groups
of the same language and culture, and that these local groups are not
lineages, villages or parishes, as in Duna social organisation, but more
encompassing ensembles which I call tribes. Now, Duna have no tribal
reality of this sort, no collective identity midway between the local group,
village, lineage and the Duna society as a linguistic and cultural whole. The
Duna as a group have no common material and political interests, whereas
the Baruya do. What is expressed in the Kiria cult is merely the ideological
unity of all Duna, and the common interest all Duna men share in monop-
olising access to their common ancestress, the mythical woman from the
land of Ok, thereby excluding from the cult all Duna women.
What strikes me, in the Duna world, is the struggle between their
292 Big men and great men An unfinished attempt 293
cognatic principles and practices and institutions whose function - ideo-
logically and socially - is to restrict access to supernatural powers and the
ancestors for men only. These efforts seem to result in a very strong tend-
ency to construct, within a cognatically organised world, lineage-like
groups or quasi-lineages which go through males. This is why the Duna say
that only men become the ancestors whose spirits protect or threaten their
male or female living descendants, a thesis in direct contradiction with the
myth which tells that all Duna descend from an original woman.
Unlike the wei tse, whose repeated gifts in support of wars make him a
'man-with-a-name', the liruali of the Kiria cult also becomes a 'man-with-
a-name', but this name is known only to the Duna. The liruali is, then, the
equivalent of the Baruya great man, master of the male initiation cer-
emonies, owner of a kwaimatnie (the sacred object which makes men grow
and ensures fertility), a man whose name must be kept secret from neigh-
bouring tribes.
In order for a Ouna to join any of the various cults, he must volunteer one
or several pigs; this practice does not exist among the Baruya, since every-
one, without exception, must undergo initiation, rich and poor alike. In the
Kiria cult, the pig-giving stops there. But this is not at all the case for the
auwi cults, which occasion massive pig kills and widespread redistribution
of the meat, shared out equally among the male and female descendants of
the ancestor being honoured and appeased.
For the Ouna, the fertility of the earth and women, the growth of men
and pigs, result from, are grounded (tse) in the active support of the ances-
tors, which can be withdrawn at any time. Socially difficult situations arise
when the local group ancestor has something against his descendants and
becomes angry and aggressive. Spirits and ancestors behave somewhat like
cannibals. One myth tells how, in the beginning, the ancestors used to sac-
rifice human beings to their own auwi; today, however, their descendants
sacrifice pigs to them. So, for the auwi ceremony, all descendants of the
ancestor thought to be at the root of the trouble gather and each contributes
a pig to the sacrifice. As a result, a goodly number of the pigs produced by
the Ouna, far from going into bridewealth and compensation for war dead,
sources of prestige for big men, are redistributed in the absence of any com-
petition at all.
Finally, we must turn our attention to the last component of the Duna
ideological world: the Palena cult, which fulfills a series of functions also
found in the Baruya initiation system. Young men voluntarily join the
master of the Palena cult, a man who remains a life-long virgin because of
his privileged relations with a female spirit believed to have mastery over
the fertility of pigs and the land, and to drive game into hunters' traps.
These young men spend a year in the forest, avoiding all contact with
women, before returning to communal life.
A comparison between this cult and Baruya initiation sequences
immediately reveals differences and similarities. First the differences:
bachelor cults recruit volunteers; the Baruya initiations are mandatory. j:
Seclusion from women lasts several months for the Ouna; it lasts nine or ten
years for the Baruya. The cult masters who celebrate Ouna ceremonies may
be outsiders, Huli for instance; masters of Baruya initiations must be mem-
bers of the tribe and their functions are hereditary. They never receive
material compensation for performing their duties, but this brings prestige
and social advantages. As for the similarities: three essential aspects ofthe
Baruya initiations can be found in the bachelor cults, as well as in Hagen
and other fertility cults. They stem from the fact that in these rituals men
learn that women are the source of certain powers (a woman-spirit, the
woman ancestor, the women who became the star Venus), but that they are
also the source of pollution, of the destruction of men's powers, especially
through sexual relations. By separating men and women for a period,
initiations and cults accomplish three purposes. They teach men to over-"*,
come the duality of the female world, source of life and death. The make it
possible for them to appropriate or (imaginarily) control women's powers
and add them to their own, thereby constructing the ideology of men's
superiority over women and the superiority of male cosmic forces over
female. Lastly, they comfort and deepen male solidarity.
Comparing the symbolic worlds of Baruya and Ouna, it seems as though
several structures which the Baruya see as being fused into a single ideo-
logical and ritual whole are separated by the Ouna. The former bring about
the ideological and political unity of all local groups by using the same insti-
tutions: initiation which constructs and legitimises men's superiority over
women. For the Ouna, the two functions are separate; the Kiria cult ensures
the first, the Palena cult the second. Both societies stress the importance of
young men keeping their virginity in order to appropriate female powers
and establish male superiority. Duna, however, do not link male virginity
to homosexuality, which is forbidden. Perhaps, if we are to interpret the
presence or the prohibition of homosexuality, we should look at the details
of the Baruya and Duna kinship systems. For, inthe cognatic Ouna system,
the child is inevitably a result of the mixing of paternal and maternal
substances, and semen cannot be regarded as the only, or even the main,
source of the child's life and vigour, as is the case for the strictly patrilineal
Baruya.
If it is true that the Ouna apportion to two separate cults the functions
which the Baruya integrate into a single system, why do they do so? Once
294 Big men and great men
again I feel we should look at the kinship relations and especially at whether
the driving mechanismof marriage is the direct exchange of sisters between
men or bridewealth.
In Baruya culture, the direct exchange of women between men supposes
an ideological and social coercion exercised directly on the person of the
woman. It seems to me that this requires the construction of a collective
male force to stand behind the individual man whenever he must exchange
one of the women he controls directly (his sisters or daughters). This collec-
tive force is what is created by male initiation, which builds a solidarity
among men that overrides any existing differences or opposition there may
be among lineages or villages. But this collective force is also an ideological
world, a world shared by women as well as men. And in fact this sharing is
brought about by female initiation. This is the door through which the
world of male domination enters female consciousness, adding the weight
of this sharing to the other economic, social and physical forces which men
control.
The first principle of Duna marriage is the exchange of wealth for
women. This principle, which is of only minimal importance for the
Baruya, is not practised within the group but with outsiders, and pro-
foundly modifies the conditions of men's social control of women and the
elders' of the younger. The control becomes to a certain extent indirect,
since direct control over access to wealth means indirect control over those
who might use it to produce or reproduce social relations. It is this new
social force, the role played in social relations by wealth, that I feel makes
it less important to construct a mechanism of male domination through an
institution which must be imposed on all young people, namely initiation.
Competition and the mechanisms of transformation
Having come this far in my comparison between Baruya and Duna, several
theoretical points strike me. Looking at the Duna, we have seen an enor-
mous increase in the importance of the production and circulation of pigs
for social purposes, since they are used to found kinship relations, to make
peace and hence war, and periodically to re-establish the unity and identity
of local groups by sacrificing to the founding ancestors. The increase in the
social importance of pigs may well have been the driving force behind the
extension of the principle of exchange of wealth for women and the near
extinction of direct exchange of women.
Nowwhat social mechanism might provide the link between the extinc-
tion of the direct exchange of women and the extension of the use of wealth
for social purposes, and in particular wealth accumulated in the form of live
An unfinished attempt 295
or dead pigs? One hypothesis would be that, given the division of labour in
New Guinea, extension of pig production implied an increased workload
for the men, but even more for the women. As the use of pigs for social pur-
poses spread, men's power came more and more to rest on their capacity to
control the work force of women and to deprive them even more com-
pletely of the social use of the products of their labour.
This would seem to point to an extension of polygamy or its generalis-
ation among 'apprentice' big men. For although direct exchange of sisters
does not forbid polygamy, it does impose serious restrictions. It is out of the
question for a Baruya man to exchange all his sisters for himself, leaving his
brothers with no means of obtaining wives. But this is only a relative objec-
tion, since a Baruya man may take a wife without giving a sister, promising
to give one of his daughters instead. Whatever may be the case, once the
equivalent to a woman becomes a certain amount of wealth that is pro-
duced, as is the case of pigs (produced) versus game (not produced), then
the limits of polygamy implied by the direct exchange of women are over-
come; and this is accomplished by social mechanisms which make it poss-
ible for a few men to concentrate more wealth than others. For having more
wives requires amassing more wealth. But these mechanisms also set other
limits on the unequal access men have to the use of wealth as an equivalent
of social relations.
Something bothers me in this theoretical argument, however; in order for
a man to take his first wife in a bridewealth society, he must be able to dis-
pose of the products of the labour of women to whomhe is not married: his
sisters, mother, female cousins or the wives of his brothers and friends. This
is true regardless of the importance of polygamy in his society. Modjeska's
data points in this direction, as he cites the case of one big man who had
nine wives, and in another place stresses that Horalienda big men are rarely
polygamous. Whether there is a link between amassing wealth and
polygamy, then, remains up for discussion.
In any case, I want to state my position on the weight kinship relations
may have in transformation affecting social logics. I do not believe that the
extension or the extinction of a kinship system can be traced to causes or
forces within the system. These causes and forces make their appearance in
other spheres of social life, in economic or other transformations, which
alter the social differences within the group or bring it into conflict with
neighbouring or enemy groups over use of the surrounding environment. I
would be more tempted to look among the mechanisms linking wealth and
sacrifices, or wealth and war, for an explanation of why one kinship system
ceases to prevail and another takes over. But to date, these mechanisms
have barely been glimpsed.
-------------------------
.1
The foregoing analyses seem to be heading in this direction, however.
For, in the Duna case, we have the example of a society in which the pro-
duction of pigs has undergonf: vast expansion, not because some system of
competitive exchange is fostering the emergence of big men; but because,
alongside thebridewealth needed for matrimonial alliances, war and the
compensation required for political alliances and, even more important,
sacrifice to the ancestors - the renewal of the spiritual alliance between the
living and the dead, humans and spirits - imply the consuming of this type
of wealth. .
It follows, therefore, that big men can indeed appear before there is any
system of competitive exchange and that kinship and war are sufficient
conditions for their emergence. But it must also be pointed out that, along-
side great men who look very much like big men, are Duna great men who
look like Baruya masters of initiations, except that the latter inherit their
sacred powers whereas there seems to be no proof that the secrets of the
Duna cults are transmitted hereditarily. Modjeska does suggest, though,
that at an earlier time the Duna probably had lineages which were the
hereditary 'owners' of the magic elements of the Kiria cult. At this level, the
Baruya and Duna systems of power can be seen to bear some resemblance
with one another.
I see an irreducible difference, however, in the contrast between the Duna
wei tse, who derives his fame from using his wealth in the service of peace
- and hence war - by compensating allied war dead, and the Baruya
aaulatta, whose renown stems from the number of enemy warriors he has
killed in personal combat. And behind the Baruya aaulatta stands the
tannaka, the great and often polygamous gardener who puts the products
of his garden at the disposal of all, but in order that the fighting may con-
tinue and not to compensate the death of allied warriors.
The question is, then, under what circumstances a man can derive fame
simultaneously from killing enemies by his own hand and using his own
wealth to compensate the death of friendly warriors. Lemonnier has shown
that this twin figure of the warrior-wealthy man who uses his wealth in the
service of peace, the wei tse, can be found in many Papua New Guinea soci-
eties, and particularly in the Eastern Highlands. He sees this twin figure as
a type of 'leader' midway between the Baruya great man and the Hagen big
man. In this hypothesis, the Duna belong to a widespread group of societies
which combine aspects of both great-men and big-men societies.
But big-men societies seem to be more rare than I had thought. Their
scarcity would seem to stem from the fact that in these societies there are
true working competitive exchanges which, by means of gifts and counter-
gifts, confront members of both the same tribe and different tribes within
the same regional network. The emergence of competitive exchanges
remains far me a fact which needs explaining. But it already seems clear that
it is this that prompts the expansion of the big man's functions and instates
him as the dominant, if not unique, figure of social power. Indeed, it is as
though the birth and development of these systems of competitive
exchange not only eliminated once and for all the principle of direct
exchange of women, but caused the rituals and cults which ensured the
ideological integration of the group to lose importance. The colonial peace
was probably not entirely responsible for the flourishing competitive
exchanges that can be seen in Enga and Hagen.
Competitive exchange seems, then, to be a peculiar phenomenon, not
one that caused the big-man figure to emerge but was probably the con-
dition for his pre-eminence. The problem is to discover what conditions
determined the appearance and development of the giving of gifts and
countergifts (equal to or greater than the gifts) which combined into a series
of practices to form a system within which a struggle for prestige and
authority might be carried on among individuals as well as among local
groups.
We have no solution to this problem. All we can do for the time being is
to formulate it in terms which provide for continuity with the foregoing
analyses. It seems to me that the emergence of these systems implies, first of
all, that the conflicts within a local group and the power struggles which
depen9 on inequalities in the production or accumulation of wealth can no
longer be contained by making sacrifices to abstract powers, ancestors,
spirits held to be responsible for conflicts among the living. Competition
within the group must have once been much more highly developed than
that observed in Duna society, where in times of crisis a large proportion of
their wealth is destroyed in ancestor sacrifices.
But what could lead to the growth of competition within a group and
bring its members to prefer circulating pigs in contests of gift and counter-
gift to the periodical destruction and ritual consumption of pig-wealth?
Perhaps all possible references to ancestors or spirits must have dis-
appeared in order for explanations of conflicts to be sought among the
living. But it should be remembered that, in great-men societies like the
Baruya, the presence of ancestors in the lineage carries little weight and is
not a major factor in interpreting the causes of conflict among the living.
Another prerequisite might be a growing interest in seeking wives, and
therefore allies, outside one's local group or tribe. What are the mech-
anisms which might encourage a preference for marrying out of one's
group rather than looking within, the inverse of B)c\lya or Telefolmin
practice? The problem is still to understand how the development of
296 Big menand great men An unfinished attempt 297
298 Big men and great men An unfinished attempt 299
[
r
L
competition within groups leads to the institution of competitive exchange
systems between local groups or tribes.
One remark must be made here: although these systems constitute a form
of peaceful struggle using economic means, the latter have not done away
with warfare, 'and could not have done so. They exist parallel to war; but
to the extent that war is a threat to the wealth and the men involved in the
exchange, it endangers their functioning. It could be assumed, then, as
intertribal competitive gift-giving gained ground, warfare progressively
became a subordinate activity and finally encountered a social limit to .its
development.
But if competitive exchanges both restrict warfare and partially replace
it, it may be legitimate to wonder if they were not developed for that pur-
pose, to restrict warfare by replacing it. One would then have to presume
that, in certain societies where big men already made gifts of pigs to con-
tract marriage alliances or to preserve politico-military ones, pressure to
engage in war had increased to such a degree that the problemarose of find-
ing a partial substitute. This pressure would have then to be maintained,
providing the permanent driving force behind the development of net-
works of intertribal competitive exchange.
Or, following a different line of reasoning, one might imagine another
process which would provide an equally convincing explanation of why
networks of competitive exchanges persisted and developed beyond the cir-
cumstances and pressures responsible for their birth. For the principle of
unequal exchange which governs these competitions implies that, once
they have appeared and have become embodied in a network conjoining
numbers of individuals and groups, they automatically begin reproducing
themselves by the giving of gifts and countergifts, and escalation leads to
their spread. These networks would then follow the logic inherent in their
functioning and become independent of the conditions of their origin; and
it is therefore not necessary that pressure to make war be maintained at the
same level in order to explain their persistence and expansion. Whatever
circumstances may have surrounded his birth, it is clear that the emerging
big man acquired a definitive advantage over the great warrior or the great
magician and could afford to no longer be a warrior, choosing instead to be
an orator, a manipulator of men and a financier.
Yet this whole line of reasoning assumes that we have the answers to two
questions: the first, for what reasons did the pressure to make war increase
in certain societies; and the second, why was the response not simply to
make more war? It can be assumed that an increase in warfare would have
endangered other aspects of social life and conflicted with other interests.
But which ones and how? It is up to us to imagine these answers, taking as
our starting point the social logics and representations of several Papua
New Guinea populations. This answers the second question. But what
about the first; what, in those societies in which big men warriors along
with other great men were important figures, and in which the production
and the circulation of pigs were already closely tied to the production of
kinship relations and of politico-military relations among groups, could
have been the reasons behind an increase in the pressure to make war?
Perhaps the time has come to talk about the introduction of the sweet
potato. It must be kept in mind that, while its introduction does not explain
the appearance of big men and the structures they represent, it must cer-
tainly have amplified the mechanisms which had long since developed in
connection with pre-sweet potato economies. Howmuch credibility can be
accorded the causal chain a number of authors, fromWatson to Modjeska,
have imagined and which I summarise as follows?
According to these authors, the sweet potato initiated the development
of more productive agricultural methods and facilitated the expansion of
both human and porcine populations. It also enabled local groups to
exploit a wider spectrum of the ecosystem and to live in greater numbers in
the higher but colder valleys. These phenomena were followed by increased
deforestation in some areas, which resulted in a relative falling-off of game,
or less availability because animals were driven back by the expansion of
cultivated land. And yet these resources were the traditional source of the
feathers, fur or game needed in the ritual exchanges within the tribe or for
trading purposes.
This situation is supposed to have brought more groups or groups whose
numbers had increased into the most deforested zones, and forced them to
practise more intensive forms of agriculture. In short, all these mechanisms
could have added up in one way or another to putting greater pressure on
groups to police their territories. That could have been the reason for the
increase in the amount and intensity of warfare which forced them to pro-
duce more wealth in order to compensate the warriors from neighbouring
allied tribes who died in common battles with other neighbours. Now the
relative drop in hunting resources would not have eliminated the social,
cultural need for the feathers and furs used in the ritual ceremonies marking
the differences in social status, social distinctions between individuals and
groups. But it could have stimulated intertribal commercial exchanges and
forced people to rely more heavily on pigs as a medium of exchange, since
they were already used as a substitute in the case of bridewealth, or as com-
pensation to keep the peace.
In short, these various processes might have prompted certain societies
to carry the social use of pigs yet a step further and employ wealth to
300 Big men and great men
An unfinished attempt 301
compensate not only the death of allied warriors but that of enemy warriors
as well. Perhaps, as chapter 1 suggests, it was only when groups began pay-
ing compensation for dead enemies that true competitive exchanges were
instituted among tribes, each group being tempted to make peace in order
to ask its ~ n m i s for ever greater compensation for the loss of warriors,
while undergoing similar pressure from the other side.
These are the broad outlines of the context which may have been the
breeding grounds of an upheaval in social logic, a fundamental transform-
ation with respect to great-men societies: the fact that the donors of wealth
tend to become superior to the recipients. For the practice of competitive
exchanges meant that a logic founded on the principle of direct exchange
of women or, where this was not the custom, one founded on the prin-
ciple of equivalence in the nature or the quantity of the terms of exchange
was gone forever. We have seen that in Baruya society donors of women
are superior to recipients, and the debt incurred by the gift of a woman
can only be counterbalanced by an equivalent gift in the other direction.
On the other hand, when donors of wealth outrank recipients, the
recipients-of-women/donors-of-bridewealth have it over the donors of
women.
Of course, with the generalisation of the use of pigs to reproduce a
group's internal structures as well as to ensure some of its ongoing relations
~ i t neighbouring groups, pig production along with that portion of the
agricultural activity it entails must have increased. It is easy to see that, in
this context, women's work took on an even greater importance, while it
became even more necessary for men to exercise direct control over the
products of this work, since they are the ones who circulate the pigs among
themselves and derive prestige and power from the circulation. Now, in
classless societies, once the appropriation and circulation of wealth have
become the condition for the production of social (kinship or political)
relations, it is no longer necessary to exercise direct or collective control
over individuals as physical entities. It is enough to control their access to
the wealth. In this context, the disappearance of the great male initiation
and the simultaneous relative spread of female autonomy would make
sense.
It is undeniable that the appearance of truly competitive exchanges of
wealth tending to fall into intertribal networks covering an entire region
both depended upon and precipitated thoroughgoing socio-economic
changes. It is here that we see the value of Kelly's (1988) recent thesis: that
the transfer of live pigs, as in the big competitive exchanges in the High-
lands, depends on these animals having been hand fed so that they will
remain with their new owner and not return to their old territory. This also
assumes that these pigs are no longer half-wild, that they do not have to
wander the forest to complete the ration of food the women give them every
evening (as in Baruya villages). Now for pig husbandry to become more
sedentary and the animals tamer, agriculture must provide the means.
Whatever the case may be, there is still a question as to which, among the
socio-economic transformations that went along with the development of
big competitive exchanges, are the causes and which are the effects.
Finally, I shall propose an hypothesis which seems to place together the
main points developed above. Competitive exchanges should reach their
full development when and where the following social processes exist
and combine into a single mechanism: competition within and between
local groups give more than their recipients are presumed to be able to
countergive; preference for marrying outside your own local group and
choosing your wife among enemy groups as much or even more than
among allied groups; and compensation for the death of both allied and
enemy warriors. Hagen is one society in which all these processes were
combined.
We have now corne to the end of our social-science-fiction attempt at
imagining the mechanisms which might have transformed great-men
societies into big-men societies. Our first hypothesis was that these trans-
formations could have taken place only in societies in which marriage did
not depeIld on the existence of totally exogamous kinship groups. If this is
true, the analysis of North Mekeo (Amoamo) society, which is ideally
divided into exogamous moieties, should provide a counter-example and
thus validate our experiment.
From reading Mosko's analysis of Mekeo (chapter 5), we see that it com-
bines the two principles of exchange of women and exchange of wealth in
an original way to establish matrimonial alliances. But this combination
seems to be possible only because the exchange of women is not a direct and
simultaneous exchange of sisters. In fact, we have a society conceived as
two exogamous patrilineal moieties, each of which is in turn divided into
clans which alternate exchanges of women with each other.
By rule, a man or his sister (real or classificatory) of clan A (moiety I)
whose mother was of clan D (moiety II) is required to marry a person of
clan C (moiety II). And reciprocally, a man or his sister of clan C (moiety
II) whose mother was of clan B (moiety I) must find his or her mate among
members of clan A (moiety I). Other members of clans A and C whose
mothers originated in clans C and A, respectively, will have to find their
spouses among persons of clans D and B. Nonetheless, this does not result
in a direct exchange of woman for woman.
It is as though, on the overall moiety level, marriage were based on the
direct exchange of women, while on the clan level, and between lineages
which intermarry, what is practised is not the direct exchange of women
but the exchange of goods. In order to marry a woman from C, a man from
A must pay bridewealth made up of live pigs, shells, dog teeth, bird-of-
paradise feathers, clay vessels and, today, money. The bridewealth is put
together by the clans of the young man's father and mother and paid to the
clans of the girl's father and mother. The clans of the young man's parents
each compete to contribute the most to the wealth to be given the bride's
parents. But the clans should complete their exchanges for this marriage
before a man C (whose mother is of clan B) might marry a woman A (whose
mother was of clan D). If two men, Aand C, did exchange sisters at the same
time, or if the second marriage occurred before the exchange of bridewealth
for the first was complete, then there would be no bridewealth at all. It is
for this reason the Mekeo prohibit direct and simultaneous exchange of
sisters. On the tribal level, then, it is as though marriage were based on
balanced exchanges of women and wealth between moieties, while on the
clan level, the alliance is based on the principle of bridewealth and the com-
petitive exchange of goods for women.
This example demonstrates once again that a single society may combine
the two principles of exchange, here on two separate levels, which generate
at the same time a balanced exchange of women (on the global level) and a
competitive exchange of wealth between individuals from different clans
(on the local level). The point recalls Strathern's discussion in chapter 11,
except that in the Hagen case the global 'balancing' exchange can also be
seen as competitive.
Two other aspects of Mekeo social organisation are equally important
for our theoretical analysis: the absence of initiation involving the young
people of the whole tribe, initiations existing at a local, i.e. lineage and clan-
based village level; and the predominance of inherited powers over achieve-
ment or merit. These powers stem from political and ceremonial functions
which are divided among the four lineages comprising each clan: the
powers of the chief of peace, the sorcerer of peace, the chief of war and the
sorcerer of war.
But what becomes of Mekeo younger sons or those who do not exercise
Moieties
Bb Dd
303 An unfinished attempt
an inherited function? Are they able to gain prestige and authority by their
own merits, become big men? What must they do? and in what areas? It is
obvious that my questions are prompted by Tuzin's analyses of Hahita
Arapesh (chapter 6). Faced with a society divided into ceremonial moieties
in which sacred powers are inherited exclusively by the elders of the clan,
Tuzin suggests that there are two roads to power: that of the elders, who
inherit and who are the equivalent of the Baruya kwaimatnie men or the
Mekeo chief or sorcerer; and the other road, that of the younger brothers,
who must leave and make something of themselves and who can at best
become a sort of big man.
In addition, the fact that Mekeo have no system of collective initiation
seems to tie in with the fact that their kinship system alone suffices to
integrate the entire society into a whole capable of reproducing itself, since
women are exchanged exclusively within the tribe, between the two
moieties comprising it. This society never marries its enemies, just as it
never makes peace with them. The situation is like neither Baruya nor
Hagen, nor even Duna. Male domination among the Mekeo is still linked
with initiation, but they are local ceremonies, performed in the villages; and
while they temporarily separate the boys from the girls, there is no female
initiation. Finally, power rests on inherited functions, but these are split
into pairs; they undergo an abstract division in order to integrate all clans
and lineages, in short all otherwise equivalent kinship groups of the society,
into a ordered ensemble, since the functions associated with
peace dominate those associated with war. From one point of view, this
division of functions into hereditary, complementary, hierarchical, makes
the Mekeo a sort of chiefdom with no (paramount) chief, as on Kiriwina.
From another point of view, the Trobriand Island chief looks like both a
super big man and a super great man (d. chapter 2). In the big-man role, he
is the principal partner in the competitive Kula Ring exchanges. Like the
Baruya great man, master of initiations and heir to the sacred ancestral
objects and powers, he has the power to multiply resources and make the
men grow. The figure of the Kiriwina chief would seemeven to fuse the two
logics which in the Highlands are separated. And compared with Mekeo,
the Trobriand chief's clan seems to concentrate functions and powers
which, in other cultures, are divided among the clans that comprise the
society.
From yet another point of view, a comparison between Papua New
Guinea great-men or big-men societies and the hierarchically ordered
societies of Vanuatu analysed byJolly (chapter 3) reveals yet another logic.
In the more stratified societies of Vanuatu, men who have reached the
upper ranks of the secret societies are highly respected and enjoy such
Cc
II
Aa
Big men and great men
Clans
302
i'
304 Big men and great men
power that like the Polynesian Chief of Tikopia they may temporarily
forbid other members of society the use of such vital resources as the land
or the sea. But on Vanuatu, access to secret societies requires first of all
accumulating and redistributing or sacrificing pigs whose production
depends primarily on the work of men, unlike the big-men societies of the
Highlands. For in Vanuatu, pigs are raised to produce not only pork, but
those famous precious curved tusks which subsequently enter into other
exchanges. Pigs are, then, both living beings and precious objects. This is
perhaps why raising them is men's rather than women's work.
Having run my course, I have one last question. What possible logic can
lead to someone regarding a pig, a shell, a curved tusk as the equivalent of
a human life; the life of a woman, of a warrior, of a living being threatened
by man-eating deadmen, in short, the preferred support for exchange
among human beings, on the one hand, and between the latter and the gods,
on the other?
It is not possible to replace human beings, living or dead, by objects or
living things without first reifying social relations. In order to understand
the logic behind these substitutions, then, we must pry open the black box
of the psychic and sociological mechanisms which transformconcrete rela-
tions between human beings into abstract relations between realities they
imagine. For social relations to become reified, one precondition must be
fulfilled; people must alienate themselves by their representations, they
must become strangers to themselves by their thought process, they must
use thought to institute distances which separate them within their society.
But by alienating themselves by means of thought, people also produce
their social self, since they produce some of the concrete organising prin-
ciples of their society, their reality. What can it be, then, that drives persons
to invent themselves by becoming alien through thought and alienated
within society, trapped between representations which become fetishes
and social relations which become things?
Translated by Nora Scott
1
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Index
abutu (Kalauna, competitive exchange),
40,45,46
achieved status, 28, 32
Afek,254
affinal relationships (Mendi), 221,
224-5, 228, 232nn
affines, 24; (Duna), 238, 242,251
agency (Hagen), 210; (Mendi), 219, 229
agnates, 239, 242; female, 222, 224, 225,
228; male, 221, 224, 228, 231
agriculture, 24, 236, 239, 240,251
agricultural surplus, 240
alliance, 19-20, 30, 38, 40; (Duna), 235,
242,253; groups, 218, 225, 229,
231
ancestors, 236, 245-50, 254, 284, 294,
295,297
Anga, 15ff., 267, 270; also see Baruya
anoa hani (Duna, man active in
exchange), 242, 244, 253
anoa kango (Duna, wealthy man), 243,
244,253
aoulatta (Baruya, great warrior), 231,
282,296
articulation (with capitalism), 144, 155
ascribed status, 28, 31-2, 33, 39
asymmetrical relationships, 218, 223,
227,229; see increment; balance, lack
of autonomy
asymmetrical structure, 31,34,35,37,
38,40,43,44; relations, 202
Austronesian, 34, 35, 41, 45; affinities,
77-8; Austronesian vs non Austro-
nesian,98
authority, 28, 39,41,97-114
Awa,27n
bachelors (Duna), 245, 246; cults, 247,
252
Baktaman,llff.
balance, 207,216, 220, 227, 228; lack
of, 221, 227; see equivalence
baptism, 236
Barok, see Usen Barok
Baruya, 275-304, 173ff., 29, 32, 45, 99,
108-11,113,115-16,132,198,
234-6,238-9,243-52,257,261,
263-4,266-70; compared with
Mendi,215-16,217,222,223,226,
227-8,232n,233n
bau a (Kaluli, 'initiation'), 245
Bena-Bena, 11ff., 279
betrayals (Baruya), 236, 239
big man, businessman-like qualities of,
219; contrasted with great men,
28-33,38,41,42,44,142-55,
212-15,218,219,220,221,225,
231,238-43,248,251,253; public
performances of, 228, 223, 225-6,
228,230,231
big-manisation, colonial process of, 46,
47
big-manship, 216, 222-3, 226, 230,
232n; and collectivity, 221, 230, 231
big-man societies, 28-34, 37, 38,41,44,
46,47,97,98,99,104,108,109,
110,112,113; kinds of, 216, 221,
223,224-6,231-2,238,241,250-1,
254,275-6,280,303,304
birth order (I1ahita), 118, 122-3, 128n,
129n
blood (Mekeo), 100, 102, 104, 107-9,
111,112
bridewealth, 11, 15, 104, 105, 106, 112,
165,217,222-4,237,252,277,280,
281,288,294,302; and reciprocity,
229; as sister-exchange, 229; (Daribi),
165; (Gimi), 174-96; (Hagen), 206-9;
(Telefomin), 256, 262-6
brotherhood, idiom of, 229
321
322 Index Index 323
brothers, see siblings
burial, see mortuary
'business', 219, 220
Captain Cook, 232n
cargo cult (Yafar),' 130,132,133,135,
138-9; movements, 248
cash economy, see commodity
cassowary, food taboo on, 250; in myths,
247
categories, analytical, 99,100,106,108,
113
categories, comparative, 97-8, 99,
112-14
chief, 28, 29, 32, 34-8, 44, 46,142-55;
(Trobriand) paramount chief, 303;

chiefs, chieftainships, and chiefdoms, 29,
33-5,37,45,47,97,98,101-4,107,

without (paramount) chief, 303, with
chief, 276, 303, 304
Chimbu, 9ff., 240, 241; see Simbu
Christianity, 235
clan events 221, 223,224,225,
228,229,230,231, 233n;and
exchange network relationship of,
225-6,227-32
c1anship (Hagen), 206-9, 210;
215,220-1,224; as problematic, 226,
230-2; see collectivity, agnates
classification, 97, 98,112,113-14
climate, 251
cognatic kin, 243
collectivity, 199,229, 233n, constituting
of, 228-9, 231; as male, 224,232
colonialism, 37, 41, 46, 76, 246
colonial control (Duna), 235, 243
commemorative distributions, 236
commodity economy, 37, 46, 217, 219,
237,238,240
comparative approach, 7-27, 55, 66ff.,
161-3,197,216,219,221,223,226,
231-2,238,251; method, 216-18
compensation payments (Duna), 235-8,
242-3,253, 254-5; 224,
225,229
competition, 7-27,130-41,215-16,
220,226-7; see increment, 294, 301;
between donors only, 285; between
donors and recipients, 285
complex structure, 29, 31, 32, 36, 38, 40,
41,43-6
conception, 13; 106-8, 109,
111-12,113; (Telefolmin), 266-8
confederacy, 147
control, of cult objects, 236, 246; of
material resources, 243, 254; of
symbolic capital, 254; of symbolic
means of reproduction, 250-1
cross cousin marriage, see marriage
Crow system, 31, 38
Crow-Omaha systems, 31, 38
cult, 11, 14; houses, 246; objects
(Baruya) kwaimatnie, 236, 246-50;
(Duna) auwi, 236, 245, 246, 247,
250; kiria (see under kiria), palena
(see under palena), regional, 247,
252; secrecy in, 247; see male cult
cultural capital, reproduction of, 245,
249; elaboration, 242; factors in
history, 239; repro-duction, 245
Damene Cultural Centre (Huli), 254
Dani,llff.
Daribi, 11ff., 159-73
death, as basis for compensation pay-
ments, 237,242; due to warfare, 243
de-conception 107-9, 111,
113
d'Entrecasteaux Islands, 38, 39
descent, 34, 38, 39, 41-4,148,150,152;
by sex affiliation, 152; groups:
partially endogamous, 278;
residential, 278; matrilineal, 34, 35,
38,41,42; patrilineal, 39, 100-10,
112
detachability, of wealth from the body,
252
development, political, 216-18, 226,
231-2
devolution, 31, 34,44,45, 77
discipline, self-imposed in production,
252
discourse, field of, 242
disenchantment, 236, 248, 252-3
distancing or displacement, social
process of, 242, 254; see substitution
division of ceremonial labours, 241
dominance, 217; material and symbolic,
238,254; and subordination, in
gender relations, 249, 252, 254;
habitus of, 236
domination 110-12, 113; of
men over women, 288, 293, 294, 295,
303
donors/recipients, of women, 280; of
gifts, of wealth, 211, 300
dualism, asymmetrical, 34, 35;
31,40-1,42,44,46; (Vanuatu), 72;
and dual organisation (Yafar), 130-3,
138,140,141
Duna, 11ff., 230, 231, 234-55, 259-61,
279,284,289-90,292-4,296,297
East Ambae, 55, 59-61, 66ff., 75
Efate,79n
elder/younger brother (Yafar), 130, 133,
137-8; (Hahita), 115-29; (Baruya),
205-6
elementary structure, 29, 31
embodiment, 251-3
enchainment, in rituals, 246, 248
enchantment, 235-6, 247,253
Enga,220, 226, 243,245,247,256,
258-61, 297; 9ff., 140, com-
pared with 221, 230, 231;
Tombema,9ff.
EngalHagen region, 239
equality, 201; loss of, 240; principle of,
242; and inequality, 7-27,143,146
equivalence, 8ff., 29-32, 35, 38, 40, 43,
45, 46, 215, 220,222, 226-7; among
affines, 232nn; and increment, 230-1;
(Gimi), 174-96; notions of,
226; see balance
ethnocentrism, 112
ethnographic present, 238; wri.ting,
218-20
Etoro,25
euphemism, in misrecognition of history,
236; in ritual representations of
homosexuality, 245
evolution, 28, 29, 31, 32; and devolution,
48, 77; social, 216-18,226,231-2; of
Highlands sopcieties, 7-27, 239, 241,
254
exchange, 174-96 passim, 217, 219,
220,236-9,245,252,279,298,302;
affinal, 237, 251; breakdown of, 226;
ceremonial, 205, 217, 223, 224,
225-30, 233n, 280; competitive,
16ff., 215-16, 237, 238, 250,
280-300; commercial, 285; direct,
30-2,38,41,222; direct vs general-
ised, 99,102,104-10,112,201,
278-9,281,289,302; enchainment
of, 242, 243; enchanted, 247;
equivalent, 202, 215, 220, 222,
226-7,237-8,252,254; of food and
object wealth, 86, 88-90; game
animals in, 250-1; generalised, 36,
215,225,252,281,282; increment
in, 242; inequivalent, 202, 216, 220,
223,237-8,242,250-2,254;
(Massim), 29-32, 34, 36-46; obli-
gations, 242; precolonial, 242;
restricted, 242; of sexual fluids, 251,
281,282; social field of, 242; sym-
metrical, 242; transformation in
logics of, 251; temporality of, 226-7;
value, 258-61 100; (Sabarl),
85,86,94-5; (Telefolmin), 256,
259-63,269-70; (Vanuatu), 68-71;
(Yafar), 131, 139-40, 141
exchange networks, 215, 220, 221-2,

manship, 228; and clans, 225-6,
227-32; see 'finance'
exchange partnerships, 12,215,221-4,
225, 227-8, 230, 231,232n
exegesis, indigenous, 235
exploitation, 219, 226
family conflicts, 254
father-son conflicts, 254
feasts, 29-30, 36, 39-40, 43
'finance' 217, 219, 222, 223,
224,225-6
fight leader (Duna), 243, 253; see warrior
filial relations, 199-206,243
Foi,199
food, 29, 30, 39-41, 43-7; ritualisation
of, 202; 103-4, 108, 112
Fore, I1ff.
friendship 105, 106, 108
funeral distributions, 253; see mortuary
game; see hunting
Gahuku Gama, 11 ff., 276,279
garden ritual (Massim), 29, 35, 37, 39,
42,44
gardening (Duna), 240, 250, 251;
(Telefolmin), 263-6; (Baruya) see
tannaka
Gawa,210
100, 104, 106, 110-12,
114; (Sabarl) androgyny, 90-4, in
narrative imagery, 93-4; relations,
85-90,91-3,95-6; (Telefolmin),
256-71; (Vanuatu), 48-80; (Yafar),
130,133-6,140
324 Index
gender inequality; see under dominance
gift (Baruya) redistribution of, 285, 286;
substitution/compensation, 285, 286,
290,292,300; gifts/countergifts, 288,
297,298; (Duna) field of exchange,
242; organisation, 248; production of
social relations, 236; strategies, 237,
251
Gimi, 168-9,174-96,180,198
Goodenough Island (Nidula), 28, 31, 38,
39
graded societies, 246, 247, 250; as
reification of rank, 50-1; in north
Vanuatu, 48-67
great man, contrasted with big man,
28-30,32,38,39,41,45,49,66,78,
142-55,215,218,220,222,223,
231,238-42,248,251,257,263,
270; discovery of, 236, 252; (Baruya),
282,296
great-man societies, 97, 98, 99,104,
108-13,251,254,275-6,280,303;
system, 29, 31-4, 40, 42, 45, 47
group boundary maintenance, 243;
descent, 242, 243; intergroup affairs,
248; local, 242, 246-7, 250
Gururumba, 11ff.
habitus, 248; inulcation and repro-
duction of, 236
Hagen, 197-214; 10ff., 140, 162-3,219,
239,240,242,243,256,258,261-3,
270-1,279,285,297,301; compared
with Mendi, 215-34
hat (Vanuatu, opposite of kon), 58-9
Hawaiians, 232n
Hawaiian system, 40
hereditary leaders, 240; power of, 243;
status, 28, 31, 97-114
hewa ingini (Duna, 'sun's son'), 253
hierarchy, 7, 34-8, 41, 43-5; male (see
also under dominance), 247
Highlands of Papua New Guinea, com-
parative analysis of, 7-27
historical change and analysis of, 3 7 ~ 8
241, 251-2, 255; process, 217-19
history, generic connection in, 254;
(Baruya),236
holography, 166-71
'home production', 223
homosexuality, and male virginity, 282,
292,293,266-7; ritualised, 245,
266-7
Horailenda parish (Duna), 243, 246
'house' societies, 142-55
huqe (hungwe, hukwe) (East Ambae,
graded society), 59-61
Huli, 167,230,231,245,246,254,
293
hunting, 212, 245, 252; game, as product
of men's work, 286; as gift, 286; and
deforestation, 299; (Telefolmin),
264-5,271; (Yafar), 130, 131, 132,
136
hypergamy,34
Ida (see Yafar, Yangis), 131
ideal type, 28, 34, 97, 98, 99, 112-13,
206
Ilahita Arapesh, 115-29, 130, 131, 137,
202,303
incest (Duna), 226, 228, 235, 253
increment, 91-4; 204-5, 211-14, 216,
219,220, 223-6, 228-9, 230; and
reciprocity, 227-9, 230-1; and
women's interests, 230-1; principle
of, 237; see moka
inequality (see also dominance, hier-
archy), 23, 201, 217, 219, 228, 240,
256-8, 269-70; gender, 258-61,
266-70; reproduction of, 252
inflation, 37
initiation, 11-12,277,283; (Baruya), 15,
201-6,236,238,246,247,250-2;
female, 294; male, 293, 294, 300,
303; (Duna), 237, 245, 248-52;
(Gimi), 176-80, 187; (Massim), 30,
32,41,42; (Mekeo), 97, 99,100,
108-10, 112, 113; (Mendi), 232;
(Telefolmin) male, 266-8; (Yafar),
131,141
integration, 209, 277, 278,282,283,
303; ideological, 292, 297; social and
ritual, 203, 241, 248
internal duality and external unity, 142,
148
'interest', see increment
Ipili,245
Ipomoean revolution, 142-55,238,251,
276
Iqwaye, 15ff., 167-8, 170
Irian Jaya, 135, 138
Jale, 11ff.
Kaluli,245
r
!
!
i
Kalauna (Goodenough Island village),
39,40
Kamano,18ff.
Kapauku, 1Off.
Katutubwai (Sabarl story of), 93-4
Kaupi,15ff.
Kewa, lOff., 221
kiria pulu (Duna cult), 246-50, 252, 253,
254; kiria anoa, 253; leaders of,
247-8
Kiriwina (Trobriand Island), 34-9, 41,
43-7,303
knowledge (Oro), 145-6, 148; (Yafar),
132,133,136,139,143
kon kokona (Vanuatu, having sacred
power), 58, 59, 64
Kuk,240
kula, 38, 39,43,163
Kunai (Ilahita Councillor), 118, 126,
128n
kwaimatnie (Baruya, ritual objects),
205-6,236,246-50,283,292
labour, household, 223; values, 222;
(Duna), 252; (Telefolmin) men's,
262-6; women's, 258-61, 262-4,
267,269,271
leaders, leadership, 237, 239-45, 251-3;
configurations of, 237, 239-42;
despotic{239-41, 243; warrior/
wealthy man, 296; (Mekeo), 97, 98,
99,110,112,114; hereditary, 98, 99,
100,101-4,106,108,112; (Sabarl),
big man (guiau), 83, 85, 88, 95;
big woman (yova suswot), 85, 88,
95; director (tologugui), 83, 85, 86,
88
legitimisation, 236, 249-50, 252; of
great men, 238
linguistic relatedness, 98
liruali (Duna cult leaders), 247
local groups (Yafar), 132, 133, 134-7,
138,140
logics, social, 200-1, 206, 212, 215, 217,
237,238,256-71,275,276,278,
295,300
Longana (East Ambae), 52, 53, 54,
59-61,70-1,74-5,76
'loose structure', 143,221
Louisade Archipelago, 38, 41
Lus, Sir Pita, 126
Mae-Enga, see Enga
Index 325
magic, 243, 253; (Ilahita), 119, 126
magico-symbolic production of social
relations, 236; and gift-economic
power, 236
maki (Vao, graded society), 56-9
male, bachelor cults, 291, 293; control of
in initiation cult, 250; dominance,
250; domination in New Guinea
Highlands, 49-50; (in Mekeo), 99,
108-13; (in Telefolmin), 264, 266-8;
creativity, 230; hierarchy, 249;
interests, unity of, 246; versus female
(see also gender), (Mekeo), 97,107,
109,110,112
mali (Duna, dance), 243
Maring, llff., 207-8, 276
market, 218-20, 232; see commodity
marriage (Baruya), 279, 297,298,301;
(Hagen/Maring), 207-9; (Massim),
31,34,38,40,41,43-6; (Mekeo), 97,
100,102-10,112-14; (Oro), 143,
150,151; (Telefolmin), 261-3;
(Yafar), 130-1, 140, 141; cross
cousin, 31, 36, 38,43,147,150,162,
190; and sister exchange, in or by
contrast with: (Baruya), 278, 288,
290,294,302; (Duna), 250, 252;
(Ilahita), 121-4, 127n; (Massim), 31,
40,43; (Mekeo), 106; (Mendi), 215,
217,222,229; (Oro), 147, 150; see
bride-wealth
maternity and paternity, 55
Matoto, Tairoro despot, 19
matriliny versus patriliny (North
Vanuatu), 52-4; (Highlands), 13
marsupials, in Duna mythology, 245; in
exchanges, 251
Marxian models, 254
Massim, 28, 31, 33, 34, 37-9, 41, 42, 45,
46
material reproduction of society, 238
medium (Yafar), 131, 132, 139
Mekeo, North, 97-114; 198,278,301,
302,303
Melpa, see Hagen
Mendi, 10ff., 212, 215-33, 284
misrecognition,236
mobility, inter-group, 243
modernism, post-Ipomoean, 237, 252
moieties, (Barok), 169ff.; (Baruya), 278,
301,302,303; (Mekeo), 101, 102,
104,105,107,112; (Yafar), 130,
131,132,133,138,140,141
naming (Daribi), 163-5
Nambweapa'w, story of, see mythology
Nidula (Goodenough Island), 38-41,
43-7
Nondugl,22
Non-Austronesian, 41
North Mekeo, see Mekeo
North Vanuatu, 48-80; diversity of
politics, rank system, 48f., 199
Oedipus complex, 247,254
Ok, 270, 291
Oksapmin,254
Omaha system, 31, 38, 40
Omarakana (Trobriand Island village),
36,37,39
Ongka, 219, 252
oral traditions, 235
oratorical skills, 242-4; (Duna) anoa
hakana 'orator', 253
Oro Province, 142-55
327 Index
shells, 240; (Daribi), 165; (Telefolmin),
265,271
Siane, 11ff., 162
siblings (Hahita), 123, 128n; logical
opposition between, 120-1, 123-4,
125-6; kin terms for, 124, 128n;
succession of, 124-6, 127
Simbu, compared with Mendi, 221; see
Chimbu
Sinclair, J., 243, 253
sister-exchange, see marriage
soaring hawks as metaphor for high-
ranking men (Vanuatu), 48, 58, 78
social, capital, 241; change, 126-7, 127n
, 128n; control, 252; evolution, 142,
154-6; fields: 154,241,251; of dis-
course, 242; of exchange, 242; of
marriage, 254; of political power,
236; of production, 242; magico-
mythico-ritual, 235, 237, 242, 254;
integration, 248, 277; organisation:
(Duna), 242, 245, 254; (Mekeo), 97,
99, 100-4,106-7, 112,113;supra-
local, 246-8; reproduction: 163,
(Duna), 237, 238, 250, 253; (Mekeo),
97, 101,108,109, 112, 113, scale,
159-73,249
social logics, see logics
sorcery (Duna), 243, 253; (Mekeo), 98,
101-4,107,109; (Mendi), 227;
(Yafar), 131, 135
South Pentecost (Vanuatu), 52-4, 55,
61-6,69-70,73-4,75-6
sponsors in graded society (Vanuatu), 56,
59,63-4
spirit, 235, 236; women, 245
stratification, social, 240, 243, 249; see
also hierarchy, rank
Strickland River, 254
substitution, of persons/wealth: 7-27;
(Mendi), 216, 218, 222, 2;23, 225,
227,229; of relations, 174-96,206;
see bridewealth
succession, 28, 42,101
Sudest Island, 38
surplus production, 239
sweet potato, see Impoean (post- and
pre-)
symmetrical structure, 31, 36, 44
symmetrical relations, 202,210; see
balance, equivalence, exchange
symbolic capital, 236, 246, 254
sympathy group, 147
Sabarl Islanders, 83-96, 198,202
sacred power (Duna), 241, 249; sites
(Duna),247
sacrifice (Baruya), 287, 294, 295, 297;
(Vanuatu), 56, 58-60, 62-3, 67; see
cult, ritual
sagali (Trobriand, mortuary feast), 36,
38,40,42,45
scale, social, 159-73, 249
secrecy, in cults, 247
segaiya (Sabarl, mortuary feast), 86f.
sem onda (Mendi); see clanship
semen, transactions, 201, 203, 237;
exchange of, 281, 282
semiotic, construction of the body of the
world, 251-2; entropy, 235; malaise
in culture, 235; reproduction, 235;
construction of social relationships,
255
secret societies, 303, 304
semi-complex structures, 36, 40, 41, 43,
44,46
senior vs junior (Mekeo), 101, 105, 112;
see elder/younger brother
settlement, permanent, 239
shaman, (Baruya), 238, 247
shell money, 43, 46
rank, 29, 34-6, 38-9,41,44-7,276,
303
ratahigi highranking man of East Ambae,
60
rationality, 155,241
rationalisation of society, 237
reciprocity, 30, 31,38,43,220,222,
226-7,228,232,255; among affines,
232nn; and brideweaoth, 229; and
increment, 227-9, 230-1
redistribution, 225, 227, 231
reification of social relations, 304
regional parameters, 144
replacement, 227, 228
representations, as source of alienation,
304; become fetishes, 304
residence, 242; residential mobility, 243
ritual (Baruya), 283, 303; (Duna),
234-55; (Gimi), 174-96; (Massim),
31-3,35,39-42,44-6; (Mekeo), 99,
102,112-14; expert, 29, 31, 40;
(Baruya), 283, 292; (Duna), 245; see
cult, sacred, sacrifice
rivalry, see competition
Rossel Island (Yela), 28,38,41,43
person, 229; and thing in Vanuatu,
exchangeability, 49, 55, 67, 75-6;
fractal, 159-73, 195,212; -hood
(Sabarl), physical, 87, 90, spiritual,
87-9,94
personal gift relations, see exchange
networks
pig, 14f.; (Baruya), 287, 294-5, 297,
298; (Massim), 29, 30, 40, 32;
(Telefolmin), 259-63, 269-71;
(Vanuatu), 56, 58-60, 62-3, 67,199;
see tusked boar
pig festival (Mendi, mok ink), 217, 223,
224, 225-30, 233n
Plains and Mountain societies, 142-55
political alliances (Mendi), 218, 225,
229; dominance, 250; types, 116-17,
126-7
Polopa, 12f.
Polynesia, 97, 98; chiefs in, 218
population density, 242; growth, 249; of
tribal groups, 249
post-Ipomoean development of com-
petitive exchange, 250; modernism,
77,252; historical period, 249,252
power (Duna), 248; field of political,
236, Oedipal symbolism in, 247,
sacred, 236; secular and ritual, 245; in
wealth/kinship/status nexus, 243,
251; inherited or ascribed, 277;
inherited or achieved, 277; male, 278,
282,295; female, 278, 293; sacred,
magic, religious, 282, 303
pre-colonial period, 235, 236
pre-Ipomoean period, 248, 299
prehistoric artifacts, as cult objects, 236
prehistory (Vanuatu), 79-80
prestige goods, 34
production, and exchange, 258-66; 238,
252; and circulation, 238; discipline
of, 252; domestic, 243; exchange,
241; relations of, 254-5; technical
field of, 242; (Mendi), 217, 220, 225;
and value, 223; forces, development
of, 241, 250, 254-5; (Vanuatu), Vao,
68-9; South Pentecost, 69-70; East
Ambae,70-1
public events, see clan events
public and domestic domains, 50
quadripartite structure, 35, 39,42
quartipartition, 97,100-1,103,104,
106
Index
palena anda (Duna, bachelors' cult), 245,
246, palena aua ('owner' of
bachelors' cult), 246, 253
Paliau,128n
Papua New Guinea, national
sovereignty, 237
parish (see also group, loca!), 243, 247,
249; cults, 245
paradoxical features, 142-3,207,217,
220,230
payback killings, 238, 254; see
vengeance
peace, 7-27,100,101-4,112
moka (Hagen, ceremonial exchange),
10f., 31,162,163,209,210,219,
220,223,226; see increment, 237,
242,247 I
Mountain Ok, see Ok
moral order, 254
mortuary, distributions, 12, 15-16,236,
253; exchange (Mekeo), 97, 100,102,
103-4,106,107,108,109,112,113;
feasts (Sabarl, segaiya), 86;
prestations, 216, 218, 224, 225; rites
(Massim), 36-8, 40, 42, 43
mythico-ritual field and strategies, 235,
237,254
mythology (Duna), 246-8, 254, 245-7;
(Ilahita), 122-3, 128n; (Yafar), 134,
136,137; (Gimi), 174-96
326
"
I
Ii
~
I
I
"
I'
328 Index
taboos, food, 264-5,271; (Telefolmin),
269
Tairora,18ff.
Tambaran (Ilahita, men's cult), 119-20,
126, 128n
tannaka (Baruya, great gardener), 282,
296
technology, development of, 242, 251
tee (Enga, ceremonial exchange), 237,
242,247
Telefolmin, 256-71; 202,251,254,279
Tembinei (Ilahita, 'great man'), 118-21,
124, 125, 128n
Tikopia, 98, 304
Tolai,219
Tombema-Enga, see Enga
total systems, 97, 98, 99,100,104,105,
106,108,110,112,113,114,242,
253
totemism (Yafar), 131, 133, 140
trade, 34, 35, 39, 45
transformation, 11,23, 76ff., 152,208,

rank (Vanuatu), 76; see substitution
tribal identity, 249; organisation, 100-2,
107,109,112, 248ff.; unity, 211-13,
246-9
tribe (Raruya) definition of, 291; unity of,
291,303
Trobriand Islands, 28, 34-5, 37, 39, 41,
98,303
tsimia (Baruya, cult house), 246, 248,
249
Tumbudu River, 246
tusked boar (Vanuatu), 56, 59, 60, 62,
67
twem (Mendi, exchange partnership), see
exchange
typological methodology, 115-16, 126,
159-61,241
use value, 258-61
Usen Barok, 159-73
Usino, 17ff.
valuable, 30, 32, 35-7,40,41,43-5;
(Duna), 237; (Sabarl), 83-96;
(Telefolmin), 264, 265-6, 271
Vanuatu, see North Vanuatu
Vao, island of (Vanuatu), 55, 56-9, 65ff.
vengeance, 7-27; (Duna), 237, 238, 254
violence, 7-27; (Duna), 240, 242, 243,
246,247
wage labour, see commodity
Waina (Umeda), 131
warfare, 7-27; (Baruya), 290, 291, 295,
298,299,302; (Duna), 236, 238,
242-5,252; cessation of, 253;
endemic, 239; frequency of, 243;
leadership in, 253; pre-colonial, 243;
(Mekeo), 99,100,101-4,112;
(Mendi), 224, 225, 229; (Telefolmin),
256; (Vanuatu), 75-6
warrior, 19-20,238,239,249,253; as
leader, 240, 243; (Barok), 173;
(Baruya), 212; see aoulatta
warsangul (graded society, South
Pentecost), 61-6
wealth, 12, 14-15,29,30,32-7,40,
42-7,165; (Duna), 238, 243, 251-2;
(Mendi), 216, 217, 218, 219, 221,
223, 224, 227, 229-30, 231;see
valuable
wei tse (Duna), see fight leader
witchcraft, see sorcery
Wiru, 11ff., 221, 230
Wola, 17ff., 221, 230
Woodlark Island, 37
women's, labour (Telefolmin), 258-61,
262-4,267,269,271; titles
(Vanuatu), 58, 60, 64, 66, 67
Yafar,130-41
Yangis (Yafar, ritual), 131, 132, 133,
135,136,137,141
Yela (Rossel Island), 38, 41, 42, 44-7
younger brother, see elder