Damon 2000

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From regional relations to ethnic groups?

Frederick H. Damon
a
Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia Charlottesville
Version of record first published: 17 Aug 2006.
To cite this article: Frederick H. Damon (2000): From regional relations to ethnic groups?, The Asia
Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 1:2, 49-72
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FROM REGIONAL RELATIONS TO ETHNIC GROUPS?
On the transformation of value relations to property claims
in the Kula Ring of Papua New Guinea
Frederick H. Damon
I. INTRODUCTION
In this paper I put forth and partly illustrate the thesis that neither the idea of
ethnic groups nor a focus on ethnic group boundaries is appropriate for
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analysing the Kula Ring social system as being representative of constructed

sociality throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Models such as these, are, I
believe, part of a political philosophy, an idea about social order, which has
been fundamental to Western societies for several centuries at least. As a
philosophy of social order, it is only one that anthropologists might consider
and use as an analytical tool. The corollary to this is that there are other
perspectives on social order. And at least one of these, in all probability, has
governed the social systems that have reigned across the Asias into the Pacific
Islands for the last several thousand years. This is not to say that the ideas
enunciated in Fredrik Barth's famous book (1969[1998]) are irrelevant to our
consideration. My argument is not just negative. For part of my thesis and
illustration shall be showing how this philosophy of order is becoming the
political theory on the island where I do my research - Muyuw, Woodlark
Island, in Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. But this is part of a social
order which is being brought to the area. Since about 1850 the West has
sought to incorporate the region into its world, motivated by the proposition
that there were souls and sales to be made from its human and natural
resources. Over the last few decades one can see something akin to ethnic
groups coming into being over the struggles to extract resources as cheaply as
possible. 1 That the region is composed of something akin to ethnic groups is
certainly how Westerners, and the enactors of its forms, have viewed the place.
I shall try to show that this is how the local people are beginning to define
their existence. But these new conceptions amount to a transformation of a
social system. This change is a transformation from regional relations to ethnic
groups, from the transformation of value relations to property claims.2
There are three parts to my presentation. In the remainder of the
Introduction I shall locate the area of my research and introduce what I mean
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 1(2) 2000:49-72

50 FROM REGIONAL RELATIONS TO ETHNIC GROUPS?
by 'philosophies of social order,' 'ethnic groups', 'regional relations', 'value

relation', and 'property claims'. The paper's main part presents, on the one
hand, a theory of the traditional social system; and on the other a review of
contemporary transformations. In the briefest of Conclusions I restate my
thesis and suggest lines for comparative research by noting how what I see on
one little island in the South Pacific relates to transformations in the United
States in the nineteenth century.
LOCATING THE KULA RING AND THE LOCUS OF 'VALUE'

Since 1973 I have conducted nearly thirty-six months of research on or near
Muyuw, a collectivity forming the northeast corner of the Kula Ring and a
location of Western missionary and extractive activities cyclically since the late
1840s (see Map 1). This paper is written close to the end of a second phase of
research begun in 1991 and devoted to ethnobotanical questions (see, for
example, Damon 1998): I situate the region with findings resulting from that
work.
The Kula Ring

Standard Enghsh names in parertheses.
(Trobriand I )
BBudibud
ILaughlan I.)
-" ";< __* Louisade Archipelago
0k ,9.
C30tB6A c(al.ados I.)
, &(Rossel .)
.... -
Map 1
FREDERICK H. DAMON 51
Obligations over the last several years have forced me to look at

similarities and differences among the productive systems of South Asia and
the Melanesia I know best. These concern the integration of forests with
horticultural orders. Initially these operations just appeared to be analogous to
one another (See Damon in press a). I'm beginning to suspect, however, that
they are related historically. I can mount very tentative evidence of a Sanskrit
derived word in the region, the local meaning of which forms part of my
argument. 3 I suspect these kinds of similarities will also turn up between East
Asia and the Kula region. 4 There is evidence that these regions were much
more interconnected than we could imagine until about 1250 CE or so (see
Manguin 1993). After then, global climatological changes may have brought
about a restriction of traditional Indo-Pacific sailing systems just as they
helped lead, eventually, to a transformation of Europe's productive order, and
its spilling out of Western Europe. 5
Although there have been people in Australia and Melanesia for some
60,000 years, Milne Bay Province seems to have been settled quite recently.
Most provincial languages are in the Austronesian family. Guessing from the
archaeology of this region, these languages seem to have arrived in Milne Bay
over the last 2000 years.
Although scholars have tended to view the Indo-Pacific region divided
into separable social systems - Madagascar, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast
Asia, Melanesia, Polynesia, and so on - it is becoming clear that this is one
vast region defined by pulses of interaction over the centuries (see Wheately
1983, Swadling, 1996). Dong-son trader/sailor culture's influence was
followed by the synthesising cosmologies of Hindu and Buddhist India on the
one hand and China on the other, Bali being a particular meeting point for
these orders. In the Kula area much seems to have happened about 1500
years ago, and I suspect that activity was an eddy off the complex interaction
patterns between China and India.
If hypotheses based on recent evidence are correct, this region
developed through a prestige system based on megalith building which
resembles, and may be historically related to, the centre-periphery systems of
Southeast Asia. 6 It probably transformed into the current system 600 to 800
years ago. Now 7 a social actor generates prestige by exchanging the two kinds
of shell wealth clockwise and counterclockwise along a succession of people
around the participating island-cultures. Through the agency of this person
the energies of particular places flow out and into allied areas. 8 The valuables,
individually produced, named and defined through a male/female opposition,
embody parts of persons. When he 'throws' a valuable to a partner a

participant physically loses a part of his body while depositing it in another.
By means of the exchange of the two valuables, therefore, individuals
incorporate bits of others as they put themselves into them. Through this
actors acquire 'fame' or a 'name'. One's rank - socially determined value
- is held by series of others. The more important a person is, the more he is
thought to be deposited in others. People speak of this process in terms of
how large one's name is, as if the larger the name, the greater the distance
from which it can be seen. This is not an ill-defined, ad hoc procedure. Rather
it is a well-formed system with spatial and temporal, and individual and
collective consequences and implications. 9

The terms for 'fame' and 'name' are bulagan and yagan respectively.
I suspect one or both of these terms are cognate to the Sanskrit term
negara/nagara. 1 0 Now often translated as 'state', in its older Southeast
Asian
context it probably means something closer to the English 'realm', which is a
more diffuse, less territorial understanding of political order signalling how a
person in a social order represents that social and spatial order in relation to
others. Geertz uses 'theatre state' to translate the Balinese usage of the word
(Geertz 1980).1 1 As it turns out, for my current interests and those of a more
accurate Massim ethnography, there is evidence that the 'South Asian'
nagara is related to forest orders. A seventh or eighth century AD South
Asian treatise on architecture tells us a 'royal capital' is 'called pura or
nagarawhen it is situated in forested country and when it contains houses for
all classes, and shops' (Dagens 1985:40).12 The sense of the word seems to
include encompassing social differences - 'royal capital' and 'all classes' -
and products/activities - 'shops'. And indeed trees define fundamental
aspects of productive and social identity among the people of the Kula Ring.
Beyond their use in reproducing soil fertility in horticultural systems,
practically each place in the eastern half of the area understands itself, in
relation to others, with respect to a particular kind of tree used as a ritual
firewood. Recently married people give the wood to their affines in rituals, as
noted later. These trees specify the distinctive activities of each place. One tree
used by a sailing village is important because a critical boat part comes from
it. Another tree comes from middle-aged fallows because that part of the
island stereotypically cuts its gardens out of those. And another place takes its
tree from an early fallow tree because its gardens are cut there. Selected
firewood species represent a place's position in a system of regional
differentiation.
It is important to conclude by noting that the Kula exchange system, the

prestige system for which this area is famous, is predicated on formal
differences, the male and female shell wealth being only the most abstract and
encompassing. The system then operates by means of weaving among other
sets of differences. This is a social order predicated on complementarity. 13 It
is no accident that my best informants often expressed confusion at the 'new
order' being thrust upon them.
SOCIAL ORDERS
In his vigorous Preface to the new (1998) edition to Ethnic groups and
boundaries Fredrick Barth writes that when the conference and volume were
first held and published (1967/1969):
Most anthropologists ... thought ... that the world could be described usefully as a
discontinuous array of entities called societies, each with its internally shared
culture, and that this framed the issues of ethnicity. They further assumed that each
such entity should be analyzed in a structural-functional paradigm to display its
systematic order and functional integration ...
similar ways of thinking are constantly being reintroduced ... The breakthrough we
were striving for during our symposium in 1967 was to identify the particular
processes whereby ethnic groups are formed and made relevant in social life ... We
were trying to see social organization as emergent and contested, culture as
something characterized by variation and flux, and to think of cases of relative
stability in ethnic and other social relations as being as much in need of
explanation as cases of change.
The most heterodox and still contentious sentence in my Introduction is the most
central: I urged us to focus the investigation on the 'ethnic boundary that defines
the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses' (Barth 1998:6).
By putting the stress on the boundaries and contestation for the

production of identity, Barth is moving to a transactionalist explanation for
the emergence of cultural order. Entities are not, they become. Although
undeniably coming to terms with an important social quality, _I suggest Barth
is rephrasing the political philosophy of the 'hidden hand' that emerges in
the world view of Shakespeare, the philosophy of Locke, or the triumph of
'economic rationality' and individualism in the nineteenth century Western
world (Dumont 1977 and 1986). This is the logic of the market, and its
exchange corollaries. Barth's ethnic identities, essentially boundary markers,
are analogues of the way 'price' is understood in the emerging Western
culture. Owners of property go to the market and by negotiation settle on a
price in a contract: this is the only reality, and it fades when the transaction is
over. Marx described these dynamics in Chapter Two of Capital (Vol. 1). His
analysis suggests that these ideas were more to mystify than reveal
accumulation processes. 14 Dumont isolates perhaps the critical social fact in
this orientation when he writes of the late seventeenth-century English
philosopher Locke:
With his doctrine of trust, Locke characteristically evades the problem of political
subjection and maintains the idea of a society of equals governing themselves by
consent. Private property appears, not as a social institution, but as a logical
entailment of the individual's self-sufficiency (1986:81).
I would assert that it is this claim to self-sufficiency, to a kind of formal pre-

social autonomy, that is the fundamental axiom behind the idea of an ethnic
group. For 'ethnic groups' are nothing other than an ideal statement about a
perfect political unit, ideally one country, one blood, and one religion (see
Schneider 1969, Barnett and Silverman 1979). Much of Western politics for
the last century or two has been about such abstractions.
If one can see this in Western cosmology, ideas about the state, the
person, and exchange, it is also found more pragmatically in current attempts
to define traditional legal rights of 'minority' peoples. It is believed that if
claims to property are formally and fully specified in advance then actors will
be able to engage in contracts - formal relations with others - from
complete awareness of their rights. Beginning as self-sufficient, such units can
participate in society exchanging their goods for whatever the market will
bear. I find it ironic that while many international legal agencies are working
to specify property rights to assist minorities in gaining what is due to them,
mining and timber interests in Papua New Guinea are seeking to have the same
kinds of rights established so that they can evade the claims of the traditional
Papua New Guinea social systems. 15 In any case, in this Western social theory
social forms emerge from transactions, property as such is a pre-existing
condition, and in the most rarified (economic) point of view, relative value or
price derives from individual preference rather than socialised action.
II. THE TRADITIONAL SETTING AND ITS TRANSFORMATION

A THEORY OF THE TRADITIONAL SETTING
Yet the Western model is by no means the only model of social order.
Anthropologists, of course, have described the facts of other orders for
decades. It is nearly fifty years since Edmund Leach outlined what appeared to
be a curiously porous social order among Jing Po and other peoples in

Political systems of Highland Burma (1954). Drawing on Leach's study,
Christine Helliwell (1992) shows how what we have understood as an
evolutionary relationship between agricultural forms, swidden (older) versus
irrigated (more modem), and clear-cut ethnic differences between the Gerai, a
Dyak (and supposedly pagan) group and Malays (Moslems), is in fact a
complicated interrelationship between productive and social orders. There may
be a history behind these people that completely differentiates them. But the
point to their current differences is a complementary relationship in the
present, not a reality independent of their formal interrelations. These people
intermarry with one another, sometimes change positions, but define their
realities with respect to one another. About rice practices Helliwell writes:
once produced in the swiddens, [it] is marked explicitly as part of 'our' rather than
of 'the Malay' world: after carried back to the village it is processed (trampled,
husked, and winnowed) on a longhouse space intermediate between the 'inner' and
the 'Malay' sections of the apartment, before being carried into the 'inner' section
to be stored at its spiritual heart (in a sacred jar immediately next to the hearth). At
this point the rice is said to have 'come home': it is one 'of us', rather than 'other',
a 'Malay' (pp.13-14).
These facts might be conceived as a classic Barthian boundary issue - the

differences among the two groups are negotiated with respect to one another.
But since the construction of the Gerai home is dependent upon the Malay
identity, it is more accurate to understand the order not as emerging from the
difference, but rather the difference is the order. This may be seen also by the
very name of a great ruler coming to us from Indonesia's history. This is:
Kertanagara, a 13th century king (1268-92) of Tumapel (or Singhasari) in Java ...
He united Java, extended his influence over Sumatra, and resisted Mongol attempts
to exact tribute from his kingdom ... [The] ... son of princely families - King
Vishnuvardhana of Janggala and a princess of Kadiri - so that by birth he was a
reuniter of the two halves of the Javanese kingdom. Even his name, Kertanagara,
meaning 'order in the realm', might refer to reunion, which was the achievement of
a great king according to the Javanese dualistic cosmology (Encyclopaedia
BritannicaOnline).
With the idea of united differences being essential let me go quickly into
a review of Muyuw's social order. I have already provided one critical
description - the complementary exchange of male and female Kula
valuables among spaces defined through the different trees used to epitomise
different activities. This is a form which is refracted through many different
domains. I select two for description, one a 'simple' item - fishing nets; the
other more complex - the dialectical relationships between encompassing
and encompassed clans and subclans.
The Muyuw fishing net (wot) is a complicated object whose production,
reproduction and use reflects all of the culture's fundamental tenets (see
Figure 1). Left/right and east/west symbolism important elsewhere in the
culture (Damon 1990, Chapter 5) is critical for it. To dry it people hang its
centre (pwason) to the east, the two ends to the west. A basic principle for
gender relations - complementarity - is encased in its use: likened to
women because it is large, heavy, and slow, when coupled with the speedy
action of men, it is extremely productive. Used by younger men, it is

constructed by elders as they are passing out of the social system. As such it is
understood to be a repository of their energies that should last through time.
Unlike lines and hook or spears, nets can only be used by bunches of people.
The net reflects and requires a totality.
Let me now focus on spatial aspects of the net. First, although many
villages may have and use these nets, they are special for interstitial ranked
villages, the inhabitants of which both garden and fish. The floats at the top
come from trees planted by or in villages. The inner bark used to make the
string comes from trees that grow in the early garden fallows. Lower ranked
1U ~-
Figure 1: The Muyuw fishing net, Wot

areas supply critical parts. The shell and stone weights tied to the bottom have
to come from the Sulog area in the south-central part of the island, from a
low-ranked area. Nets constantly wear out and have to be constantly
reproduced. So elders must constantly create new sections. When these are
added to the existing net its extreme ends are discarded and the new section is
spliced into the middle in a ritual (which is like a first pregnancy ritual). The
first cut of the old net has to be made with a shark's tooth that comes from
Budibud, a low-ranked set of villages on islands to Muyuw's southeast. For
those people shark is special, and others reflect that relation by incorporating
a bit of their existence into net rituals. 16 Higher ranked villages specialise in
gardening, and expect to receive fish from the interstitial villages.

Here, in quick summary, is one instance in which an apparently simple
object serves as a vehicle for representing a social order - a dialectical
tension among sets of differences.
Having described this quality with an object, let us now turn to social
relations.
I focus on the complementary and dialectical relations between what
have been called clans and subclans. A famous area in anthropology, there is
much literature devoted to clans and questions of kinship in this region. 17
In the discipline's received wisdom, these people are matrilineal, and
their clans and subclans are exogamous. For some analysts the social system
would be simple since its 'building blocks' would be conceived to be
unilineal descent groups. Anthropologists have had a lot of success describing
systems like this, a success that stands out whenever apparently anomalous
systems were found - which, as it turns out, has frequently been the case. Let
me quote from an early paper by Harold Scheffler, partly because it is close
to my region, and partly because discussion of it highlights several important
points. The society at issue is the Simbo, a people whose peculiar social forms
made them 'the scourge of the Western Solomons until pacification began
about 1905' (Scheffler 1962:151).
Scheffler writes 'Kindred and kin groups in Simbo Island social
structure' (1962) using older notes and articles from Rivers and Hocart, and
his own brief survey of the area in the Solomon Islands. Briefly, the paper's
problem is that these people are thought to have non-unilineal descent groups
- tavita -which act as corporate groups. Corporate groups were thought to
be the distinctive building blocks of society. Incorporating productive
resources, they exist beyond the lifetime of an individual. They had to be
distinct, otherwise people would fight over property. I summarise and quote
selectively from Scheffler's account:
The problem of Simbo social structure as it emerges from Rivers' account may be
summarized briefly ... [Wlhat would be defined ... as a personal kindred is also
reported to be a corporate group - a clearly impractical if not wholly impossible
situation, this was soon noted by other anthropologists. Armstrong (1925:45;
1928:40) argued that the tavita, as defined by Rivers, could not be any kind of
group but was rather a category or, in Armstrong's and later Nadel's terms, a
'grouping'. Firth (1936:226-227, 369) later noted, in effect, that it is impossible
for a viable social system to be constructed from the 'building blocks' described by
Rivers; since membership in personal kindreds is nonexclusive, no society or
community can be subdivided, except analytically, into its constituent personal

kindreds (cf. Murdock 1949:60-61). Personal kindreds cannot, therefore, form the
enduring and discrete units of a social structure such as that which clearly existed
on Simbo. The taviti could not be what Rivers claimed it to be and still do the
things he said it did. (p.135).
It is interesting that independent of this difficulty, an inconvenience born of

the idea that entities have to be unambiguously defined, Scheffler later
discusses a kind of hierarchical position, sort of a chief, with the suggestive
name of bangara, defined as:
'manager' of [territorial units] [or] ... custodian of its land. He acted as a

genealogical expert, settled quarrels over land usage, and figured prominently in
rituals concerned with the land's productivity ... The bangara managed more than
land; they managed men and their affairs as well. There were often two or more
associated with one major butubutu.[A territorial unit] (p.145).
They contributed labor to one another's gardening, supported one another in feasts
and vengeance, and always went to war as a single unit ... The Simboese were
insistent that each represented the whole district and not his own subunit (Hocart
1922:78) ... Sanctions were largely supernatural, and when a dispute within the
ramage seemed likely to erupt into fighting they intervened to settle it through the
imposition of fines or compensatory payments (p.150).
Revenge was generally exacted through a third party 'hired' by the bangaraof the
injured group. Depending upon the strength of the groups involved, counter-
retribution might be attempted, but peace could be established through the formal
exchange of shell rings (bakia) of equal value by the bangara. It is difficult to
assess the exact significance of this exchange: Hocart (1931:302) noted that it did
not necessarily soften hard feelings, and Rivers (1926:9) argued that it could not be
considered compensation for injuries because of the equality of the exchange. But it
does seem to indicate a desire for, and perhaps the necessity of, peace within
Simbo (p.151).
The first set of quotes illustrates a set of anthropologists - Hocart,

Rivers, Amstrong and Scheffler - struggling with what appears to be a
fundamental, and impossible, ambiguity at the centre of a social system. In the
second part it may be suggested that the bangara characters are the analogues
of figures like the Javanese Kertanagara, or the Kula actor who has achieved a
great name (yagan) or 'fame' (bulagan), that is, social beings whose
significance results from synthesising differences in other units. The closing
comment on the difficulty of accounting for that transaction is also telling. In
the logic that Scheffler represents, there has to be an unambiguous closing to
an exchange, otherwise the groups are not left distinct, which they must be in
order to fit the idea of a social system - formed of, by, from or creating
distinct building blocks. However, if the point of a social structure is
establishing relations, creating exchanges which cannot be 'considered
compensation for injuries' may be just the point - relating differences.
With this example in mind, let us go to the question of Muyuw clans
and subclans, the local categories of which are kum and dal respectively. In
more or less conventional terms, clans contain subclans. While this
conventional terminology would stress that they are both exogamous, the
Muyuw idea of these forms is very formally organised, and it is best to look
carefully, if briefly, at the indigenous ideas.
While normal discourse would stress how the subclan is in the clan,
Muyuw emphasise that there is not one clan, but four imagined to be
positioned around a part of their garden (see Figure 2). One clan is to the
North
Kulabut
West Kubay
Malas East
Kwasis
South
Figure 2: Clan model from Garden Path intersection

north (Dawet), another to the south (Kwasis), a third to the east (Malas) and
the fourth to the west (Kulabut). People understand this diagram to prescribe
correct marriage relations among the clans, so north gives a woman to south,
and must later receive one back. This relation in fact prevails among all
conceivable combinations. When asked what clans were for, Muyuw told me
they were for marriage. The model prescribes a system of reciprocity between
units conceived to be different as north is to south, east to west, and so on.
This is important because it contrasts with the understanding of subclans,
which people nevertheless associate with the clans. Moreover, while there are a
finite number of clans - four in the model, in fact exactly eight - there is an
undefined number of subclans. And as clans are thought of as a set, subclans

are thought of individually. In the indigenous theory the subclans specify
origin relations, and each subclan comes from a different place, by no means
necessarily on Muyuw itself. In the paradigmatic subclan origin myth, a
brother and sister come out of the ground together on a little island, mountain
top or estuary, along with 'food', that, by today's standards is inedible. This
image is a negation of reality. So, people would deny that subclans are about
marriage. Although subclans are in clans, and clans are for marriage and
depict the exchange of spouses between clans, this is not the understanding of
subclans. People would become embarrassed at the suggestion. For the idea of
marriage has to do with created relationships, and that is a function of the clan
notion, not the subclan idea. In fact, the understanding of subclans as having
different and unconnected origin points is a feature that shows how Muyuw
origin notions relate to those found across the span of Austronesian societies.
Fox has written most persuasively about this when he notes that:
Our own ideas of origin - either the Judeao-Christian-Muslim or the evolutionary

view of human derivation - ill prepare us to appreciate Austronesian ideas of
origin or to take seriously the implications of these ideas. Our ideas look to a
unitary, if not unified, conception of origin whereas the Austronesians tolerate -
or rather relish - the notion of multiple origins. Often this multiplicity derives
from an initial unity that is shattered - the destruction of a cosmic tree, the
internal rupture of a universal egg, or the separation of a primary couple - but
once this unity is shattered, concern is with a multiplicity of entities (1995:216).
In the Muyuw subclan origin myths eventually the original people go

their separate ways until you find them where they are now. It is at this point
that the model of the subclan is conjoined with the clan model.1 8
Subclans are conceived to begin as a brother/sister unit, in fact an
incestuous unit. They come out of the ground in a worthless place - their
FREDERICK H.DAMON 61
'property' - with worthless food. It is only when they leave those spots by
virtue of the productive associations of the clan/marriage model that a positive
content accrues to individual subclans.
Given this, the Muyuw situation differs from the one described by Fox
by virtue of the fact that the separateness/unity dialectic is held simultaneously
in the relation between the clan model and subclan notions. There is a
contradiction here. Origin accounts that stress isolation on a discontinuous
landscape featuring an incestuous unit with ridiculous food, describe units
which are contained in the synthesising clan model located in the centre and
epitome of Muyuw productivity - the garden. The contradiction is mediated
through mortuary rituals which pass the values of the present to succeeding
generations.
It is in the public forum of the mortuary ritual where questions of
property arise. Details of these rituals may be found elsewhere (Damon 1983c,
1989b, 1990, Chapter 4). The critical issues here include the fact that many,
many people, over and above those who are required to attend, witness these
rituals. Hence the ritual managers lay out enormous stocks of food.
Consequently these activities - some five or more being held every year
across the island - define annual productive cycles, and bring together for a
week or more major portions of what is considered Muyuw if they are small
and representatives of much of the Kula Ring if they are large. The ritual
firewood discussed earlier comes into play in these rituals, and in two ways.
Firstly, for the ritual itself massive amounts of wood have to be collected to
accomplish all of the cooking, and the most prestigious foods should be
cooked in fires using the designated firewood. Secondly, the collection of
people that forms to make some of the most important gifts had to have been
created by young married women making smaller gifts of firewood to the
group. If they have not made such gifts over the weeks and months leading up
to the mortuary ritual, they will not be able to garner sufficient support to
effect the display deemed necessary.
The demonstration involves men connected by a marriage - brothers-
in-law, proximate and alternate generations as well - giving pigs and
vegetable food. If a man of group A puts on a ritual, all the men married to his
mothers, sisters and daughters are obligated to give him pigs and vegetable
food. Long lines of people form to carry the things up to the ritual owner's
house. These include pigs; long poles to which pieces of cloth are attached as
if they are flags, along with tobacco, money, and individually tied yams or
taro,; and bundles of sago and many, many baskets of yams and taro. For each
pig a trumpet shell is blown. The prestation is, and is supposed to be, a public
transfer of wealth from one set of persons, via a married woman, to another. It
is at this juncture where the question of value, of energy formed by and
moved through specific social relationships, becomes critical. For valuable
resources of many kinds are in fact held by subclans. However, these
resources - for example, good garden land and orchards of many kinds -
are always a matter of flux, depending upon the giving and receiving of pigs
effected in mortuary rituals. A subclan's resources are always a function of its
relations to other subclans, visibly displayed in public demeanor and formal
ritual procedures, and these are always reversible. If you are married to my
sister you may in fact have me in debt by virtue of pig exchanges, and
therefore I may have to show deference of various kinds, including giving
over land my subclan owned. But there is no reason why this relationship
might not be inverted next year, in a decade, or after we are dead and our
children have cleared and changed the relationship. Productive property of
any positive significance has no standing outside of such considerations. What
this means is that, if we wish to call subclan resources private property, the fact
and possession of private property emerges out of the social forms, the
witnessed gifts instituted in the mortuary rituals. In this sense, of course, it is
public property, conditioned by the performance of the mortuary rituals.
IN SEARCH OF PRIVATE PROPERTY - THE MODERN ERA 19

Not surprisingly, Westerners have declared mortuary rituals a waste of time,
pagan customs, or, if they can be made benign enough, 'traditional' rituals
that, if they only had more colour, would be good for tourists. Few have
suspected, however, that they have been at the centre of the region's
understanding of property relations, its conditions of production and
reproduction. Such considerations became critical soon after the island
became significant for Europeans, which was after a gold strike in 1895. The
Anglo-Australian order did not worry about indigenous rights too much then,
so quickly declared 95 per cent of the island Crown Land. Fortunately or
unfortunately, the search for gold and copra, starting from the 1880s and
1890s, did not last beyond 1940 and World War II. So when the island's
resources - minerals, but in a new way after 1980, timber 2 0 - again became
a matter of interest, increasingly after about 1965, a problem really had to be
addressed: who owned what?
Finding an answer to this question is what is making ethnic groups on

the island. Whether or not it will succeed only a matter of time will tell.
The first assumption was that somebody must own the land, and that if
landowners can be properly identified contracts can easily be formed. Shortly
after I left the island for the first time in 1975, government-sponsored
surveying started (again). When I returned in 1982 I began hearing wry
comments from elders who were suspicious (again) about what was going on.
One group of people who I knew well, and who had claims to many resources
in the southeastern end of the island by virtue of pig exchanges, were told by
the government that they only had claims to the land of their origin spot. As it
turns out, their origin spot was a set of islands they consider worthless2 1 off the
eastern end of the main island. They thought it was ridiculous for them to
consider their origin myth as an unmediated claim to any kind of land,
valuable or not. 2 2 In 1996 when I stayed for a few days in the village near
those eastern islands people talked about the fact that they now considered
themselves on land owned by somebody else - my friends in the other
village. People thought they had no basis for legitimate social action, and
contemplated leaving should the 'owners' return. In 1982 another man
looked at me plaintively and said that in the past the Kula and mortuary rituals
determined who owned what, not myths. This is critical, because he is
recognising the function of public effort - individual and collective - in
determining the place of things in the social order. And he is recognising that
he is being asked to live with the idea that a kind of pre-social existence,
unmediated by the dialectics of social life, was instead becoming the basis for
resource distribution. What is going on here corresponds exactly to what
Dumont described in the passage quoted earlier. Rather than 'property' being
an attribute of publically recognised debt, that is, social relations, among
people engaged in a determined productive order, the new order is trying to
see how it can get 'Private property [to] appear, not as a social institution, but
as a logical entailment of the individual [group's] self-sufficiency'.
As it turns out, with the routinisation of the Government's policies, in
principle at least a third of the island's population will be disenfranchised
from the island's resources - because by origin myth those people came out
of the ground elsewhere. The laughter that some origin myths used to generate
will, and in some cases has, become tears.
By my returns in 1991, 1995 and 1996 and 1998, my knowledge of
these transformations and the situation itself had furthered. Firstly, I learned
that in 1978 an Australian who had been long resident on the island thought
he would do everyone a great service by assembling a meeting of elders so

they could get their myths and land claims down on paper. This would turn a
situation that is almost purposely ambiguous (designed such that social action
disambiguates it), into an unambiguous point of departure. It is interesting that
at that meeting a group of elders argued that they should not use subclans as
the basis for dividing up land claims and royalties, but rather use the clan
model. Youths argued this down. By 1996 and 1998 the 1978 meeting had
become something of a loose tooth for many people. Nobody had the
document, but many people I spoke with about it could dispute one or another
claim set in it.
Secondly, major timbering and renewed mining exploration began -

both about 1980. By 1995 hundreds of thousands of dollars had been
distributed. This made the island attractive for other people, most importantly
people from the Trobriands. Many people from there have origin myths
proclaiming that they came out of the ground on Muyuw (see Young
1998:199). So some have flocked to the area to make land and consequent
resource claims. This created a problem often discussed on Muyuw. By virtue
of minor differences in their respective social structures, genealogical time is
very important in the Trobriands yet virtually irrelevant in Muyuw. Many
Trobriand people can recount thirteen generations of predecessors, whereas in
Muyuw names and persons have to be forgotten as social debts are transferred
from one generation to the next in the mortuary rituals. In 1998 one friend
looked at me mysteriously and said they were being asked to have genealogies
of the kind found in the Bible. While some youths brought up only on the
Bible wonder why not, he is old enough to know that way of reckoning social
significance is foreign. This leads to a problem because Trobriand people talk
a better line than Muyuw. And the natural solution has been for Islanders to
get the government to intervene and declare the two areas distinct. If you are
from the Trobriands you cannot now have claims on Muyuw (formally; I
know some recently moved Trobrianders who make the claims, and Muyuw
who consent to them). While rectifying that problem, it is substantialising the
relationship between the two places. It is making Muyuw people and
Trobriand people something akin to ethnic groups.
This tendency is working on lower levels too. By forcing the idea that
subclans are autonomous units with original claims to productive property,
government action generates a redefinition of these units. So actors are trying
to figure out how they can convert a system of identity fixed to a point but not
tied to boundaries into a system which separates this plot of land from that plot
of land, on which landowners are affixed. 2 3 This is now usually done with real
or invented stories about the movement of this or that ancestor over the
landscape. This subverts the clan model of marriage and the purpose of the
mortuary rituals, whose exchanges are modelled on the clan model described
in Figure 2. One of my best friends and teachers from one subclan subscribes
to the idea that his subclan came out of the ground on top of a mountain -
there they had broth from boiled coral for their food. 2 4 That unit now lays
claims to a stretch of land nearly 20 kilometres in length and up to 10
kilometres in width, extending from the mountainous southeast through most
of the southeastern quarter of the island. After listening to the stories
sustaining these claims in 1996, about which I had heard nothing from these
men's 'grandfathers' in 1974 and 1975, I returned to discuss the issue with
their father. Before I got in the door he laughingly but bitterly said 'What
stories did they tell you now?' His accent on 'stories' (leliw) gave the word
one of its senses, which is 'just words'.
III. CONCLUSION
The old man's bitterness was from seeing a social order pass by him. That his
sons might become wealthier by virtue of mineral and timber royalties would
not displease him. And I would not like to suggest that the people in this
typical place in Papua New Guinea are not partly the agents of their own
transformation. But the reason for this overt destruction of the value
transformations of a different social order is clear: the Government, now as an
agency for the accumulation of capital on an international scale, feels
compelled to help create a social system which operates according to a
recognisable form of law. And this 'law', this social order, is one where
discrete units own discrete things and can, by their interested consideration of
pluses and minuses, trade a 'this' for a 'that' at the end of which all parties
will conceive of themselves as equal, unrelated to one another, but tied to
traditional customs, histories, or blood - and they will be ethnic groups.
This story is not a new chapter on the stage of history. The nineteenth
century in the United States experienced a similar transformation. The idea of
a social whole, a hierarchy, gradually disappeared. 2 5 It was replaced by
attempts to define people by their internal, not social, states. Physical
Anthropology as a discipline was created in this environment. So were the
great divisions of the United States social order, depending on the time or
place, White/Black, American/Chinese, White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant/Catholic
(or Jew). This was an order in which those defining what the culture was
assumed there were discrete groups - and a lot of effort went into defining or
finding them. The anthropology I have critiqued in this account, represented
by Scheffler's paper and also Barth's book, are mere extensions and correlates
of that idea about order.
Yet I do not think the idea of an 'ethnic group' is an adequate one for
describing the social conditions where I did my research, and, I suggest, much
if not all, of the Indo-Pacific region, before the coming of the European order.
Instead there was a different system, or systems, built out of the idea that order
derived from differences, and the more differences, perhaps, the better. The
coming of the Western order has seen an overt attempt to transform that
previous order. And it has done this by enforcing the idea that there were
originally distinct persons, groups, and ultimately, countries. There is no
question that this simple idea leads to a kind of wealth unparalleled in recent
history. But the history of the twentieth century does not make it clear that this
is a social order we want to pass on to our children.
NOTES
This paper is a revised version of one delivered to the Fourth Senior National Seminar on
Sociology and Anthropology, 'Ethnicity: Sociological Approach and Cross-cultural
Understanding', in Kunming, Yunnan Province, Peoples Republic of China, from June 24
to July 4, 1999. I thank conference organisers, and especially Professor He Shao-ying, for
asking me to participate. Thanks also to the University of Virginia's East Asian Program
and the Weedon Foundation for a grant to attend the conference. Drs James Wilkerson and
He Ts'ui-p'ing, Naran Bilik and others in Kunming did much to make this paper and
participation in the conference socially significant and intellectually stimulating.
1 Recent decades of excitement generated by mining and timbering activities are not new
in Milne Bay Province. They parallel the events of exactly 100 years ago, and I can see
strife looming up that parallels the consequences of the European involvement then. See
Nelson 1976 for a review of the island's earlier history.
2 The processes I describe are not unique to this island nor Milne Bay. See Filer 1997 for
a review of similar cases.
3 One of the difficulties in contemporary historical linguistic research is that it is marked
by the ethos of a social order defined by what I - and Barth - mean by 'ethnic groups.'
So although Chinese-language speakers, Sanskrit-based speakers, and Austronesian
speakers have been interacting for millennia, language analysis strives to find uniqueness
of each original language. See Ross, Pawley and Osmond (eds) 1998. In suggesting some
criticism of this work I do not mean to disparage the extraordinary accomplishments of
these scholars. Please see note 10.
4 Professor Gao Lishi's remarkable book (1998) On the Dais' traditionalirrigationsystem
and environmentalprotection in Xishjangbanna confirms this suspicion. Western Yunnan
Province is in the orbit Dong-son influence, so affinities with Melanesian cultural

attributes may not be surprising. Please note a somewhat similar reach in Waterson's
studies (1997). She suggests affinities between Japanese styles and those in Southeast
Asia. John Knight's discussion (1998) of the place of trees in Japanese names provides
further affinities on this matter especially when one considers that the other field of
activities from which Japanese names derives concerns irrigated rice agriculture.
5 Note Macknight: 'In the political history of South Sulawesi a case can be made for a
transfer of political power around 1400 from states based primarily on trade to new states
relying on agricultural surplus' (1990[1986]:224). If this is a general transition - related
to changing sailing conditions from the Little Ice Age? (see Gunn 1994) - it would
roughly correspond to the time of the switch from megalith burials to the secondary
interment system of the 'present' in Milne Bay Province.

6 Dr Simon Bickler has conducted extensive archaeological research on many of these
ruins. Dates derive from his work. See Bickler 1998, and Bickler, Simon and Baiva Ivuyo
(in press).
7 Although there is evidence for conus shells being used in this area for the last 700 years,
the Kula I now describe is the one I've seen, undoubtedly a simpler system than existed
when doga, usually but not always pigs' tusks, prized stone axes from Sulog, and other
items constituted important prestige items as well.
8 When Mauss writes 'The Kula is the gathering point of many other institutions'
(1967[1925]:25) he correctly identifies this principle. Fuller accounts of my view of the
Muyuw in the Kula are listed in the references (especially Damon 1980a, 1980b, 1983a,
1993, and in press b). For the region see Leach and Leach 1983.
9 In received wisdom about the evolution of society the Kula is viewed as a primitive
contract system which facilitates bartering necessities between spatial units not otherwise
related. This perspective, however, is an imposition upon the data and in no way
corresponds to current reality, nor, in all probability, to the historical reality.
10 Although some people - Jim Fox, Janet Hoskins, Geoffrey Benjamin, and Malcom
Ross - with whom I have checked this issue are sympathetic to the possibility, none is
convinced by my suggestion. Since it seems to me that the social, if not the linguistic,
cognation is obvious, I float the idea.
11 Geertz's voice is not alone. When Schulte Nordholt writes that 'the ruler constructed
his negara through the building of his temples'(1996:156) I believe he is describing a
system which is an analogue of if not cognate to the Kula (see also ibid., 69-77).
Wheately also stresses this political form's relation to 'trading' activities in such a fashion
that the likeness to the Kula is quite clear (see for example, 1983:326-7).
12 Constructing a world by means of floral references is of course as much an
Austronesian as subcontinent practice as work stimulated by Fox, Waterson, and others
testifies.
13 Aesthetic systems in the Kula region stress such complementarity. Wheately (1983)
suggests the Indic image of Siva symbolises this property in the overtly Hinduised states
of Southeast Asia. In this part of Melanesia the aesthetic forms look more East than
South Asian.
14 In the designated chapter Marx discusses how people in the capitalist mode of
production understood exchange relations, saving for later chapters how he thought they
actually worked. These are very carefully formulated depictions which anthropologists
should study. I have used them to contrast Kula exchanges in a number of publications,
the most thorough of which is Damon 1993.
15 Those social systems remain concerned more with relative rank than property. So
ranked relations between people are paramount, those between people and things merely
derivative. Among the miners who have visited Muyuw recently this social quality is
impressed upon them - agreements are never final.
16 Shark is a favoured food and the curve of sharks' noses is used to model the shape of
Budibud sails; other areas use the leaves of Calophyllum inophyllum, a tree called kakam.
17 Most of which can be found referenced in my publications dealing with matters of

kinship (Damon 1983c, 1989b, 1990).
18 For the lecture version of this paper Dr He Ts'ui-p'ing assisted me in defining how the
Muyuw kum and dal might be translated into Chinese, shi-zu and zong-zu respectively.
This is suggestive; however the sense of the latter term brings out important features of
the Muyuw dal idea. The Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary (page 934) lists the
following idea for the concept: ancestor; of the same clan; sect; principle aim, purpose;
take as one's model; model; great master. As I understand these associations they are very
positive marks, or aspects of sociality. The Muyuw term is in fact the opposite. It models
what should not be.
19 This paper attempts to describe a change in Muyuw culture that is underway as I write.
This is, however, the second major change effected by Western presence. The first was a
reduction of complexity in the organisation of village relations. I have discussed this
reduction in different ways in Damon 1983b and 1990 (Chapter 3).
20 have discussed some of the relevant history in Damon 1997.
21 'Worthless' for them. For people who live in or near the eastern villages of Kavatan
and Ungonam the islands are good places for catching turtles or using for other aspects of
marine-resource acquisition.
22 There is a deep irony here. This area is the locale for Malinowski's research, and it was
his pioneering work which led anthropologists to learn that origin myths were not to be
taken as literal (historical) truths, rather as charters. Although Malinowski never analysed
the content of Trobriand origin myths, which are similar to Muyuw's, he realised they
should not be taken as true history. I do not know if he understood Trobrianders were not
taking them as a literal truth. It is clear that Muyuw people did not. Rather the elders I
knew had a complicated appreciation of the fact that they marked an identity whose truth is
revealed in a different order of structured action.
23 While there may be something unique to Muyuw's situation, as Filer attests, this
problem is generalised throughout Papua New Guinea. For example, in 1975 the Post-
Courier, Papua New Guinea's main newspaper, carried one story with the word landowner'
in it. In 1993, after the infusion of new mining endeavours - exploration and actual
development, and a new world searching for PNG's timber resources, there were ninety-
nine such stories. Filer 1997:164, Table 10.1.
FREDERICK H.DAMON 69
24 This assertion is so ridiculous that it used to raise profound laughter amongst my

informants, this particular origin story being almost a prototype for the creation of
differences that only make sense by being transformed though time and across space.
25 The whole, of course, was the region's relation to the power, that is, the hierarchical
forms England enshrined.
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The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology

From regional relations to ethnic groups?

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analysing the Kula Ring social system as being representative of constructed

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 1(2) 2000:49-72

by 'philosophies of social order,' 'ethnic groups', 'regional relations', 'value

LOCATING THE KULA RING AND THE LOCUS OF 'VALUE'

The Kula Ring

-" ";< __* Louisade Archipelago

Obligations over the last several years have forced me to look at

embody parts of persons. When he 'throws' a valuable to a partner a

collective consequences and implications. 9

It is important to conclude by noting that the Kula exchange system, the

By putting the stress on the boundaries and contestation for the

I would assert that it is this claim to self-sufficiency, to a kind of formal pre-

II. THE TRADITIONAL SETTING AND ITS TRANSFORMATION

be a curiously porous social order among Jing Po and other peoples in

These facts might be conceived as a classic Barthian boundary issue - the

action of men, it is extremely productive. Used by younger men, it is

Figure 1: The Muyuw fishing net, Wot

gardening, and expect to receive fish from the interstitial villages.

community can be subdivided, except analytically, into its constituent personal

It is interesting that independent of this difficulty, an inconvenience born of

'manager' of [territorial units] [or] ... custodian of its land. He acted as a

The first set of quotes illustrates a set of anthropologists - Hocart,

Figure 2: Clan model from Garden Path intersection

undefined number of subclans. And as clans are thought of as a set, subclans

Our own ideas of origin - either the Judeao-Christian-Muslim or the evolutionary

In the Muyuw subclan origin myths eventually the original people go

IN SEARCH OF PRIVATE PROPERTY - THE MODERN ERA 19

Finding an answer to this question is what is making ethnic groups on

he would do everyone a great service by assembling a meeting of elders so

Secondly, major timbering and renewed mining exploration began -

Province is in the orbit Dong-son influence, so affinities with Melanesian cultural

interment system of the 'present' in Milne Bay Province.

17 Most of which can be found referenced in my publications dealing with matters of

24 This assertion is so ridiculous that it used to raise profound laughter amongst my

Barnett, Steve and Martin G. Silverman

Bickler, Simon H. and Baiva Ivuyo

Dagens, Bruno (translator)

in press a A stranger's view of Bihar-rethinking 'religion' and 'production': more

School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, pp.7-21.

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Schulte Nordholt, Henk

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