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BIG MEN AND GREAT MEN

Personifications of power in Melanesia
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MAURICE GODELIER and MARILYN STRATHERN

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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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EDITIONS DE LA MAISON DES SCIENCES DE L'HOMME

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Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge

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Contents

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)

List ofillustrations Notes on contributors Preface Acknowledgements Map

page vii
IX
Xlll

XVll XVlll

-""/ Introduction
MARILYN STRATHERN

PARTI

From great men to big men: peace, substitution and in the Highlands of New Guinea
PIERRE LEMONNIER

7
28

2 3

Great man, big man, chief: a triangulation of the Massim

JOHN LIEP

Soaring hawks and grounded persons: the politics of rank and gender in north Vanuatu
MARGARET JOLLY

48

PART II

81 83

'-">4

Punishing the yams: leadership and gender ambivalence on Sabarl Island

DEBBORA BATTAGLIA

Great men and total systems: North Mekeo hereditary authority and social reproduction
MARK MOSKO

97

WD

VI

Contents

I:
115

6 7

The cryptic brotherhood of big men and great men in Hahita

DONALD TUZIN

Complementarity and rivalry: two contradictory principles in Yafar society

BERNARD JUILLERAT

130 142

I: II
11 ;[1 \1

8 How Oro Province societies fit Godelier's model

ERIC SCHWIMMER

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Illustrations

PART III

157 159

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Figures Hypothetical transformation of a great-man system into a big-man system 2.1 A representation of the three political types 3.1a The im, or household dwelling 3.1b The mal, or men's house 4.1 Leadership: models reconstructed across time and social categories 5.1 Quadripartite tribal structure 5.2 Quadripartite moiety structure 5.3 Quadripartite subclan structure 5.4 Quadripartite gender structure

-::y 9 The fractal person

ROY WAGNER

10

The flute myth and the law of equivalence: origins of a principle of exchange
GILLIAN GILLISON

174 197

1.1

page 26 33 65 65

11 12

One man and many men

MARILYN STRATHERN

88
100 101 103 111

'Interests' in exchange: increment, equivalence and the limits of big-manship

RENA LEDERMAN

215 234

13 14

Post-Ipomoean modernism: the Duna example

NICHOLAS MODJESKA

Tables 256

Big men, great men and women: alternative logics of gender difference
DAN JORGENSEN

1.1 3.1 3.2

PARTlY

273

Non-competitive and competitive forms of exchange Regular male grades in South Pentecost Central actors in rank ceremonies in three regions 14.1 Relation between labour and values accrued 14.2 An invidious but revealing comparison

22 62 67 261 263

- ' / 15

An unfinished attempt at reconstructing the social processes which may have prompted the transformation of great-men societies into big-men societies
MAURICE GODELIER

Maps 275 Map of Papua New Guinea 3.1 Vanuatu 3.2 The distribution of the graded society
XVIII

53 57

Bibliography Index

305 321

VII

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 anthropological 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 abbreviated 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 dominated by conventional distinctions between the Highlands and Lowlands of Papua New Guinea, and between the apparently egalitarian nature of

XIII

XIV

Preface

Preface

xv

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 dimensions 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 replicate 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 compromise or segmentary product as a remainder, what is left over after a twoway 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 consequently 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.

This is then no ordinary set of conference papers whose coherence has to be justified after the event. The individual of this volume offer a progressive 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 particular 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 significant 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.
MARILYN STRATHERN

Manchester June 1989

Acknowledgements

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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 collective. 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

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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 procedures 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 nonequivalence, 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 kinship) 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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XVIII

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 new centre of theoretical interest, complementing that of the recently denoted Mountain 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 significance for general anthropological theorising about the nature of sociality. The big man had been taken as prototypical of a type of group organisation, 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 New Guinea 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.

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Introduction

Texts, these days, do not survive without subtexts. A number of controversies run through these pages. One concerns an established debate over the admissibility of historical reconstruction and the necessity for hypotheses 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 controversial 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 unthinking 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 strategic parallel here with the anthropologists' MelanesialPolynesia conundrum, 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 consider 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 reappearance 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 comparison of societies is faced with the chaotic knowledge of internal differentiation within anyone, and any fine internal discrimination is faced with the magnitude effect of radical global divisions that make their co-eval

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.

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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.

CHAPTER 9

The fractal person

ROY WAGNER
Wagner re-opens the Highlands material via his own Austronesian perspective from New Ireland. 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, keeping 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. If we 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 seem to 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 discourse 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 necessarily 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 jurisprudence 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 necessarily substantive, physical and material, notion of the person as object.
159

160

Big men and great men

The fractal person

161

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 problema tics. 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 variable and problematic. It is by no meansdear that the subjects think of themselves 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 surprise 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 automatically 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

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 friction 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 challenge is that of a more holistic manner of thought than that implied in structure, 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. 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, help109 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

----,I

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Big men and great men

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The fractal person

163

'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 dimensionality 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 commonly 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. A fractal 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 relationship 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 reproductive '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 enchainment 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 comparative reality or practicality, but rather one of how one's realities or practical iss4es are situated with respect to relationship. The only issue that need detain us is that of how Melanesians themselves would seem to 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 conceptualise 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 responsibility 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 aspiration 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. A Daribi name, nogi, is always an instantiation, and also a simplification, of the relation designated 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

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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 universally 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 designation 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 claim such 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 colloquially the ebi-haza, the 'cassowary-animal' through its non-avian proclivities, 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 sustenance 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 congruence 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 enhancement), items exchanged become the mere 'wealth objects' of a like categorisation - a 'representation' of human values through utility, a 'classification' 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 representational 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 attribution 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 fractality, that which expands or contracts the scale of recognition and articulation to fit all exigencies, making language equal to all occasions by

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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 law and 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.

j 1

Neither singular nor plural When the arbitrary sectionings cut from the whole cloth of universal congruence are taken literally as data, they become the social categories that we identify as names, individuals, groups, wealth-objects and informationbearing 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 representational 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 scaleretaining understandings of unsuspected elegance and force, the generalising 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 meanings 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 construction. 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. A crucial facet of the mathematic is that digits are understood to be assimilated 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-onetwo-one'. 'Ten', the 'one' at the end of the second hand, is also, of course, except that this is hand number two. The feet are likewise differentiated ('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 cosmology, 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 on which 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

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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). However 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 conflation 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, instantiating 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 marriage 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 pregnant 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 replicated 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

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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 subterranean (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 demonstration 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 significance 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 perceived 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 containment 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 understanding from collapsing into the individuals, groups and categories that constructionism 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 counting is but a mathematical mistake; ignoring the transitivity of its impregnation and the transformations worked upon it, Gimi reproduction is just a neat set of native categories, and missing the exacting protocols of feasting, 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 meaning 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 powerbroker. 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 individuation 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

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pressed into service to focus attention on the form of reduction or scalechange intended - behavioural, psychological, symbolic, economic or ecological. 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 underwrites 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 individuals 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.

non gender-specific, is great as a particular instantiation or configuratlOn 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 exemplifications of this point. But I should like to close with a final example from the Usen Barok of New Ireland. 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.

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

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"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 equivalence' 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' (LeviStrauss 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.

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 crosssocietal contrast that enable us to see these persons figured as the outcome of different perspectival strategies. Each is a focus for the way people think about themselves, 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 transactions. There are consequences for competition (cha pter 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.

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 compares. 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 ordinary 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, according 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.

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 presented with 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 individually 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 overseas 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
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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 irreducible. 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 ceremonial 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 relationship. 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 transactions 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 prominence 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 heterogeneous 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 substitution for other relations already there, such as those of domestic kinship. One form ('clansman') thus appears out of, and here as a transformation 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 specialist 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.

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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 difference 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 ('equivalent') 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 necessarily 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 comparisons 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, equivalence and non-equivalence are more profitably understood as comparisons 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 distinguished by a mutual relation of inferiority and superiority (d. Godelier 1986a: 173). These relations transform into sisters and wives what otherwise 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 nonequivalence 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 perception 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 counterpart 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 principle 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

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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 counterpoised anthropological models appear together in the actors' reality' (Lederman 1986: 65; author's emphasis). She notes how Mendi 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. Now attempting to map principles or institutions on to one another - this marriage practice on that marriage practice - awkwardly suggests that different 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 contained 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 classifying 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 difference 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 solidary 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 persons 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 anticipates 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

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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 nonequivalence 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 departicularised, 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 anticipates 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 enlargement 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 person. 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 tha t 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 wealthproducing 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 differentiated 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 ceremonies, the kwaimatnie-man thus stands to the initiates as a source of differentiation 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

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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 nonequivalent 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-tobe) 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 alternating 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. A single transaction may capture this re-versionary process, as Maclean's (1985) analysis of Maring bridewealth 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 marriage, 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 sustained 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 subversive 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 produces 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 perspective. 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 recipients, they make patent their inequality. The oscillation between the equivalence 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

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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 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 arrangements 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 confront one another in unitary, collective form. But there is more to this divergence than simply a narrower and wider view of 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 appearing 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-

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 borrow an image of non-equivalence. This is then re-deployed in interclan 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

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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 selfinterest, political aggrandisement or striving for prestige is inadequately likened to possessive individualism in so far as that misses the transformation 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' constitutes an attempt to focus sequences of action upon the self. His single purpose thereby attracts the regard of others. We might say that the perspectives 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 particularises 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 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 creating himself '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 perspectives 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. Conversely, 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 prestige, 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 perspective by which they seem unequal and dependent upon one another. This is not an incidental contingency of competition, but a contrived aesthetic 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 analogous 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 collectivity. He is its capacity for unity. At the same time, in so far as his single figure 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 conduit through which an internal relation is substituted for external ones (individual householders, embedded in their own matrilateral-affinal networks, 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.

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One man and many men

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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 possibilities 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 collectivity. 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 particular (kinship) relationships can be eclipsed in the pursuit of a single purpose. 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 accoutrements 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 transformation 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 distinctive 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 particular 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 different 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 perspectives of the person. That person is, of course, a fractal person (chapter 9). I

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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. Lederman 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. Competitive 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 movement, 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 relative position in the comparative politics of the region. On the other hand, I draw on my own ethnographic experience with the Mendi, a central Highland 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
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PART IV

A reformulation of the original questions with which this book set out.

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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 bigmen 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. Anthropologists 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 unreconstructed system of structural transformations, I had not dared to consider 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
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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 contrasted 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, combining 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-yetundiscovered 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 introduction 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 revolution', could have brought certain societies in Papua New Guinea closer to producing a new type 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 imaginary 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 governing 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 merited or achieved. These systems of initiation function as the place where the entire society undergoes integration; they are the institution by which society represents itself as a whole, and where its constituent 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 production 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 system of 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

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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 to produce 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 constitute 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 differences between these two logics. The first concerns the nature of kinship relations, the second, the nature of the principles of equivalence which prevail 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 reproduced 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.

A second remark necessary to the clarification of these various social logics concerns the nature of the principles which guide exchanges. In greatmen 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 oficequivalence; Hageners combine the two principles of non-equivalence; and Bena-Bena, Gahuku-Gama or even Duna can be seen to illustrate intermediate 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 tfpeace 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. By contrast with endogamous tribes, in big-men societies the overall group, a

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'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 distances separating Ego from his potential matrimonial allies undergo considerable 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 sometimes a great distance if the alliance is contracted through regional networks of competitive exchange. One last remark on 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 counterbalanced 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 a bandon 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?
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.

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. From our 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 contracting 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 nonenemies, and therefore potential friends, with whom they wished to establish 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.

*"

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'*
J

'*-

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 initiation, for a man cannot marry unless he has been initiated. Kinship relations are not autonomous. The production of a complete social individual is based on the subordination of kinship relations to politicoideological relations which are more extensive, integrating individuals and groups into a whole capable of reproducing itself. One condition is essential 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 homosexuality. 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 neighbouring 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 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 initiation ceremonies. 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 claim that they too possesssuch objects, secreted away by their ancestors but which could come to light tomorrow were the political 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 tha t one of their men take his place. Most often the ploy falls through, but once again everything

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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 ceremonial 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 practise 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 conditions 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). 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 production 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 menlike great men. 2 Furthermore, the development of competitive exchanges seems to become a dominant fact only in some societies and under some con-

ditions. If any light is to be thrown on these conditions, we must follow Lemonnier's example (chapter 1) and identify the various forms competitive 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 themselves 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 comparison 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. Means ofdistribution: 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 specialist. Baruya trade their salt for bark-cloth capes, stone blades, bird-ofparadise feathers, cowry necklaces, charms and sometimes even piglets; it

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can thus be exchanged for goods as varied as charms or the means of production 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 (barkcloth 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 portion 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 ceremonies, great quantities of other goods are also amassed and redistributed: 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 illustrations. 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 substitution 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 ela borately 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 firststage initiation (mouka). Each Baruya family raises pigs which it withholds from the consumption 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

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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, without 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. 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.

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 principles 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

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but also reap immediate prestige and gratitude. Yet accumulating pigs is also a necessity in order to intervene in contexts that go well beyond marriage: 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. Compensation (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 contributions 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 'foundationof-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 success, 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 nonequivalence 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 themselves, the most visible symptom of which were their constant mutual accusations 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 system with 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, laststage initiates of the Kiria cult. The Kiria supplied a framework for ideological 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 monopolising 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

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cognatic principles and practices and institutions whose function - ideologically and socially - is to restrict access to supernatural powers and the ancestors for men only. These efforts seem to result in a very strong tendency 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-witha-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 ceremonies, owner of a kwaimatnie (the sacred object which makes men grow and ensures fertility), a man whose name must be kept secret from neighbouring 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 everyone, 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 ancestors, 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 sacrifice 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 competition 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 members 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 ideological 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 institutions: 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

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again I feel we should look at the kinship relations and especially at whether the driving mechanism of 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 collective 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 profoundly 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 enormous 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-esta blish 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. Now what social mechanism might provide the link between the extinction 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

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 purposes 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 completely of the social use of the products of their labour. This would seem to point to an extension of polygamy or its generalisation 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 objection, 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 produced, as is the case of pigs (produced) versus game (not produced), then the limits of polygamy implied by the direct exchange of women are overcome; and this is accomplished by social mechanisms which make it possible 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 dispose of the products of the labour of women to whom he 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.

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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 production 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, alongside 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 continue 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 societies, 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 countergifts, 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 condition 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 countergift to the periodical destruction and ritual consumption of pig-wealth? Perhaps all possible references to ancestors or spirits must have disappeared 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 mechanisms 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

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r
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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 purpose, 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 contract marriage alliances or to preserve politico-military ones, pressure to engage in war had increased to such a degree that the problem arose of finding a partial substitute. This pressure would have then to be maintained, providing the permanent driving force behind the development of networks 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 circumstances 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 certainly have amplified the mechanisms which had long since developed in connection with pre-sweet potato economies. How much credibility can be accorded the causal chain a number of authors, from Watson 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 produce 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 compensation 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

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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 paying compensation for dead enemies that true competitive exchanges were instituted among tribes, each group being tempted to make peace in order to ask its 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 transformation 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 principle 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 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 Highlands, 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 transformations 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 combines 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.

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Clans

Aa
Bb

Cc
Dd

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-ofparadise 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, A and 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 competitive 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 clanbased village level; and the predominance of inherited powers over achievement 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

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 seem even 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 by Jolly (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

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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 transform concrete relations 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 principles 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

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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 Austronesian,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
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 payments, 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, compared 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 generalised, 99,102,104-10,112,201, 278-9,281,289,302; enchainment of, 242, 243; enchanted, 247; equivalent, 202, 215, 220, 222,

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

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; obligations, 242; precolonial, 242; restricted, 242; of sexual fluids, 251, 281,282; social field of, 242; symmetrical, 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
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, hierarchy), 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

r ! !
i

Index
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

325

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 reproduction 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, comparative analysis of, 7-27 historical change and analysis of, 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

Jale, 11ff. Kaluli,245

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

326

Index
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 competitive 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 rank, 29, 34-6, 38-9,41,44-7,276, 303 ratahigi high ranking 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 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

Index

327

"

Ii

I
I
I' "

moka (Hagen, ceremonial exchange), 10f., 31,162,163,209,210,219, 220,223,226; see increment, 237, 242,247 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
I

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
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

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 highranking men (Vanuatu), 48, 58, 78 social, capital, 241; change, 126-7, 127n , 128n; control, 252; evolution, 142, 154-6; fields: 154,241,251; of discourse, 242; of exchange, 242; of marriage, 254; of political power, 236; of production, 242; magicomythico-ritual, 235, 237, 242, 254; integration, 248, 277; organisation: (Duna), 242, 245, 254; (Mekeo), 97, 99, 100-4,106-7, 112,113;supralocal, 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

328

Index
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

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.