The Melanesian World 9781138693715, 9781315529691, 1138693715

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TH E M E L A N E SIA N  WO RL D

This wide-​ranging volume captures the diverse range of societies and experiences that form what has come to be known as Melanesia. It covers prehistoric, historic and contemporary issues, and includes work by art historians, political scientists, geographers and anthropologists. The chapters range from studies of subsistence, ritual and ceremonial exchange to accounts of state violence, new media and climate change. The ‘Melanesian world’ assembled here raises questions that cut to the heart of debates in the human sciences today, with profound implications for the ways in which scholars across disciplines can describe and understand human difference. This impressive collection of essays represents a valuable resource for scholars and students alike. Eric Hirsch is a Reader in Anthropology at Brunel University London, UK. He has a longstanding interest in the ethnography and history of Papua New Guinea. Will Rollason is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University London, UK. His research to date has focused on Papua New Guinea and Rwanda.

T HE ROU T L E D GE WO RLDS THE ISLAMIC WORLD Edited by Andrew Rippin

THE OCCULT WORLD Edited by Christopher Partridge

THE WORLD OF POMPEII Edited by Pedar W. Foss and John J. Dobbins

THE WORLD OF INDIGENOUS NORTH AMERICA Edited by Robert Warrior

THE RENAISSANCE WORLD Edited by John Jeffries Martin THE GREEK WORLD Edited by Anton Powell

THE WORLD OF THE REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN REPUBLIC Edited by Andrew Shankman

THE ROMAN WORLD Edited by John Wacher

THE SHAKESPEAREAN WORLD Edited by Jill L. Levenson and Robert Ormsby

THE HINDU WORLD Edited by Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby

THE WORLD OF COLONIAL AMERICA Edited By Ignacio Gallup-​Diaz

THE WORLD OF THE AMERICAN WEST Edited by Gordon Morris Bakken

THE MODERNIST WORLD Edited by Allana Lindgren and Stephen Ross

THE ELIZABETHAN WORLD Edited by Susan Doran and Norman Jones

THE EARLY CHRISTIAN WORLD, SECOND EDITION Edited by Philip F. Esler

THE OTTOMAN WORLD Edited by Christine Woodhead THE VICTORIAN WORLD Edited by Marin Hewitt

THE SWAHILI WORLD Edited by Stephanie Wynne-​Jones and Adria LaViolette

THE ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN WORLD Edited by Augustine Casiday

THE SYRIAC WORLD Edited by Daniel King

THE BUDDHIST WORLD Edited by John Powers

THE MEDIEVAL WORLD, SECOND EDITION Edited by Peter Linehan, Janet L. Nelson, and Marios Costambeys

THE ETRUSCAN WORLD Edited by Jean MacIntosh Turfa THE GOTHIC WORLD Edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend THE ATLANTIC WORLD Edited by D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard, and William O’Reilly THE POSTCOLONIAL WORLD Edited by Jyotsna G. Singh and David D. Kim THE SUMERIAN WORLD Edited by Harriet Crawford

THE ELAMITE WORLD Edited by Javier Álvarez-​Mon, Gian Pietro Basello, Yasmina Wicks THE FAIRY TALE WORLD Edited by Andrew Teverson THE ANDEAN WORLD Edited by Linda J. Seligmann and Kathleen Fine-​Dare THE MELANESIAN WORLD Edited by Eric Hirsch and Will Rollason www.routledge.com/​RoutledgeWorlds/​book-​series/​WORLDS

T H E M E L A N E S I A N   WO R L D

Edited by

Eric Hirsch and Will Rollason

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Eric Hirsch and Will Rollason; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Eric Hirsch and Will Rollason to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​69371-​5  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​315-​52969-​1  (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

CONTENTS

List of figures 

ix

List of tables 

xi

List of contributors 

xii

Preface 

xvii

Maps of the region and its language groups 

xix

1 Introduction: the challenge of Melanesia  Eric Hirsch and Will Rollason

1

PART I: HISTORICAL CONTEXT  41 2 The archaeology of Melanesia  Glenn Summerhayes

43

3 Melanesia: a region and a history  Max Quanchi

63

4 Missionaries in the Melanesian world  John Barker

77

PART II: GEO-​P OLITICAL, LINGUISTIC AND REGIONAL OVERVIEWS  93 5 Geo-​political overview of Melanesia  Stewart Firth 6 Melanesia as a zone of language diversity  Alan Rumsey v

95 110

— ​ C o n t e n t s —​

7 Regional overview: from diversity to multiple singularities  Jaap Timmer

126

PART III: ECONOMY AND LIVELIHOOD  141 8 Subsistence food production in Melanesia  R.M. Bourke

143

9 Class, labour and consumption in urban Melanesia  Lorena Gibson

164

10 Money schemes in contemporary Melanesia  John Cox

180

11 Cash crops and markets  Timothy L.M. Sharp and Mark Busse

194

12 Searching for Melanesian urbanity  Michael Goddard

223

PART IV: GOVERNMENT, POLITICS AND PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS  237 13 Sovereignty, civil conflict and ethnicity  Matthew G. Allen

239

14 Local government and politics: forms and aspects of authority  Steffen Dalsgaard

255

15 Security governance in Melanesia: police, prisons and crime  Sinclair Dinnen

269

16 Gender relations and human rights in Melanesia  Martha Macintyre

285

17 Health, institutions and governance in Melanesia  Alice Street

300

18 Owning the law in Melanesia  Melissa Demian and Benedicta Rousseau

315

PART V: RELIGION, CHURCH, RITUAL AND EXCHANGE PRACTICES  331 19 ‘Witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’ in Melanesia  Knut Rio vi

333

— ​ C o n t e n t s —​

20 Charismatic churches, revivalism and new religious movements  Annelin Eriksen and Michelle MacCarthy

345

21 Cargo cult post mortem  Lamont Lindstrom

359

22 Big men, ceremonial exchange and life-​cycle events  Keir Martin

375

23 Interpreting initiation in Melanesia: past and present  Pascale Bonnemère

389

PART VI: ART, MATERIAL CULTURE AND CULTURAL HERITAGE  403 24 Museums and cultural centres in Melanesia: a series of experiments  Lissant Bolton

405

25 Creation and destruction in Melanesian material culture  Anna-​Karina Hermkens

419

26 Contemporary art in Melanesia: from grassroots to national identity?  434 Eva Ch. Raabe 27 Melanesian worlds of music and dance  Michael Webb 28 The Melanesian world of Paradise tourism: reflections on time, travel and cultural performance  John P. Taylor

455

471

PART VII: DEVELOPMENT AND RESOURCES  485 29 Places and paths in Melanesian landscapes  Borut Telban

487

30 Extractive industries in Melanesia  Glenn Banks

501

31 Climate change in the islands and the highlands: Melanesian manifestations, experiences and actions  Edvard Hviding and Camilla Borrevik

517

32 Western conservation in Melanesia: biodiversity conservation for whom, by whom, and according to whom?  Bridget M. Henning

532

vii

— ​ C o n t e n t s —​

33 New media, new Melanesia?  Geoffrey Hobbis

546

34 Afterword  Marilyn Strathern

561

Index  Index of Language Groups 

567 577

viii

FIGURES

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 4.1 4.2 4.3 8.1 8.2 9.1 17.1 21.1 21.2 26.1 26.2 26.3 26.4 26.5 26.6 26.7 26.8 26.9

Map showing corridors of entry into Sahul Map showing Pleistocene sites in Northern Sahul Pleistocene stone tools from 49,000–​44,000-​year-​old contexts Map of the Bismarck Archipelago with location of early Lapita sites and obsidian sources Map showing the spread of Lapita over the western Pacific Early Lapita pottery, Emirau Island, New Ireland Province, PNG Cathedral on the Dogura plateau Mural above the High Altar Memorial chapel on Kwato A simplified representation of the distribution of the most important staple food crops in Papua New Guinea Sources of energy and protein in Papua New Guinea by main food groups in 2006 The first town plan of Lae, 1938 A (working) ambulance, donated by a local politician, parked outside a local health centre John Frum supporters raise the USA flag, 1979 Burning Man 2013 poster, ‘John Frum Returns (to Nevada)’ Incised decorations on bamboo containers, 1960s, north-​east New Guinea Patterns on bamboo container Timothy Akis, War Magic, 1975, screen print John Man, How Mountain Kimenjim Came to Be, 1991 Samuel Luguna, Mwali Abstraction, 1998 Trobriand Island red: young girls wearing kula jewellery Julie Mota, Walkabout, 1999, watercolour on carton Jane Wena, Women Subservient of Man Particularly in Highland Society, 1999 Jane Wena, Features of Beauty, Wealth and Love from the Trobriand Islands, 1999 ix

44 46 48 52 53 54 78 79 87 147 148 167 306 365 370 437 438 439 440 442 443 444 445 446

— ​ F i g u r e s —​

26.10 Mathias Kauage, Minister Michael Somare’s Car, 1991 26.11 John Siune, Hapcas, 1998 26.12 Contemporary bilum, Papua New Guinea, 1999 30.1 Distribution of current mineral and petroleum operations in Melanesia

x

447 448 452 503

TABLES

6.1 Some English and Tok Pisin personal pronouns 8.1 Estimated food consumption in PNG by food type in 2016 8.2 Estimated rural population growing staple food crops in Papua New Guinea in 2016 8.3 Estimated production of staple food crops in Solomon Islands in 2016 11.1 Percentage of rural households by country earning income from the production of cash crops in PNG, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu

xi

116 149 151 156 200

CONTRIBUTORS

Matthew G. Allen is Professor of Development Studies at The University of the South Pacific. He is a human geographer with over 20  years’ experience working in the Melanesian Pacific. Glenn Banks is Professor and Head of the School of People, Environment and Planning at Massey University/​Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa. His research focuses on socio-​ economic and cultural dimensions of extractive industries in Papua New Guinea. John Barker is Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. His research primarily concerns the adoption of Christianity by indigenous people in Oceania and British Columbia. Lissant Bolton is Keeper of the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Vanuatu. Her research has focused on textiles, and museums and indigenous communities. Pascale Bonnemère is a Senior Researcher in Social Anthropology at CNRS and member of the CREDO in Marseilles. Her research focuses on gender and initiation rituals in Papua New Guinea. Camilla Borrevik is a PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway. Her research focuses on climate change in the broader Pacific region. Mike Bourke is an Honorary Associate Professor at the Australian National University. He has been continuously engaged in research, development and training in agriculture in Papua New Guinea, and other Pacific Island nations, since 1970. Mark Busse is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Auckland. His research concerns social organisation, reciprocity and markets, intellectual and cultural property, and inequality with a geographical focus on Papua New Guinea. John Cox is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Human Security and Social Change at La Trobe University. He researches religion, politics and development in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands. xii

— ​ C o n t r i b u t o r s —​

Steffen Dalsgaard is an Associate Professor at the Technologies in Practice research group at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has conducted long-​term ethnographic research in Papua New Guinea. Melissa Demian is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK. She is a specialist in the anthropology of law in Papua New Guinea. Sinclair Dinnen is a Senior Fellow at the Australian National University. He has undertaken extensive socio-​legal research in the Melanesian Pacific, particularly in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. Annelin Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway. Her research has focused on Vanuatu, religion, gender and cultural change. Stewart Firth is a Research Fellow in the Department of Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University. He writes about the politics and international relations of the Pacific Islands. Lorena Gibson is a Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She specialises in the anthropology of development, hope and NGOs, with an area focus on Melanesia, South Asia and Oceania. Michael Goddard is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Macquarie University, Australia. He has conducted research both in the western highlands and central south coast of Papua New Guinea. Bridget Henning is an Assistant Scientist in Conservation Ecology at the Illinois Natural History Survey at the Prairie Research Institute of the University of Illinois. Her research interests include the social-​ ecological systems surrounding biodiversity conservation projects, particularly the Wanang Conservation Area in Papua New Guinea. Anna-​Karina Hermkens is a researcher and lecturer working at the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney. She has an interest in gender, art and religion and works in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. Eric Hirsch is a Reader in Anthropology at Brunel University London, UK. He has a longstanding interest in the ethnography and history of Papua New Guinea. Geoffrey Hobbis is Assistant Professor in the Centre for Media Studies and Journalism at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His research focuses on digital technologies and media in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. Edvard Hviding is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bergen, and Director of the Bergen Pacific Studies research group. His long-term fieldwork is in Solomon Islands, and more recently on Pacific climate change diplomacy. Lamont Lindstrom, Kendall Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa, has since 1978 pursued several areas of research in Vanuatu. Michelle MacCarthy is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, NS (Canada). Her anthropological research on religion, gender and tourism is based on fieldwork conducted in the Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea. xiii

— ​ C o n t r i b u t o r s —​

Martha Macintyre is an Honorary Professor at the University of Melbourne. Her research on Papua New Guinea spans 30  years, covering topics including matrilineal kinship exchange, gender, and colonisation and capitalist economic development in Melanesia. Keir Martin is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway. His research to date has focused on social stratification in Papua New Guinea and the contemporary growth of psychotherapy globally. Max Quanchi is a Senior Research Fellow in History at Queensland University. His research focuses on the history of photography, and the colonial era in Papua New Guinea and the wider Pacific. Eva Ch. Raabe is Curator for Oceania and acting director at the Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In her work she focuses on New Guinea, Oceanic Art and material culture. Knut Rio is a Professor of Anthropology at the University Museum in Bergen, Norway. He has worked on topics concerning kinship, ritual life, ceremonial art and witchcraft in Vanuatu. Will Rollason is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University, UK. His research to date has focused on Papua New Guinea and Rwanda. Benedicta Rousseau is a Research Associate in Anthropology at La Trobe University. She has been carrying out research in Vanuatu since 2000, focusing on indigenous leadership, kastom, politics and law. Alan Rumsey is a Professor of Anthropology at Australia National University. His research has focused on languages and cultures of indigenous Australia and Papua New Guinea. Timothy L.M. Sharp is a Research Fellow in Geography at Curtin University, Australia. His research focuses on marketplaces, trade networks and livelihoods in Papua New Guinea. Marilyn Strathern is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, and (Hon.) Life President of the ASA. Since initial work in Papua New Guinea in 1964–​65, Melanesia has always been a presence in her writings. Alice Street is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She has conducted research in Papua New Guinea, exploring how people engage with biomedical technologies. Glenn R. Summerhayes is Professor in Anthropology at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. His research has focused on the archaeology of Papua New Guinea. John Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at La Trobe University. He researches and writes on healthcare-​seeking practices, human mobility, religion, photography and tourism, especially in Vanuatu and New Zealand. Borut Telban is Professor of Anthropology at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His ethnographic and linguistic research in Papua New Guinea has spanned more than 30 years. xiv

— ​ C o n t r i b u t o r s —​

Jaap Timmer is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Macquarie University, Australia. His research focuses on religion and historicity in Solomon Islands and West Papua. Michael Webb is a historical ethnomusicologist and Associate Professor at the University of Sydney. He grew up in Papua New Guinea and has conducted fieldwork there, as well as in Vanuatu and New Caledonia.

xv

PREFACE

Just as we had sent the manuscript of this volume to the publisher, an article appeared in The Guardian newspaper, reporting on the discovery in a thirteenth-​century manuscript on falconry, authored by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, of an image of a bird that was unmistakably a cockatoo.1 Cockatoos similar to the bird illustrated originate from New Guinea and northern Australia. The Emperor Frederick received his cockatoo from the Sultan of Egypt, who himself must have acquired it from points east. This discovery forced a revision of the dating of trade routes between Europe and the western Pacific –​prior to this image coming to light, the oldest picture of a cockatoo from Europe was Andrea Mantegna’s 1496 Madonna della Vittoria altarpiece. What this example highlights is that how Melanesia appears depends on when and in what connection we think about it. Europeans of the thirteenth century were entirely ignorant of the Pacific Ocean, yet Frederick’s cockatoo represents clear evidence of a connection –​no doubt highly indirect and mediated –​between the heart of Europe and Melanesia at a very early date. Since that time, our understanding of Melanesia and its connections to the wider world has increased exponentially to be sure. However, that increase has not been a straightforward linear progression or simple increase. Despite the region’s medieval connections to Europe, the island of New Guinea especially was imagined by colonial officials and missionaries as an untouched land of ‘stone age people’, and is still commonly regarded as ‘the last unknown’. The relations through which we come into contact with Melanesia, and the images we use to think about it, make a difference. As editors, we, of course, are limited to the relations and images available to us. What we have attempted to do in this book is not to provide a completely comprehensive picture of Melanesia –​as if such a thing were possible –​but a rounded picture, taking into account the past and present of the region. Like the cockatoo

1 Lyons, K. 2018. Images of cockatoo on 13th-​century Vatican manuscript inspire trade route rethink. The Guardian, 26 June. Available at: www.theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​jun/​26/​images-​of-​cockatoo-​ on-​13-​century-​vatican-​manuscript-​inspire-​trade-​route-​rethink (accessed 14 January 2019).

xvii

— ​ P r e f a c e —​

pictured in the manuscript, however, this volume can only capture Melanesia at a particular time, and by means of a specific set of relations. In 1993 Epeli Hau’ofa characterised the Pacific as a ‘sea of islands’,2 an image of the region not as a vast ocean punctuated by tiny specks of land, but as a network of routes connecting people and places. His image foregrounded a far-​flung social life of movement and exchange, but left the untraversed sea empty. Our experience of Melanesia as a site and object of scholarship in the editing of this book has, in many ways, been analogous. We have had to work with specific networks of scholars and scholarship, leaving many blank spaces between the cords of the net. Although we attempted, with help from Don Niles, to enlist a number of academics of Melanesian origin, unfortunately none were able to contribute. Likewise, none of our contributors are specialists on New Caledonia or the Torres Straits Islands, although several are knowledgeable about these areas. A  number of topics that we wanted to include could not be covered. This was the case in particular for the topics of sport, youth and education, and migration. Having said this, the list of topics that we could have included was limitless –​for example, net bags, roads and infrastructure, drug use and so on. Even the generous format of this book proved rather narrow in comparison with what might be said of Melanesia. The work of editing has also highlighted certain nodes or islands of expertise, notably at the Australian National University. We have made an effort to expand our network to include scholars from a range of areas, but scholars from Australian and New Zealand institutions represent a considerable proportion of our contributors. We have also made deliberate attempts to register the changing shape of scholarship about Melanesia, and tried to include both new and established scholars in the field. Our successes and failures in constructing the network of relations out of which this book was produced, themselves say something about Melanesia as a scholarly object. In putting this volume together, we have incurred numerous debts in the relationships out of which it is built. Katherine Ong approached us and suggested the volume for the Routledge Worlds series. Both she and Marc Stratton have been extremely helpful in progressing the volume through the publication process. Kelly Winter oversaw production and Rachel Carter did sterling work in copy editing the chapters. All of our contributors also deserve thanks for their patience in answering our numerous queries and our incessant revision of their chapters. We also want to thank Marilyn Strathern, not only for writing the afterword to the volume, but also for her detailed comments on all of the chapters. Ed Rollason provided invaluable help with the mapping for the volume, patiently guiding our clumsy efforts and producing the final maps that appear at the beginning of the book. Eric Hirsch Will Rollason Uxbridge, January 2019

2 Hau’ofa, E. 1993. Our sea of islands. In E. Waddell, V. Naidu and E. Hau’ofa (eds), A New Oceania: rediscovering our sea of islands (2–​16). Suva: School of Social and Economic Development, University of the South Pacific.

xviii

MAPS OF THE REGION AND ITS LANGUAGE GROUPS

Map legend

Table 1  Language groups in the region

Language group

Map number

Index number

Asmat

1

1

Biak

1

2

Dani

1

3

Kamoro

1

4

Kapauku (Mee)

1

5

Korowai

1

6

Sentani

1

7

Yapen

1

8

Abelam

2

9

Ambunti

2

10

Arapesh

2

11

Asabano

2

12

Banaro

2

13

Chambri

2

14

Iatmul

2

15

Karawari

2

16

Kayan

2

17

Manambu

2

18

Mundugamor

2

19

Ngaing

2

20

Oksapmin

2

21

Telefol

2

22

Umeda

2

23

Urapmin

2

24

Wogeo

2

25

Yangoru Boiken

2

26

Ahi

3

27

Ankave

3

28

Fuyuge

3

29

Gogodala

3

30

Kala Kawaw Ya

3

31

Kala Lagaw Ya

3

32

Language group

Map number

Index number

Mekeo

3

33

Merian Mir

3

34

Motu

3

35

Baruya

4

36

Bena (Bena Bena)

4

37

Daribi

4

38

Duna

4

39

Enga

4

40

Etoro

4

41

Foi

4

42

Huli

4

43

Ipili

4

44

Iqwaye

4

45

Kaluli

4

46

Kewa

4

47

Maring

4

48

Melpa

4

49

Mendi

4

50

Onabasulu

4

51

Paiela

4

52

Sambia

4

53

Simbu

4

54

Wiru

4

55

Yuwarrunatse

4

56

Baining

5

57

Kaulong

5

58

Lak

5

59

Lelet

5

60

Mono-​Uravan

5

61

Sulka

5

62

Tolai

5

63

Bwaidoka

6

64

Maisin

6

65

Language group

Map number

Index number

Managalase

6

66

Orokaiva

6

67

Suau

6

68

Are’Are

7

69

Arosi

7

70

Baegu

7

71

Guale

7

72

Kwaio

7

73

Kwara’ae

7

74

Longgu

7

75

Nasioi

7

76

Owa

7

77

To’Abaita

7

78

Mwotlap

8

79

newgenrtpdf

Index map

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Map 1  West Papua

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Map 2  Papua New Guinea (north)

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Map 3  Papua New Guinea (south) and Torres Straits Islands

newgenrtpdf

Map 4  Papua New Guinea (highlands)

newgenrtpdf

Map 5  Papua New Guinea (islands)

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Map 6  Papua New Guinea (east)

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Map 7  Solomon Islands

Map 8  Vanuatu

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Map 9  New Caledonia

newgenrtpdf newgenprepdf

    

Map 10  Regional context

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION The challenge of Melanesia Eric Hirsch and Will Rollason

Villagers from the Marovo Lagoon in the Solomon Islands have for the past couple of years been experiencing unparalleled high-​tide flooding and saltwater inundation of a natural freshwater spring. Knowledge from their ancestors said that winds came and ceased after so many moons. From this knowledge follows all other things, such as tides, rain, fish in the sea, and so on. Because of this, everything has its times and the ancestors knew how to mark those times. This knowledge was passed on to the current generation who, until recently, could see all this with their own eyes. But now people are not sure –​the weather is not straight any more. People from the Marovo Lagoon are, on occasion, given cause to wonder whether the ancestors tricked them and whether matters were ever as straight as they were led to believe (Hviding and Borrevik).1 The inhabitants of Marovo Lagoon have a story that accounts for how their lagoon was created by a giant ogre in the past. The ogre’s wife could not sleep due to the waves crashing on the exposed island. The ogre took the seashore and dragged it away from the island to form the raised barrier reef which is the defining topographic feature of the lagoon. If this account is compared with the analyses of geologists and coral reef scientists, it represents in compressed time how the lagoon was formed through the combination of seismic forces and coral reef building. People in the region are acquainted with strong seismic forces and do not take for granted that seashores, reefs and seaways remain unchanged from one generation to the next. They are also now aware of the tropes of ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ and these are used as one of several local explanations for such changes. Older people with a lifetime of experiences of earthquakes and rising and sinking sea levels question the very idea of ‘climate change’, as in their experience they never knew what was coming next. As one Marovo Lagoon resident asserted, ‘We can’t worry too much about it here, for we know that all of a sudden an earthquake can make our land rise, or sink! We never know what comes next’. On the one hand, then, steady sea level rises are associated with global warming and this is widely recognised throughout the Melanesian region. For the people of the Marovo Lagoon, the effects of climate change are now a current reality affecting their daily lives. On the other hand, Melanesians have always dealt with droughts, flooding, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and tropical storms, and islanders have developed their own schemes of prediction and adjustment honed from thousands of 1

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years of living in the Pacific Ring of Fire, and the current effects of global warming are just one more thing that they are adapting to, based on this extensive knowledge. The example of climate change illustrates one of the important themes that emerges from the diverse contributions to this volume. Climate change cannot be made sense of unless it is understood as a worldwide phenomenon. Although global warming caused by carbon emissions is overwhelmingly created by industrialised countries, it profoundly affects Melanesian peoples and other remote coastal and island inhabitants who have had no part in its origins. At the same time, it is impossible to understand the experience of climate change unless it is examined in a local context and with reference to local ideas. From one perspective the islands that make up the world of Melanesia are little different from other so-​called Third World contexts. People endure inadequate healthcare, patronage politics, shanty towns, domestic violence, environmental degradation due to resource extraction, and now climate change. They have also been missionised by numerous Christian churches, their lands are part of conservation projects, and many partake in Ponzi money schemes. From a different perspective, all of these issues common to Third World peoples (among others) have a distinctiveness in the Melanesian world. How to manage the relationship between these two perspectives on Melanesia is one of the key issues this volume raises. In this introduction, we consider the relationship between these perspectives. First, we discuss our definition of ‘Melanesia’ for the purposes of this volume. Second, we explore the significance of different approaches to Melanesian distinctiveness, or conversely, what the region and its people share with others, for the development of social science. We attend especially to anthropology because of the well-​known cultural and linguistic diversity of the region which has been largely investigated by anthropologists. Third, we discuss a series of key thematic and practical issues –​ gender, sexuality and kinship, the impact of Christianity on the region, and the role of images of mobility and connection in a wide array of contexts. We use these issues to illustrate how the dilemma between the distinctiveness or generality of Melanesia is evident in everyday life. A dilemma of this kind, however, is potentially crippling. Without a way of bringing its two arms  –​‘Melanesian distinctiveness’ and ‘Third World generality’ –​into some relation it threatens to become a gulf between entirely different paradigms with little to say to one another. To avoid such an impasse, fourth, we suggest attending to the ways in which Melanesians mobilise particular forms of action in definite undertakings, attempting to move social life in the direction of their interests. These forms are, of course, located, and enacted in culturally specific ways. The extent to which Melanesia will appear distinctive or as a reflection of broader problems will depend on how the people involved (including scholars) value or exploit the cultural specificity of these undertakings in relation to more expansive horizons.

DEFINING ‘THE MELANESIAN WORLD’ For the purposes of this volume, we consider ‘the Melanesian world’ to consist of the following contemporary political entities: Papua New Guinea (PNG), West Papua, Torres Strait Islands, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia. All of these contemporary political units were previously the colonial possessions of various 2

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European powers. In the interests of clarity and simplicity, in this introduction, and throughout the volume, we use contemporary designations wherever possible, using the historical names of colonial entities only where absolutely necessary. This is particularly important with regard to the designation ‘New Guinea’, which we use to refer to the island of New Guinea, the landmass occupied by PNG and West Papua. We do not use New Guinea, unless explicitly stated, to refer to the German, Dutch and British colonies that at various times and in different languages were called ‘New Guinea’, or the Australian Territory of the same name. A similar terminological problem exists for what we call ‘West Papua’. By West Papua, we intend the western half of the island of New Guinea, which was annexed by Indonesia in 1962 (see Firth, Quanchi). In administrative terms, this latter region is currently composed of two provinces, Papua and West Papua (Papua Barat) which were formed out of a single province, first called Irian Jaya, and then Papua. Indonesian rule has often been extremely abusive of indigenous Papuans, and opposition to it has been both widespread and vocal (and sometimes violent). As a result, names for the western half of the island of New Guinea are politically charged and the use of one name or another signals political alignment either with the Indonesian government or with Papuan independence activists. West Papua is the designation favoured by activist opponents of Indonesian rule on the island of New Guinea, and we follow that usage here, despite the potential for confusion with West Papua Province, the Indonesian administrative entity.2 Temporally, the chapters in the volume examine the Melanesian world back to the first evidence of human occupation in the region, some 49,000 years ago. They are, however, mainly focused on the present and recent history. Contributors attend closely to the period since the expansion of European influence and colonialism into the region at the end of the nineteenth century, and the bulk of the volume considers contemporary issues. Indeed, in many respects the idea of the contemporary moment operates as a kind of ‘meta-​frame’ for the Melanesia that is the subject of this book and enables the connections that our contributors establish between different kinds of human activity. In spatial terms, it is difficult to place boundaries around Melanesia. Geographically, both the eastern and western boundaries of Melanesia can be drawn in different ways. Fiji to the east is often included (see Brookfield and Hart 1971) but has also been excluded (see Strathern 1988). Hauʹofa (2008: 39, n.1) excludes Fiji from Melanesia ‘for geographic and cultural reasons’. In a similar manner, western areas of Indonesia, including Maluku, North Maluku and East Nusa Tenggara, could come within the boundaries of Melanesia given their proximity to the island of New Guinea, related Austronesian origins (see below) and the similarity of indigenous cultural life but are rarely included (see Firth, this volume). The dimension of time also makes the definition of a Melanesian world problematic. What is now Australia and New Guinea was a single landmass for roughly three fourths of the period of human habitation. Even after the postglacial division, when the Torres Strait land bridge was flooded, the two land masses are only separated by 100 kilometres of sea. It is very likely that there has been unbroken human traffic between them for thousands of years (see Rumsey 2001). Indeed, as Summerhayes, reviewing the archaeological evidence of human habitation, and Rumsey, discussing linguistic diversity, both note, people we now think of as ‘Melanesians’ have historical 3

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connections far to the west and east. The Austronesian languages that are now common in Melanesia were introduced by seafaring people, probably from Taiwan, around 3,500 years ago. These people journeyed through the Malay Archipelago and into Polynesia and crossed the Indian Ocean to arrive in Madagascar. Such wide-​ ranging connections were clearly significant as recently as 300 years ago, when sweet potatoes from Central or South America were introduced almost certainly through contacts with Polynesians. Once in Melanesia, they fuelled the development of the dense populations and exchange systems in the New Guinea highlands that so captivated twentieth-​century ethnographers (Bourke). These connections and entanglements have equally been a feature of more recent times. It is well documented, for example, that Polynesian missionaries from Samoa and neighbouring islands who were initially converted by European missionaries were brought to Melanesian islands to teach the gospel in village settings (Barker). It was thought by European missionaries that Polynesians would be better adapted to village life and able to engage with Melanesians in their domestic contexts. While Polynesians travelled to Melanesia, Melanesians from different islands were brought to Australia and Fiji as indentured labourers, often staying for several years (Quanchi). In short, as many of the chapters in this volume record, the boundaries between the Melanesian world and neighbouring ‘worlds’ were sites of recurrent crossings and transformations (cf. Thomas 2010). From a material and historical point of view, the Melanesian world is not a world unto itself. Thus, any definition involves carving ‘Melanesia’ out of a larger expanse of similar places –​Fiji, Indonesia, and so on –​and shutting off certain connections, to Australia and latterly China and Southeast Asia, for example (see Bellwood, Fox and Tryon 2006 [1995]). This is necessarily an arbitrary exercise that itself relies on earlier, equally arbitrary definitions that have given us the notion of Melanesia in the first place. The merits of any definition of Melanesia from this perspective must be given by its capacity to help to solve and identify problems. Thus, we can argue that our Melanesia consists in a large area in which the indigenous cultures that are the main subject of the contributors to this book are quite closely related and similar. To include Fiji would have been to introduce excessive complexity, especially in the relation between indigenous and Indo-​Fijians, in a context in which we already must grapple with the profound political and social differences between the independent Melanesian states of PNG, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, and the very different, non-​ independent entities, West Papua, Torres Strait Islands and New Caledonia. From this point of view, our restricted Melanesia has the merit of a certain (limited) coherence. This discussion emphasises the interested nature of definitions of Melanesia. Quanchi, in his historical overview (and 2006), remarks how the name given to the passage around the eastern tip of PNG, the China Strait, reflects Europeans’ limited interest in the region. New Guinea and its associated archipelagos was significant because it was on the way to China, and the town of Samarai, for a brief period, flourished because of its proximity to this trade route. This underscores the fact that the ‘Melanesia’ we receive from history is the product of European colonial interests, as well as subsequent geo-​political alignments in the region. Scholars, foreign as much as Melanesian (see Narakobi 1983; Moutu 2011), bring their own interests to Melanesia, and the alternative approaches to defining the region sketched here, as well as their limitations, reflect this fact. Our definition should therefore be 4

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understood as provisional. We hope that it will enable readers to come to grips with the questions and choices that the study of Melanesia presents. We have divided this volume into a series of thematic sections. The volume opens with two parts, constituting a set of six chapters covering topics of considerable breadth. These can be read as contributions to their respective fields in their own right, but also serve to provide context for the more tightly thematised contributions later in the book. The first three chapters aim to provide a historical context for Melanesia. These chapters contextualise this large region in terms of its prehistoric past (Summerhayes) and the key influences that have affected its peoples over a period of nearly 150 years, covering the colonial and post-​colonial periods (Quanchi), and with a chapter devoted to Christian missionisation (Barker), which has played a very important role in political and social developments in the region (see Timmer; Eriksen and MacCarthy). This trio, which aims to provide context in time, is followed by another whose purpose is to introduce readers to key thematic concerns in the region, operating at right-​angles, if you like, to the historical material. The chapters of this section serve three related purposes. The first is to introduce the reader to the geo-​ political context of Melanesia and its relations with some of the major powers in the region (Firth). The second is to introduce the remarkable linguistic diversity of Melanesia which accounts for a large percentage of the world’s languages (Rumsey). Finally, to present an overview of Melanesian social life, largely from the perspective of anthropological knowledge of the region (Timmer). This will show how the broad thematic topics raised in the remainder of the volume are influenced by regional variation and common trends (including socio-​cultural life, history and missionisation). Following this opening material, the body of the volume is given over to chapters treating key contemporary issues in Melanesia. The choice of topics in these chapters is, of course, selective and interested, reflecting recent patterns of scholarship on the region and the availability of contributors. Given the problems of defining Melanesia and debates about the region’s significance (see below), it was necessary to choose topics that did not prejudge what is understood by the ‘Melanesian world’. Therefore, we proposed topics that are somewhat ‘neutral’ or general in this regard. Likewise, we have not chosen theoretically driven topics such as the constitution of persons and collectivities in Melanesia, often phrased in terms of the ‘dividuality’ or ‘partibility’ of persons (Strathern 1988: 13, 15, 348–​349n7), although these notions frame much of the ethnography of the region and we allude to them below. Although we have not singled out kinship, for example, as an explicit contemporary issue, it is clear that it figures either implicitly or explicitly in all the contributions to this volume, and we discuss it in this introduction. Our aim has been to structure discussion in a way that does not assume a given framework for understanding Melanesia. The broad topic headings could be found in any classic ethnography of the region. The thematic chapters dealing with contemporary issues are, in turn, divided into five topical areas. The first of these (Part III) concerns issues of economy and livelihood. This is a central part of understanding any social life. In the Melanesian context much of this understanding has been informed by the distinction between ‘gifts’ and ‘commodities’ (Gregory 1982). A very large percentage of people across the region live in rural villages and live from subsistence agriculture (Bourke). At the same time, urban life and migration to towns (Goddard), money and market trading (Sharp and Busse), with their attendant influence on class formation (Gibson) have 5

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been far reaching in their influences. In some cases, as in the development of ‘fast money schemes’ or Ponzi scams, these influences are heavily inflected by Melanesian understandings of the operation of both local and international systems of economy and governance (Cox). Questions of governance, politics and public institutions are the focus of the Part IV of the book. Within Melanesian Anthropology this set of issues has only recently been the focus of sustained ethnographic research (Reed 2003; Street 2014). The section seeks to address such questions as how people see and interact with government and public institutions and how this shapes their everyday social lives. The chapters deal both with state agencies and the provision of public services  –​ local government (Dalsgaard), policing and prison services (Dinnen), law (Demian and Rousseau) and health (Street)  –​and with political issues facing Melanesian governments  –​sovereignty and civil conflict (Allen) and questions of gender and human rights (Macintyre). The third topical section deals with issues that have long been central, both to Melanesian social life and politics, and scholarship concerning the region –​namely questions concerning religion and ritual, including concerns over Christian and other churches and exchange practices. There have been many debates about the character of Melanesian religious beliefs and activities. Part V addresses some of these issues. Indigenous millennial cults, popularly called ‘cargo cults’ have been a key focus of scholarship (Lindstrom). The influence of new Christian churches, as well as other religious sects, has also been considerable throughout the region (Eriksen and MacCarthy, see also below). Connected to these practices is the widespread presence of witchcraft and sorcery which has recently taken the form of extreme gendered violence (Rio). Initiation ritual and exchange practices are classic issues in Melanesian Anthropology and in many respects have been seen as the defining features of Melanesian societies (Martin; Bonnemère). Another area of longstanding scholarly interest in Melanesia is that of art, material culture and, more recently, cultural heritage. This is the topic of Part VI. Past research on Melanesian art tended to focus on the production of traditional objects and the analysis of motifs. More recently there has been a shift in emphasis which addresses matters of representation, appropriation, art markets and the politics of ‘traditional’ art in the context of evangelical Christianity. The chapters in this section deal with both aspects of these issues, with contributions on material culture (Hermkens), museums and cultural centres (Bolton), post-​colonial and contemporary art (Raabe), traditional and contemporary music and dance (Webb) and tourism (Taylor). The final set of contributions deals with issues surrounding ‘development’ and the use of environmental resources, including the concerns with climate change we introduced above. The vast majority of Melanesian peoples still reside on customary land. Place and landscape thus figure centrally in how people constitute themselves (Telban). Most recently, telecommunications have spread to many parts of the region and there are trends toward social connections to wider networks and increasingly dispersed compatriots or ‘wantoks’ (Hobbis). At the same time much land is rich in exploitable resources, whether for local cash-​cropping, multinational large-​scale mining, logging, trawling or petrochemical extraction (Banks). In this environment of exploitation, local people are widely involved in conservation programmes (Henning) and debates about climate change (Hviding and Borrevik). The volume 6

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concludes with an afterword by Marilyn Strathern. This was written independently of this introduction, but in dialogue with the other chapters, and comments on the overall project of the book. The arrangement of the chapters in this volume is intended only as a provisional organisation of the material. Like the notion of Melanesia itself, these sections are our classifications and clearly not the ways in which people in Melanesia would necessarily understand their world. Nor do they exhaust the possible connections that could be drawn between the various chapters. Ritual (Timmer; Bonnemère) shades rapidly into exchange (Martin), which in turn has a clear influence on local government (Dalsgaard) and has profound implications for the ways people understand their place in wider economic systems (Cox), for example. Similarly, contemporary art (Raabe) speaks to questions of gender and human rights (Macintyre), invoking in the process local understandings of law (Demian and Rousseau) as much as they involve the international conventions to which Melanesian nations are, in one way or another, signatories (Firth). Thus, the divisions into which we have organised this volume, while they seem necessary for the coherent presentation of the material, are probably more interesting for their cross-​cutting connections than for any attempt rigidly to classify the chapters. Where possible, material from all the countries and areas that make up Melanesia as we define it was to be discussed in each chapter. The majority of the chapters focus on PNG, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, however. This is mainly the result of the ways in which scholarship on the region, especially in English, is structured. PNG occupies a dominant position in this scholarship because of its size and linguistic and cultural diversity. The study of Solomon Islands and Vanuatu reveals similar themes to those found in PNG. Together these countries constitute the core of the ‘Melanesia’ conventionally studied by Anglophone social scientists. West Papua is somewhat neglected because the political situation there makes access problematic, although a body of recent literature does exist (see, for example, Slama and Munro 2015; Kirksey 2012; Rutherford 2003, 2012; Stasch 2009; Miedema, Odé and Dam 1998; Miedema and Reesink 2004; Miedema 1984; Ploeg 2001). Torres Strait Islands are generally little studied in their own right (but see Beckett 1987, 2015) with many sources dealing with islanders together with Aboriginal Australians more generally. The bulk of social scientific work on New Caledonia is published in French, which has tended to insulate the study of New Caledonia from wider, mainly Anglophone, Melanesian studies. New Caledonia is covered here in various chapters, although none focus on it specifically.

STUDYING MELANESIA The problem of how to comprehend Melanesia is, of course, not new. The question of how to value the ‘singularity’ of Melanesia has long shaped Western engagement with the region, and had a profound impact on scholarly approaches to it. Historically, Western explorers, colonists and early scholars supposed ‘Melanesia’ to be an incommensurably alien place populated by ‘alien people’ (see Carrier 1992: 1–​21). One objective, and certainly an effect, of Malinowski’s (1922) pioneering anthropological studies was to dispel the assumption that Melanesians were incommensurably different from the metropolitan people who undertook to study them. He aimed 7

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to make Melanesians, or ‘savages’, as he called them with the easy racism of his era, readily comparable to Western people. They were, he argued, equally human and comprehensible, given the right intellectual tools. Indeed, ensuring this comparability and the general conclusions it allowed social scientists to draw from studies of Melanesia, remained central to the project of the anthropology of the region as it developed before and after the Second World War. After the Second World War, Melanesia became a major centre of anthropological attention, and in particular the PNG highlands. Many highlands populations had only been contacted by the colonial administration in the 1930s. The surprising density and scale of highlands groups, their systems of ceremonial exchange and ritual, which had developed largely unaffected by colonialism (Salisbury 1962), made them fascinating subjects for the ethnographic researchers of the time. Nevertheless, the anthropologists who studied these people maintained the assumption that they were comparable to other people using the tools furnished by anthropology. Especially, notions of society and social structure, as the means by which ‘individuals’ were integrated into ‘groups’, were thought to be applicable to their lives, their divergent histories and evident cultural difference notwithstanding (Wagner 1974). A.  Strathern (1979: 98) seemed to be stating the obvious when he observed that ‘the problem of the relationship between the individual and the group is surely as ancient as any in anthropology’. Restricted to particular mountain valleys, each demonstrating their own cluster of linguistic, social and cultural traits, in this comparative frame, highlands peoples appeared to offer a veritable ‘laboratory’ for testing the effects of slight differences in ecology, institutions, economic or ritual organisation on social structure (see Brown 1978). The difficulty with this ‘laboratory’ approach was its strong presumption that Papua New Guinean societies were comparable with one another, and with other societies elsewhere. This amounted to the assumption that social systems were all equivalent to one another. Hence, PNG highlands social life could be, and often was, analysed in terms of models developed to understand descent in sub-​Saharan Africa, albeit with limited success (see Barnes 1962). The failure of African models to decode highlands social life did not result in the abandonment of comparison, however, but the production of more and more sophisticated models of social structure in an effort to discover analogies between PNG societies and other social systems. Ultimately, as Wagner (1974: 97) pointed out, this led anthropologists into a ‘kind of game of heuristic pretending’, equating the features of indigenous social organisations to their functional equivalents found in European and American state societies. The very search for ‘groups’ or ‘societies’ in this context represented the attempt to discover something analogous to the organisation of American or European social life, casting Melanesians (in Wagner’s 1974: 97 phrasing) ‘in the unseemly roles of barristers and bewigged judges’ and rendering their social lives as a ‘droll parody of the Bank of England’. In the process, needless to say, whatever constituted the ‘singularity’ of Melanesia was obscured. In response to this problem, a number of anthropologists, notably Battaglia (1983), Biersack (1984), Damon (1983), Gillison (1980), Jolly (1984), Lederman (1980), Mimica (1988), J. Weiner (1988), and earlier Wagner (1967, 1972), began to recognise the limitations of the conventions of existing anthropological analysis. Rather than subjecting their ethnographic materials to ideas of ‘society’ or ‘culture’ 8

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they attempted to pursue the logical implications of indigenous conceptualisations of social life. This approach was crystallised in M.  Strathern’s (1988) The Gender of the Gift. Strathern’s critical target was the assumption that the conceptual repertoire of anthropology was adequate to account for other people’s social lives –​in other words, she attacked the assumption, that had been at the heart of social scientific approaches to the region since Malinowski’s day, that Melanesian social lives were comparable to African or Western ones. Highlanders, she argued, were clearly interested in ideas of reproduction, but what was being reproduced was not ‘society’ –​ a distinctively modern European idea, which did not inform their ideas of the world. Anthropologists would be better employed understanding how Melanesians thought about their social lives and rendering these indigenous notions useful as new social scientific concepts. This line of argument had the effect of reinvigorating old interests in the alterity of Melanesia  –​the same fascination with the otherness of remote peoples –​albeit on a rather different basis to the myth of primitive society of previous eras. We can trace the effects of this reinvigoration in two directions. First, and mainly within the anthropology of Melanesia, we find work that amplifies and makes use of the ethnographic basis of Strathern’s work to understand Melanesia. A generation of researchers who had either worked with, or been heavily influenced by Strathern and Wagner, whose work is closely related, set about developing ethnographies predicated on the radical difference of Melanesians. This kind of work, sometimes termed the ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’ (Josephides 1991), was in some ways productive, working out the possibilities of Strathern’s approach, elaborating it as a theoretical corpus, and often producing excellent descriptive material that greatly extended anthropological understanding of Melanesian social life. The establishment of the New Melanesian Ethnography as a school of anthropological thought about Melanesia, however, always stood in an awkward relationship with Strathern’s project in The Gender of the Gift. Whereas Strathern’s original project involved confronting the comparative project of anthropology with differences that it could not digest, the reuse of her work often lost that disruptive, challenging tendency. Commonly, ‘Melanesia’ simply became a shorthand for a set of socio-​ cultural features –​gift exchange, distinctive forms of personhood, gendered relations and so on –​that marked out a putative ‘culture area’ which always appeared as other to ‘the West’. As a result, the assumption that Melanesians were different became as problematic as the earlier assumption, that they were comparable to other people, that Strathern had attempted to unseat (Rollason 2014; Robbins 2007; Martin 2013). The second significant line of argument developed from The Gender of the Gift and allied ideas is the so-​called ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology. If the New Melanesian Ethnography developed the ethnographic basis of Strathern’s ideas in order to understand ethnography, then scholars of the ontological turn attempt to make use of the conceptual tools that The Gender of the Gift affords to pursue a project for the reconceptualisation of anthropology. This is a movement within contemporary anthropology that seeks to enhance or ‘intensify’ the potential of ethnography to yield new conceptual insights. This is, in a sense, a turn toward an older anthropology, or at least to old concerns with the ‘exotic’. Comparisons can legitimately be drawn with, for example, the work of Lévy-​Bruhl (1975 [1949]), who argued that Bororo people did not distinguish themselves from their environment, but ‘participated’ in it. The ontological turn can be read as an effort to ‘re-​enchant’ (Salmond 2013) the 9

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world by rediscovering the possibility of transcending the Cartesian division between humans and the world, nature and culture, mind and body (putatively) implicit in Western knowledge (Viveiros de Castro 2015). Such a re-​enchantment is intended to conjure other ways of being that can, at least, ‘haunt’ (Hage 2012) Western common sense with alternatives. These alternatives, scholars of the ontological turn contend, are lost when all human lives are rendered comparable, as cultural responses to the natural world, for example, or social structures in relation to individuals. Hence, the proponents of the ontological turn argue, like Strathern, that the value of ethnography cannot lie in its illumination of theories and categories that are already known –​in, for example, the ways in which the experiences of the people of the Marovo Lagoon illuminate a ‘global problem’ of climate change. Rather, indigenous ideas are to be understood as concepts articulating their own visions of the world –​realities, that is, that are quite independent of the world defined by social scientific concepts and which are not exhausted by Western theorising. As Viveiros de Castro puts it, the problem of other people from this perspective is not ‘how they have culture’, understood as a creative engagement with a stable world that everyone understands in different ways. Rather, it is to understand how other people’s concerns, and the very ‘world’ they inhabit, are articulated by the specific concepts they have at their disposal. The question then is not how other people ‘have culture’ but how they ‘have a world’. Rather than becoming mere subjects of anthropology, the others conjured by the ontological turn are thus deliberately maintained in their alterity as standing challenges to (social) scientific claims to really understand the world. That is, the ontological turn asks us to conceive the world ‘otherwise’ (Povinelli 2014; Viveiros de Castro 2015) as an intellectual project, by entertaining the possibility that (social) scientific concepts are not descriptively or analytically exhaustive and that the world could thus be conceptualised on different terms. This is also an explicitly political programme that aims to break the hold of Western notions of nature and causation over responses to the world’s problems. In this sense, the ‘singularity’ of Melanesia has been an inspiration for ethnographers working in many settings, from Corsica to Siberia and the Amazon. Like the New Melanesian Ethnography, however, the turn to ‘ontology’ has been criticised for highlighting the differences between people at the expense of shared concerns  –​especially histories of connection, change and domination, as well as common human engagements in pressing problems like climate change.3 Indeed, it is difficult to talk at the same time about radical difference  –​the ways in which people seem unique –​and their implication in power relations that tend to demonstrate how they are influenced by others. This response has in many ways been as creative as the ‘ontological’ anthropology that prompted it. Scholars such as Pina-​ Cabral (2014a, 2014b), Graeber (2015), Chua (2015) and others have attempted to retheorise a ‘shared world’ in a way that will avoid reintroducing the dichotomies central to Western knowledge discussed above. Some such world, as critics Bessire and Bond (2014) insist, is necessary in order to take account of the evident and effective connections between peoples  –​even those who seem very different from one another. Without a shared world, the historical constitution of different social lives seems unimaginable, especially insofar as those lives are formed in contexts of long-​ranged systems of domination such as colonialism.4 Such linkages and power relations are evident, for example, in the injustices of the climate crisis, which is 10

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caused in the industrialised global North, but whose effects are felt overwhelmingly in the impoverished South, such that sea level rise in the Solomon Islands is caused elsewhere (in a different ontological ‘world’, perhaps). Likewise, soon after the publication of The Gender of the Gift, scholars including Carrier (1992) and perhaps especially Thomas (1991) criticised Strathern for neglecting the history of the people she studied, and the ways in which their lives were not simply ‘Melanesian’ –​and thus part of a great Melanesian singularity –​but co-​produced with non-​Melanesians in a long history of exchange, contact and colonialism. Strathern’s (1993) retort to this critique, however, is simply to observe that history, too, is a concept with a definite source and not a neutral yardstick of reality. History might be used to account for connections between people and places and for the forms of specific ways of life. Appealing to it without accounting for the form of the concept and where it comes from is simply to revert to the presumption that Melanesians and Western people are essentially similar, however. Concepts of history, like concepts of society, have a source, and it is implausible to ask Melanesians to ‘have history’ in the way Westerners might expect (see Hirsch 2014). Indeed, from the perspective of the ontological turn, such an appeal to (Western) history simply misses the point, which is to recover the possibility of radically different ways of conceptualising the world, which exist not so much ‘in history’ as in other ways of unfolding time and reality (Neumann 1992; Pedersen and Holbraad 2013). The question that the notion of the Melanesian world poses us, then, is how ‘world’ is to be understood. This question returns us to Hviding and Borrevik’s account of the Marovo Lagoon’s rising sea levels. In one sense, the generality of the problems presented by global climate change stand as an argument against the valorisation of cultural specificity. From this perspective, the existential threat presented by a warming planet demands alliances to be made, common ground to be found between diverse people, and a last, vast cosmopolitan effort to be made against disaster. Humanity’s last stand is for everyone, irrespective of society or culture. Seen in this way, the conceptual elaboration and careful distinction of points of view that lie at the heart of The Gender of the Gift or the ontological turn might seem frivolous, an academic game, played in ‘ivory towers’, that converts the urgent needs of faraway others into the intellectual playthings of the privileged (Bessire and Bond 2014). Yet, the reconceptualisation of difference implicit in The Gender of the Gift or the ontological turn provides them with a riposte. The assumption that common cause can be made between different people may lie at the heart of those very factors that cause the planet to warm. A common humanity, as Viveiros de Castro (1998) observes, assumes that all people have the same vision of nature. Since calls for human unity are typically made from influential positions within the global North, that nature typically takes the form of a non-​human, external world over which culture  –​science, technology, civilisation –​seeks to extend domination. It is exactly this presumption, that people can and should dominate an environment that will always be ‘natural’, that lies at the root of modernity, industrialism and thus the climate crisis. Likewise, it is precisely this kind of stance toward the world that makes it impossible to recognise politically that, in the so-​called Anthropocene, the environment, including the atmosphere, has become a human product. From this point of view, a failure to think ‘otherwise’ about the world, to develop new concepts and entertain other conceptual worlds, may yet be fatal for everyone (see Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2017 [2014]). 11

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These issues have their own implications for the definition of Melanesia as an object of study. If Melanesia is a part of the ‘Third World’ and subject to common problems, then it is very hard to delimit because the issues and questions at stake often seem ‘global’ in character. On the other hand, if Melanesia is to be seen as a ‘distinctive world’ then it does not really matter where its limits are placed. This is essentially because, seen in this way, ‘Melanesia’ is not a place so much as a site of conceptualisation or perspective. From the point of view of the New Melanesian Ethnography, the question of ‘where Melanesia is’ recedes, since almost by definition, ‘Melanesia’ ceases to be a location in a shared world whose coordinates in space or time could be meaningful. Seen in terms of the ontological turn, if Melanesia’s singularity is understood primarily as a source of new concepts, then its geographical or temporal location matters as little as that of the apocryphal apple tree under which Isaac Newton is supposed to have discovered gravity. Newton’s theory of gravitation, like Descartes’ res cogitans (‘thought’), is not located, applying throughout the cosmos; the location of the tree is incidental. Likewise, if Melanesia is to be used to understand the world ‘otherwise’, then its exact position or extent is immaterial  –​ Melanesia becomes something to think with, rather than a specific geographical location or, necessarily, a particular historical juncture (Gell 1999; Holbraad and Pedersen 2009). The Melanesian world, therefore, presents us with a series of choices that are at once intellectual, being concerned with how we should understand others; ethical inasmuch as we must choose how to recognise others; and political in the sense that they demand that we articulate a vision of the future and a solution to the challenges it presents. These choices are evident in all of the chapters in this volume to the extent that they engage with what makes contemporary Melanesia a distinctive region, and what problems and concerns Melanesians might share with others, especially other people in the global South.

EVERYDAY DILEMMAS: GENDER RELATIONS, SEXUALITY AND KINSHIP These choices are present everywhere one looks in Melanesian social life. They are perhaps nowhere more obvious than in the form of the everyday social relations anthropologists and other social scientists would call gender, sexual and kinship relations. Analysis of Melanesian gender relations and sexuality transformed significantly in the 1970s and 1980s. The emergence of feminist anthropology recast the relations between men and women in terms of gender. The earlier studies of Malinowski (1922) and Mead (1935) on exchange and sexual relations in PNG were re-​evaluated (see A. Weiner 1976; Errington and Gewertz 1987). Weiner showed for instance, the value of women’s exchange on the Trobriand Islands providing a new perspective on relations between men and women (A. Weiner 1976). Earlier, M. Strathern examined female roles in a male-​ dominated world of the PNG highlands where marriage exogamy meant that women were ‘in between’ competing collectivities of men (M. Strathern 1972). Neither used the language of gender. However, by the 1980s issues of gender and sexuality were to the fore. A focus on sexual identity, especially that of 12

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masculinity associated with studies of ritualised homosexuality was influential (see Herdt 1981). Again, assumptions concerning Melanesian sexual identities or gender relations were informed by Western ideas of ‘identity’ and gender politics which did not necessarily apply to the Melanesian world. While one wing of Melanesianists were emphasising the particularities of Melanesian gender and sexual relations, the development of feminist sensibilities in the discipline allowed another set of scholars to focus on the decidedly violent nature of these same relations. Keesing (1992: 132–​133), for instance, highlighted the violence and terror that characterised Melanesian societies, especially as it was well documented in the New Guinea highlands, but also citing evidence from his own fieldwork with the Kwaio, Solomon Islands. From the perspective of Melanesian distinctiveness, of central import is the way ‘coercion’ informs kinship and marriage relations: people are comprised of their relations with others and compelled  –​coerced  –​to act with regard to these multiple others. The form their actions take is often that of transactions, either mediated by things  –​such as food, pigs or money  –​or unmediated given the directedness of the transaction, as in sexual relations between a husband and wife. Subsistence food production, for example, still provides most of the food consumed across the Melanesian region (except in the case of New Caledonia and especially the Torres Strait Islands) and relations between men and women in this arena involve diverse forms of such ‘coercive’ transactions, from collaboration in gardens to a division of labour in rearing pigs. On the other hand, many of the exchanges intrinsic to kinship and marriage relations such as bridewealth or the character of gender relations in domestic settings are infused with violence. Incidents of pack rape, sexual violence and gender violence more generally are well documented across the region. Indicatively, one of the important effects of mobile phones in the Solomon Islands is to enable women to seek safety from violent husbands (Hobbis). Violence associated with gender relations has been noted and criticised by anthropologists, Melanesians and other interested parties. Critique of this kind extends to the material transactions, ‘bridewealth’ or ‘brideprice’ that, in many areas of Melanesia, are integral to marriages. Through education, migration and perceptions influenced by what can be called a class consciousness, many women (and men) now view the things transacted, e.g. pigs, lorries and money, in exchange for brides as unacceptable. It is as if the husband purchases the woman. Wardlow (2006: 124) examines the differences between ‘bridewealth’ and ‘brideprice’ and considers whether the former is transforming into the latter across the Melanesian region. The term bridewealth as used conventionally –​especially by anthropologists  –​suggests enduring connections between kin of the wife and husband involving obligations of exchange and support. By contrast, brideprice implies a contract-​like relation where women become alienated from their natal kin and affinal relations are not given priority. When men invoke the idiom of brideprice they appear to do so in order to assert dominance over women as wives. Jolly (1994: 132) argues that the term brideprice is appropriate for what would have once been referred to as bridewealth on South Pentecost, Vanuatu: the same idiom of purchase she reports is now used when buying trade store goods and for women in marriage. Each are said to have a price. The influence of the colonial and capitalist system, Jolly suggests, 13

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has introduced new ways to perceive and talk about persons and things (Jolly 1994: 117; Jorgensen 1993; Zimmer-​Tamakoshi 1993). In response to these developments, Wardlow (2006) shows, some women disengage from the conditions they are placed in as wives or daughters; they become ‘wayward’. This occurs when there are incidents or situations where women act to avoid compromising their autonomy and capacity for action. They choose other ways or paths, some with risky consequences, as when they become town-​dwelling prostitutes, known as ‘passenger women’ in PNG, where the occurrence of violence is ever-​present. Are these completely new developments associated with modern states, cities and towns and lack of paid employment opportunities, or an enlargement of the violence against women well documented by anthropologists beginning from the early period of colonialism? Melanesian states are now members of the United Nations and other international bodies as well as the site of numerous NGOs that all promote universal human rights. In addition, all Melanesian states (including New Caledonia which is a part of France) have constitutions that grant legal equality to both women and men. The study of quotidian gender relations thus forces us into the dilemmas identified in the previous section. Are we to recognise Melanesian subjects as culturally specific, even radically different, or as bearers of universal human rights? Should we understand violence through the universalising lens of the abuse of those rights, or as the outcome of particular cultural and social arrangements? How, in short, should we analyse, and extend respect to Melanesians, and what political outcomes do we seek? In May 1996 an article appeared in the Post-​Courier, PNG’s largest circulation English-​language newspaper. The article was entitled ‘Girl Sold in Death Compo’. The article began as follows: ‘A young girl has been included as part of a compensation payment to relatives of one of two men shot dead by police recently’ (Palme 1996: 1). The article describes the killing of two men by police in a village near the town of Minj in Western Highlands Province. One victim was a former policeman, turned criminal. The second man, Koidam Willingal, was reported as his ‘bodyguard’. The villagers argued that Willingal was not an appropriate police target and that his death was unjustified. Willingal’s mother’s clan claimed that Willingal’s clansmen had not done enough to protect the deceased from being killed (see Gewertz and Errington 1999a: 125 for the complex details of Willingal’s residence and that of his two wives and five children). His mother’s clan thus demanded ‘head pay’, compensation for his death that included money, pigs and one or more marriageable women. In this area there is a protective relationship between a maternal clansman and his nephews which is recognised especially at death. It is then that the clan of the deceased returns the skull and bones together with valuables to the maternal kin. This is known as ‘head pay’. One of Willingal’s daughters, Miriam, was the only woman of marriageable age (she was eighteen) in his clan, which is her clan as well. She was therefore included in the valuables to be given as ‘head pay’. Shortly after the case was reported it was brought to court by a Port Moresby-​ based human rights NGO, Individual and Community Rights Advocacy Forum (ICRAF). The NGO had responded to a second newspaper article where Miriam said she was torn between her personal desires to continue her education and obligations to her clan and the traditional practices which she no longer believed in. ICRAF was successful in convincing the Justice hearing the case to place Miriam in protective 14

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custody while the court decided whether the ‘head pay’ violated constitutional and human rights. Months later the case was finally decided by the presiding judge, Justice Salamo Injia. The judge’s decision was based on the evidence provided by the NGO and subsequent affidavits filed with the court. He sought to understand the local practice of head pay, as he was instructed to do under Section 2 of the Customs Recognition Act. Meanwhile, he wrote that the tribesmen of Minj and their customs and customary practices, like people of any of the other small societies in Papua New Guinea, are part of modern Papua New Guinea and they are governed by our national laws. If their customs and customary practices conflict with the National Laws, they must give way to our national laws. This is a requirement of national laws of which the Constitution reigns Supreme. (Injia 1997: 43, quoted by Gewertz and Errington 1999a: 131) The judge found that the customary practice of head pay, where a woman is obligated to be part of the payment, was an infringement of a woman’s rights under Section 32 of the Constitution. This section of the Constitution guarantees women ‘an equal opportunity to participate in and benefit from the development of Papua New Guinea’ (Gewertz and Errington 1999a: 131). The judge also cited other sections of the Constitution that the proposed head pay would violate in terms of Miriam’s rights: Section 36, Freedom from Inhuman Treatment; Section 42, Liberty of the Person; Section 49, Right to Privacy; and Section 52(i), Right to Freedom of Movement. His final assessment was that inviting a woman to be part of a head pay was ‘repugnant to the general principles of humanity’; no one should be part of a compensation payment (Injia 1997: 59, quoted by Gewertz and Errington 1999a: 132). The so-​called compo girl case shows how at a local, village level one form of transaction (i.e. violence) is perceived to be converted into another form of transaction (i.e. head pay, compensation payment) (M. Strathern 1985). In fact, the judge refers to expert local opinion (archaeologist John Muke) which indicates that the groups involved in this dispute have been partners in warfare for over 200 years and exchanged numerous women in this time.5 The judge also suggested that the majority of people in PNG are uneducated, village-​residing, and have followed traditional customs for generations. Thus, from the viewpoint of a particular ‘ethnic society’ or ‘ethnic group’ (his terms) the practice of head pay might not seem offensive. He warned that educated Papua New Guineans should not pass judgement on the traditional practices of any ‘ethnic society’ in PNG, including their own. Nonetheless, he stressed that those who drafted the PNG Constitution and current legislators think about a modern PNG formed of ‘ethnic societies’ whose well-​being and progress is dependent on the preservation and promotion of ‘good’ traditional practices and the dissuasion and removal of ‘bad’ customs. Significantly, the judge asserted that this is the case ‘as seen from the eyes of an ordinary modern Papua New Guinean’ (Injia 1997: 55, quoted by Gewertz and Errington 1999a: 132, emphasis removed). But what do ‘ordinary’ Papua New Guineans or Melanesians more generally perceive? The decade before the compo girl case Colin Filer explored this issue in an indirect manner by analysing a series of letters published in the Post-​Courier, 15

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written, he suggested, by either an ‘elite’ readership or one that seeks to identify in opposition to the elite as ‘grassroots’. The focus of their thoughts was the issue of brideprice, discussed above, and whether it should be abandoned or whether it was part of valuable traditions that needed to endure. The parties to the debate were divided but he refers to them as a whole as ‘petty bourgeois’ ‘because of the dominant themes in their discourse, which are “petty” because they are populist, and “bourgeois” because they generally side with capitalism even if they also side with custom’ (Filer 1985: 165). The letters raised the general issue of the relations between men and women –​gender relations –​and how these have transformed since Western contact. His analysis of the sentiments expressed in the letters showed how money and commodities had entered the area of marriage which made starkly evident the contrast between rich and poor families and increasing levels of inequality more generally. This did not mean, however, that brideprice was disappearing. There was still the spectre of tradition and of different cultures performing brideprice in their own way. In order to understand the contemporary significance of brideprice, Filer, like Wardlow and Jolly, suggests it cannot be considered on its own or in isolation. Brideprice is inextricably connected to debates about the relevance of custom and tradition, to the perception of gender and gender relations and to how money and commodities figure in the way people conduct and evaluate their relations. In short ‘the politics of “brideprice” are the politics of [c]‌ustom, [c]apital, and [g]ender –​of how these larger issues are related to each other’ (Filer 1985: 165). Just as head pay and brideprice (bridewealth) are caught up in debates about what are appropriate courses of action in a wider world that recognises both universal human rights and gender equality and the value of social and cultural distinctiveness, so is kinship engaged in new arenas beyond that of conventional domestic relations. Kinship, or relations modelled on kinship, emerge as highly significant in many of the chapters, although none are purely focused on kinship relations. The way in which Melanesians engage with modern institutions is often through the practice or idiom of kinship. In PNG, for example, health provision at local level was established on the premise that health practitioners would be assisted in their living arrangements by villagers (Street). A  kind of quasi kinship was assumed to facilitate the exchanges between health practitioners and local people: living necessities such as food, water, firewood and even housing would be provided in exchange for healthcare. If relations for any reason disintegrated, then the provision of healthcare would be affected. At one level, these relations reflect a distinctively Melanesian way of managing and giving form to social life. At another, they point to the inadequacy of health and other services in the context of a derelict state, hollowed out by structural adjustment and subject to the predatory operations of international corporations, especially mines, and often corrupt political leaders. In a similar manner, conservation organisations and local landowners have very different expectations about their relationships (Henning). Whereas the landowners perceived the use of the land for conservation purposes as a long-​term, kinship-​like relation, the conservationists have a more pragmatic outlook. The conservationists use very different language to speak about their relation with the landowners. They refer to needing an ‘exit strategy’ when their efforts are no longer successful or they think the benefits from conservation are minimal. 16

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Whereas in the above examples, ‘modern’ institutions are colonised by kinship relations, in other contexts, Melanesians appropriate new technologies to extend and maintain their social and kinship networks. For example, Hobbis describes how mobile phones are extremely popular with Torres Strait Islanders, who use them to maintain relationships with distant kin working or attending school on the Australian mainland. In a similar way, but often with a different moral valence, men and women across Melanesia use their mobiles to ‘cold call’ strangers, often in the hope of finding sexual partners. Indeed, mobile technology has penetrated inter-​clan relations, especially in the highlands of PNG where mobile phones are commonly used to coordinate operations in warfare. When health practitioners may need to spend time growing their food instead of administering to patients, we seem again to face the same choice as is made evident in the study of gender relations. Does this represent the working out of a singularly Melanesian modality of social life, based on kinship and exchange obligations, or is this the symptom of Melanesia’s status as a Third World, low-​income country? Do differing perceptions of the relations formed by conservation projects paint Melanesians as caught within a distinctive Melanesian understanding of social relations in contrast to a seemingly rational, cost and benefit analysis of any functioning modern organisation? And what should we make of Melanesian uses of communication technologies in kinship relations –​as the continuation of ‘Melanesian custom’ by other means, or as an instance of its integration into ‘modern’ forms of life?

MELANESIAN DIVERSITY AND ANTHROPOLOGY The issues and questions raised above concern, above all, the value and meaning of cultural distinctiveness. In this context, the predominance of anthropologists contributing to this volume requires comment. Anthropologists, among other things, are interested in social and cultural diversity. Melanesia is recognised as the most linguistically diverse region in the world as Rumsey discusses in his chapter, and associated with this is a social and cultural diversity. Diversity is as much of interest to the general public. While we were completing this introduction, the British ‘explorer’ Benedict Allen was reported missing in PNG. As the UK daily The Guardian reported (Gayle 2017), he ‘was on a journey to locate the Yaifo, one of the few remaining tribes in the world who have no contact with outsiders’. The idea of a PNG people that has ‘no contact with outsiders’ in the twenty-​first century is a fantasy. It is a fantasy insofar as colonial and post-​ colonial personnel have patrolled all areas of the country, and migration and resource extraction have touched people in every province of post-​independence PNG (see Connolly and Anderson 1987; Gammage 1994; Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991; https://​savageminds.org/​2017/​11/​21/​on-​the-​90th-​anniversary-​of-​the-​first-​european-​ crossing-​of-​new-​guinea-​explorer-​benedict-​allen-​claims-​to-​have-​done-​it-​for-​the-​first-​ time/​). It is a fantasy, though, that persists more generally and one that represents Melanesia and New Guinea in particular as ‘the last unknown’ –​exemplified today in certain touristic presentations of Melanesia discussed by Taylor. One of the best-​ known books of this genre, which also simultaneously sought to transcend it, is Gavin Souter’s (1963) New Guinea: the last unknown. It was written for a public potentially interested in the last place ‘to become modern’ (Gewertz and Errington 17

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1999b: 176). As Ballard (2006: 242) observes, in Souter’s opening he ‘suggests that New Guinea presented a last possibility of surprise to a European public largely sated by discoveries elsewhere’: The terrestrial globe was by then decently, if not quite completely, covered with fine print; museums were bursting with little yellow gods, humming-​birds, carved whale’s teeth, painted skulls, and all the other spoils of exploration; and libraries were still being flooded by a stream of travellers’ narratives as broad and sluggish as the Congo or the Amazon. (Souter 1963: 3; quoted by Ballard 2006: 242) Diversity was also of interest from the early days of government incursion and mission expansion throughout Melanesia. Sir Hubert Murray, the longstanding Lieutenant Governor of Papua6 offered the following view in the 1920s: [I]‌t is our native policy that is the distinctive part of our administration … The British system of colonial administration, which we in Papua are seeking to follow, aims at the preservation of the native races, even those ‘weaker peoples’ who are ‘not yet able to stand by themselves’, the ‘well-​being and development’ of these peoples is declared by the League of Nations to ‘form a sacred trust of civilization’, and this declaration is entirely in accord with all the best traditions of British administration. (Murray 1925: viii; cf. Murray 1923: 5; Murray 1926: 3; Lett 1935: x) A few pages later Murray insists on ‘the value of anthropology in administration, and the necessity of keeping up old customs’ (Murray 1925: ix). The researches of the government anthropologists F.E. Williams and Ernest Chinnery are early notable examples of the interest that understanding natives’ practices had, at least in principle, to the conduct of native administration.7 In the colonial period, anthropologists commonly aspired to work with and influence the policy of various colonial administrations. They rarely succeeded, especially in Africa, either because they were opposed to colonialism, or because administrators mistrusted their politics, suspecting them of being leftists (Kuper 2015 [1973]). In Murray’s Papua, an under-​resourced colonial administration was compelled to govern by and through local social organisations and with little aspiration for ‘modernising’ local people. This meant that, from an early period, administrators valued the recording and documentation of diversity. In the contemporary period, diversity continues to have value, as much for anthropologists as for the people they study, albeit in rather different ways. Diversity in the post-​colonial period takes on different forms. On one hand, diversity can take on a political character as a means to create exclusive identities. For example, Torres Strait Islanders for one use their ‘island custom’ to emphasise a collective identity and as a means to negotiate with outsiders. However, the fact that 85% of the islanders live and work away from their ancestral lands makes such negotiations challenging. In other contexts, diversity can be presented in the form of ‘cultural heritage’. This can take the form of a product for tourists. For example, Taylor describes how on North Ambrym (Vanuatu) the rom dance, part of the mage grade-​taking ceremony is 18

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packaged as an attraction for tourists in addition to its ritual efficacy. Alternatively, cultural heritage can become a resource in artistic productions (Raabe). In the 1960s and 70s in PNG, motifs from ‘traditional’ or ‘grassroots’ artistic traditions were adapted by artists such as Timothy Akis to produce fine art prints, posters and murals. This art went on to form the backbone of a national graphic style which was supported and taught in PNG’s elite educational institutions such as Sogeri National High School. Cultural heritage is also intrinsically connected to both local and national politics. New Caledonia’s Kanaks reside in a sui generis collectivity of France. They are the indigenous people but make up only 40% of the total population. A Kanak cultural centre, Le Centre Culturel Tjibaou, discussed here by both Raabe and Bolton, named after the leader of the Kanak independence movement, was funded by the French government, designed by Renzo Piano and completed in 1998. This was the same year that the Noumea Accord deferred a referendum on independence from France, promised in 1988 to end years of separatist violence by Kanaks. The design is based loosely on a chief’s house and the traditional layout of settlements on the main island of New Caledonia. The centre is meant to promote and preserve Kanak heritage and to foster contemporary expressions of Kanak culture. This has considerable political significance; New Caledonia rejected independence in a referendum in November 2018. The PNG Parliament Building, completed 12  years earlier in 1984, is also based on traditional architecture of a ceremonial haus tambaran from the Sepik region, decorated with traditional carving and artwork from different areas of the country. Its design was explicitly intended to symbolise national unity. The first Speaker to preside in the new Parliament House, Timothy Bonga expressed this clearly when he said: The new National Parliament is far more than just a building or even just a parliament. It is for Papua New Guinea, a symbol of political independence …. Its sweeping lines impress, while signifying essential aspects and parts of our nation. (quoted in Rosi 1991: 1) Since culture, or kastom,8 is often central to politics in Melanesia, anthropology and knowledge of cultural and social diversity more generally is unusually influential in the region. This helps explain the preponderance of anthropological contributions in the chapters of this volume.

CHRISTIANITY: CONTINUITY AND DISRUPTION This is not to say that all Melanesians value diversity, or indeed the contributions of anthropology. In the years since its opening, PNG politicians have questioned and attacked the diversity represented in their Parliament building. In 2013, the Speaker of the House, Theodore Zurenuoc, removed wood carvings from the building interior which he and others saw as ‘ungodly images and idols’ in a stark reversal of Bonga’s position of 1984 (cf. Bialecki and Daswani 2015). These views are shaped by an evangelical Christianity that seeks to create a Christian nation where diversity is potentially transcended and replaced by faith in God and Melanesians will take up a place in a church that extends to all peoples without distinction. 19

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Christianity, particularly in such Pentecostal and other Charismatic forms has provided a very influential perspective on the Melanesian world. Robbins (2004) has argued that the introduction of these forms of Christianity constitutes a fundamental rupture in the way people imagine themselves and their place in the world. This is illustrated in his ethnography of Urapmin people (Sundaun Province, PNG), in which he argues that the introduction of Pentecostalism in the 1970s resulted in a split between indigenous ‘relational’ ways of being and Christian ‘individualism’. In his later work, Robbins (2007) elaborates the argument further to argue that Christianity is not merely a veneer, appropriated and subverted by indigenous people  –​a position he attributes to the Comaroffs for South Africa (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997), among others. Instead, Robbins argues, Christianity provides its adherents with ‘paramount values’ that orient their lives despite the various forms in which Christianity might be practised. In short, all Christians are real Christians, engaged in the same project, to which the idea of rupture itself –​ especially the rupture of conversion –​is central. As such, all Christians are part of the same ‘world’, one that transcends culture or the distinction between first and third worlds. Robbins’ position is sharply criticised by Mosko (2010), who rejects the thesis that Christianity represents a rupture of any kind, let alone a radical one. Instead, based on his research with Mekeo people (Central Province, PNG) he contends that the relationship with God that Christianity offers to believers is not so different from the kinds of exchange relations Melanesians have historically had with one another. Melanesians, he argues, could therefore adopt Christianity without serious disruption to their conventional ways of life. Mosko’s position has been subject to intense criticism (Barker 2010; Errington and Gewertz 2010; Knauft 2010) but it is not atypical of ways in which Melanesian distinctiveness is deployed by anthropologists. Indeed, Mosko’s tendency to conserve difference is common in anthropology more widely where accounts of local appropriations of foreign things, practices or ideas are taken to index the ‘resistance’ of indigenous peoples to Western domination or the resilience of local cultures (Sahlins 1992; Comaroff and Comaroff 1993). This debate, and others of its kind, are commonly phrased as though the issues at stake were matters of fact, rather than of interpretation (Mimica 2010). However, such a reading of the problem of Christianity tends to obscure the ways in which Melanesians, scholars and other actors establish interests in Melanesia, and how those interests affect our interpretations of the region. The question of interest is made very clear in Speaker Zurenuoc’s removal of ‘idols’ from the PNG Parliament House. There is little doubt that Zurenuoc sincerely intended to provoke a rupture in PNG social life and politics by his removal of ‘pagan’ imagery from parliament and was not engaged in some strategic deferral or appropriation of Christianity for other ends. The rupture he sought was almost certainly deliberately modelled on the dispensational time of Christianity itself (Robbins 2007) and has strong resonances with other evangelical projects elsewhere, the English Reformation (Duffy 1994), for example. Zurenuoc’s Melanesia is thus one whose difference to other places is comprehensible in terms of a broader Christian world to which it belongs. Opposition to Zurenuoc’s removal of the sculptures, discussed in this volume by Hermkens and Timmer, was led by Sir Michael Somare, independent PNG’s first prime 20

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minister, senior figures in the established or ‘mainline’ churches, and Andrew Moutu, director of the National Museum and Art Gallery. Their case to the Supreme Court against the destruction of the carvings was made in the register of cultural heritage. Ultimately, the court upheld their claim that the carvings Zurenuoc destroyed were National Cultural Heritage that ought to be preserved. Here, the distinctiveness of Melanesia is differently situated. It appears not as a Christian nation moving toward a more perfect union with Christ, but as one among many locations of ‘culture’. Insofar as PNG’s protection of cultural heritage is of a piece with wider movements to the same purpose, for example the UN’s World Heritage Sites and measures for the protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage, Melanesian difference becomes one element in a series of comparable cultural patrimonies, possessed by as many nations or peoples. From another perspective again, however, Zurenuoc’s removal of ‘pagan’ images from parliament has a strong aesthetic affinity with other, perhaps more ‘Melanesian’ forms of action, focused on destruction as a means of renewing social life (Wagner 1975; see also Hermkens this volume). For example, Timmer discusses Clark’s (2000) account of how Wiru people from the highlands of PNG attempted to come to terms with the ways in which Australian colonials conducted exchange. Finding that their conventions for conducting exchanges were ineffective in accessing white people’s wealth, Wiru suddenly and systematically destroyed their shell wealth and pig herds. From this scholarly perspective, which Mosko surely shares, Zurenuoc’s actions might be seen as distinctively Melanesian. This perspective would override Zurenuoc’s apparent intent to reforge PNG as a Christian country defined by Christian teachings in favour of scholarly interests in Melanesian distinctiveness. Note that in this latter view, Melanesia is not contextualised within a larger pattern or system. Rather, the internal coherence of ‘Melanesian social life’ provides the context in which events can be understood to the exclusion of ‘outside’ causes or connections. Thus, in one sense the difference between a distinctive Melanesia as a cultural whole, and one that seems to be part of a broader system, such as the Christian world, will be determined by the way in which we place our analytic frame. Where Melanesia is a part of some wider system, that system will seem to control events and Melanesia can only work out in a specific way larger structures that exceed it. This kind of model is clearly in operation in the opposition to Zurenuoc’s removal of the parliament carvings: if Melanesia has ‘cultural heritage’ like other countries, then it works out a universal logic of culture. It may also be apparent in Zurenuoc’s original act insofar as he envisaged Christianity itself as the controlling context, making sense of his actions. On the other hand, if Melanesia is a context to itself, then apparently exogenous elements must be rendered as parts of it and according to a Melanesian logic (Sahlins 1992). This kind of thinking is evident in Mosko’s approach to Christianity, among others. Yet it is not at all clear whether Melanesians understand themselves to be ‘contextualised’ in this way. We might understand much social activity in Melanesia as quite independent of the kinds of contexts scholars might use to parse events. Thus, while indigenous culture, or kastom, is often thought of in Melanesia as an effective mode of action or way of doing things, its use does not preclude others, such as law or, in the case at hand, different varieties of Christianity. Indeed, as Demian and Rousseau suggest, Melanesians commonly experiment with the relationship between 21

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law and kastom as a resource for making social relations in general, or particular projects people entertain, explicit. From this point of view, it is worth observing that Zurenuoc’s attack on the parliament sculptures requires kastom as the ground against which his Christian nation can take shape. The point here is that neither the logic of ‘Christian culture’, nor kastom governed Zurenuoc’s action, but that the relationship between Christianity and kastom as its necessary alternative lent his project force as a way of moving PNG into the future. The controversy Zurenuoc created thus illustrates that neither Mosko’s nor Robbins’ perspective is incorrect in principle, but they are only correct in relation to one another. Each on its own expresses a certain truthfulness, but it is only in the relation between them that we can really understand someone like Zurenuoc –​or for that matter what happens among the Urapmin or Mekeo. The sense of social life seems to take shape in the tension between kastom and Christianity, the ‘wider world’ and ‘Melanesia’. This problem is exemplified in the relation between Pentecostal Christianity and witchcraft in Vanuatu as described by Eriksen and MacCarthy and Rio, respectively. Eriksen and MacCarthy describe how urban life in Vanuatu has become ‘Pentecostalised’ as forms of Pentecostal practice and ideas come to shape both public space and the intimacies of private lives. This represents a rupture with older norms and values as Pentecostalised social life deliberately sets itself off from the past. At the same time, though, people are continually aware of the existence and potential presence of what Rio, following Munn (1986), calls the ‘witch-​formed world’. Munn (1986: 231) characterises this witch-​formed world in the following terms: the witch creates a world divided between surface appearance and actual intention or reality. Similarly, in this mode of being and the world it forms, the self is split in its own immediate being and this division entails (and is entailed in) the division of the relation between self and other. The structure of this witch-​ formed world is marked out along a fault line: Deception systematically creates a dual order. People had always sought to hunt out and deal with witchcraft, but in the era of Pentecostalism, a new way of doing so becomes available. Pentecostalism responds to the witch-​formed world by seeking to locate and identify the sources of ‘evil’, often in the bodily individuality of the accused witch. Pentecostal witch-​hunts are different to their pre-​Pentecostal equivalents. Before Pentecostalism, witches would sometimes be killed, but without ceremony since they were merely particular figures of a generalised witchcraft. Under the influence of Pentecostalism, however, witchcraft is understood as an evil in a Christian idiom, as something for which specific people have an individual moral responsibility. In the era of Pentecostalism, witch-​killings therefore become elaborate, involving burnings, cutting, genital mutilation and other ordeals as techniques to drive out evil and purify the body. Nevertheless, we can also see such witch-​hunts as responding to an older problem, namely the capacity of witches to usher in a world dominated by selfish, even cannibalistic desires. Indeed, as Eriksen and MacCarthy report, Pentecostal healers in Port Vila are inclined to understand the transnational economic and cultural flows that intersect in Vanuatu as exactly the vectors along which this evil threatens to enter social life. While these ideas might represent a kind of Melanesian distinctiveness, the flows in question 22

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could also be seen, by their character and direction, as positioning the country in the global South. This example underscores the way in which Melanesia might be seen as neither a ‘part’ of a larger context (a Christian world, for example), nor an insulated case unto itself (Melanesia defined by its radical alterity to the West). The dispute between Robbins and Mosko boils down to attempts to make Melanesia correspond to one or other of these models. Since it will not, then competing perspectives do not so much supplant one another as present alternative ways of advancing an interest in Melanesia. Inasmuch as these are scholarly interests, however, they cannot be expected to coincide with or exhaust those of Melanesians like Zurenuoc. His interest is surely not in the comprehension of social life, his keen understanding of it notwithstanding, but in its constant renewal in new forms to meet the challenges of the moment whether ‘as a Melanesian’ or ‘as a Christian’.

ROADS Imageries of mobility and connection have long been used to envisage the kinds of complex interplay of contexts that this discussion of Christianity reveals. From a metropolitan point of view, as Taylor shows in his discussion of tourism, Melanesia has, at least since the late nineteenth century, been understood in terms of its distance in time and space from Western society  –​even from its near neighbour, Australia. For fin de siècle tourists that distance could be crossed technologically, in the new passenger steamships, and later aeroplanes, that were progressively opening the colonised world for tourist consumption and served as key images of the modernity of travellers to contrast with the primitiveness of the ‘savage cannibals’ whose shores they visited. Those notions persist today: Melanesia’s purported difference to ‘modern life’ is used to sell the region as a destination by both metropolitan and local tourist agencies; it operates as a draw for tourists seeking ‘authenticity’. As Taylor suggests, an iconic image of this relationship is the contrast between the giant cruise liner and the local outrigger canoe, peacefully bobbing in its shadow. Yet as Damon (2017) has recently argued, such canoes are themselves highly significant vehicles for both conceptualising and physically creating inter-​ island relationships in maritime Melanesia, just as much as they embody ecological knowledge and people’s real impact on their environments. Damon analyses anageg, the largest outrigger canoes sailed in the region of Muyuw (Milne Bay Province, PNG), on the north-​eastern arm of the inter-​island ceremonial exchange system called the kula ring (see Leach and Leach 1983; Malinowski 1922; Munn 1986). These are both efficient vessels, capable of traversing the open sea to Misima Island to the south, and valuable items in inter-​island exchange. They are also complex assemblages, composed materially of different woods, tying materials and knots, worked in specific ways and sourced in different environments, often on different islands. Ecologically, the environments that yield wood for canoe building are the products of human activity, connected to the aesthetics and symbolic significance of food production and circuits of exchange. Conceptually, the cords and knots that compose canoes, the relationships between their components, and manner of sailing them model many aspects of the conduct of social life. When the social and material connections between canoe manufacture and use, and gardening and other aspects of everyday life 23

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are taken into account, Damon is not mistaken in claiming that anageg provide both the physical vehicle and conceptual model for social life in this region of the kula ring (see also Munn 1986; Campbell 1983; Lipset & Handler 2014). If aeroplanes and ocean liners both index modernity in tourist encounters and physically extend its networks (cf. Latour 1993 [1991]), then canoes like Muyuw anageg do something similar in the context of indigenous Melanesian lives. In much of island Melanesia, canoes are significant vehicles of connection in both senses –​as seagoing vessels and media of exchange, especially connected to marriage (Munn 1986; Kuehling 2006). The technologies employed, of course vary. Elsewhere, other valuables, including people may serve the same purpose. The movement of women in marriage creates ‘roads’ between clans, groups and islands in Vanuatu (Lind 2014). Rio (2007: 89) writing about Ambryn, Vanuatu (his account applies in many other Melanesian contexts) says their term for road (hal) ‘can refer to actual roads in the … landscape, to individuals, to local groups, to relations and to rights’. He observes more specifically: Female siblings are termed metehal by their brothers. Metehal … denotes ‘the end of the road’, but as the mete is also used for spear-​point, the concept for sister also implies that she makes or leads the way. It is women who occupy the … road … between hamlets and between men of different hamlets. Seen in this way, a road is a physical part of the landscape that people traverse in their daily lives. Many local roads are named and the names are used to refer to the people with whom they are associated (Feld 1996). At the same time, the notion of road is used to talk about how people relate to one another via exchange and kinship. A person can speak of another person as her or his ‘road’. In this sense, road is used to refer to how one gains access to an event, such as a ceremonial exchange or a marriage transaction. These ‘roads’ are clearly ways of conceptualising relations and the possible futures they open up, for example in the form of the ‘paths’ kula valuables might travel, or the flow of rights, duties and gifts along the routes established by marriage. The idea of ‘roads’ is a key idiom of Melanesian social relations. But such ideas and relations are also akin to physical infrastructures with real material implications (cf. Simone 2004). Merlan (2016) documents the ways in which marriages in the Nebliyer Valley (Western Highlands Province, PNG) can serve either to moderate or intensify wars fought with high-​powered firearms by facilitating or averting attacks. The mutual entanglement of conceptual and material concerns in such connective ‘roads’ is nowhere more evident than in Melanesian concerns with the building of actual roads. In 1964 Peter Lawrence published his study of millenarian movements or ‘cargo cults’ in the Southern Madang district of PNG. The book was titled Road Belong Cargo or in Melanesian pidgin (Tok Pisin) Rot bilong kago. The notion of a road was significant. The people were searching for a way to bring to their place the material goods they imagined their ancestors had provided. What concerned them most was not the cargo per se but the unequal power relations between them and government and mission personnel. Without such a road they lacked effectiveness in the new environment created by the white people who came to transform them. 24

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The places Melanesians inhabit are thus understood by them to be defined as much by their spatial location as by the paths and roads connecting them to other places. Telban describes how myths of origin for many Melanesian peoples involve founding heroes travelling along specific paths. These routes explain the settlement of a place, but origin stories about migrations along a path are very often also stories about the origins of social conventions, practices and technologies. For example, a single hero can be traced as he crossed the Torres Strait to Kiwai Island (Western Province, PNG) and beyond. He gave people shells for making valuables, useful plants and taught them language (Wagner 1972: 21). Place and path/​road are in this sense inseparable.9 This characterisation of roads is not limited to villages. In Melanesian towns and cities people seek to create a place that acts as the basis of roads to others. Without a place, a person is not perceived as a person and without access to roads, as much physical as social, a place does not exist. Goddard describes a peri-​urban settlement in Port Vila, Vanuatu populated by second generation migrants, born in town (see Kraemer 2013). The young men among these migrants felt displaced from the relations of kinship around which their parents organised their lives. They were also marginalised from formal education and employment opportunities. In response, they engaged in ‘planting roots’. This entailed creating their own distinctive place, a place with a shared history, renamed neighbourhoods and roads. It was only through creating their own place and roads that they felt they could be effective people. Gibson describes a comparable situation in Lae, PNG where migrants seek to improve their urban prospects by learning English. The migrants have a place but feel displaced because of their lack of English-​speaking competence. With English they are better able to deal with government institutions, apply for jobs, and communicate in shops and access services. For these migrants English is like a road into a potentially better way of life in the urban context. Melanesians in both urban and rural settings are concerned with what they call ‘development’ (cf. Sahlins 1992). This is especially the case for rural people who see development arriving to their places in the form of actual roads. O’Hanlon and Frankland (2003: 167) describe instances from the past in the PNG highlands where people in out-​of the-​way areas organised their own work parties to construct roads. It was evidence of their perception of themselves as having become modern and thus entitled to be connected to ‘government’ (Sinclair 1966: 216). This is not, however, a relic of the past. People throughout rural PNG still desire and anticipate the arrival of roads (Dalsgaard 2011; Handman 2017). It is this infrastructure that enables people to find a ‘road to development’, as it is commonly expressed, an idea that parallels the formulation of Lawrence referred to above. Various strategies are pursued. In PNG Tok Pisin these include rot bilong bisnis (i.e. the business way), rot bilong lotu (i.e. the religious way, such as fundraising for church events), or rot bilong raskol (i.e. the criminal way) (Goddard 2005: 114; Filer 1990). Similar ideas are evident elsewhere in the region. For example, in colonial Vanuatu kastom was opposed to skul (ways introduced by missions). Today this opposition is less clear-​cut, but kastom remains distinguished from development, government and so on (Bolton 2005; Eriksen 2014). In their chapter on cash crops and markets, Sharp and Busse report that some areas of the region (e.g. the Goroka and Wahgi Valleys in the PNG highlands, and the Guadalcanal Plain in the Solomon Islands) are intimately connected into international commodity circuits through their ready access to roads and urban centres. 25

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For coffee trade, though, in places the coffee is carried long distances to a road or an airstrip where it can be flown to a town for processing. Roadsides in both urban and rural areas are sites of ubiquitous marketplaces. They are usually informal with only a handful of vendors often near mines, government or mission stations or where people congregate, such as near a tradestore. These are diverse instances of rot bilong bisnis. They are predicated on transactions and flows of goods both local (e.g. garden produce) and international (coffee, cocoa, copra, vanilla). However, it would be a mistake to see rot bilong bisnis as being only composed of material infrastructure. Roads are rather ‘something that might be counted as an ideology, in much the same way that followers of Chairman Mao would talk about the opposition between the socialist and capitalist “roads” ’ (Filer 2006: 68). As such, ‘roads’ represent particular forms or aesthetic styles of conduct; situations or sets of relations seen as belonging on one road ought not to be approached in the style of another. Martin describes such a distinction between mutually exclusive forms of conduct in the evolution of political leadership among Tolai people (East New Britain, PNG). Tolai people idealise big men, political figures whose authority was based on their generosity and continual management of relationships to kin and exchange partners, as the proper form of customary authority. Contemporary figures of authority, however, are more likely to owe their positions to their relationships to government and commercial enterprises, relations which often involve the systematic exclusion of kin and the denial of customary reciprocity for the purpose of accumulating wealth. That these ‘bigshots’ follow a different ‘road’ is evident from the fact that when they attempt to act as big men, for example by organising customary exchange events, they are criticised, often for using shell valuables that they have purchased with cash. Their pursuit of what can be seen as rot bilong bisnis causes them to manage their social relations in a way that is quite inappropriate for the rot bilong kastom that the idealised big man represents. Defining which situations or sets of relations will belong on which road is often a central aspect of everyday political activity in Melanesia. Dalsgaard argues that the proper way of conducting oneself in the context of local politics is constrained by three possible sources of authority, or ‘roads’, namely kastom, gavman (government) and lotu (church). He describes how, on Manus Island (PNG), there were disputes in the 1980s over politicians distributing betel nut at election time. This was seen as problematic because it obligates recipients to support the giver, a relation which inappropriately introduced kastom into a form of activity, an election, which should be conducted in the manner of gavman. Twenty years later, however, perceptions had shifted and newly instituted ‘traditional’ leaders or ‘chiefs’, who would previously have been seen as kastom men, were being spoken about as appropriate figures of government. As these examples show, the relationships between these ‘roads’ and the forms of conduct that they entail are contested. This insight helps to shed further light on the case of Zurenuoc and his destruction of carvings in the PNG Parliament House discussed above. Here perhaps, the contested relationship between rot bilong gavman, and rot bilong lotu, the ‘road of the church’ understood in a distinctively Pentecostal register, becomes visible. Zurenuoc’s perception was that kastom artefacts had no place in parliament, the seat of gavman, and that their presence there represented the obstacles to the creation of a Christian nation in which the roads of gavman and lotu would be intrinsically connected. From 26

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this point of view, Zurenuoc’s actions are emblematic of the manipulation of roads. Specifically, the mutually exclusive character of roads as forms of conduct means that creating a road, Christian government for example, demands that other ways of acting be displaced or denied. Elsewhere, analogous strategies for creating the conditions for new undertakings are equally evident. For example, Battaglia (1990) argues that funerary events on Sabarl are aimed at forgetting old relations in order to create new ones (cf. Damon 1989) so new roads are created out of the destruction of old ones. Similarly, the creation of new kula paths often involves diverting valuables from established paths, allowing them to wither, in favour of new ones (Campbell 1983). Hence, we could see the refusal of certain social connections in Pentecostal practices, like Zurenuoc’s elimination of kastom artefacts from parliament, as an instance of this necessarily destructive activity in the creation of a ‘Pentecostal way’.

INTERESTS The point here is that contextualising Melanesia –​saying what it is, or that it fits into this or that scheme –​is, in an important sense, to miss the point. People in Melanesia are generally as unconcerned as people anywhere with reproducing their past in unadulterated form; rather, they seek to move their lives in the direction of their interests. As Hermkens shows in her discussion of material culture, Melanesians are interested in creating things, but equally concerned with destroying or abandoning them to make space for new creations and relationships. Of course, these interests give their lives a specific form, just as the technology of canoe building and sailing shape inter-​island communications in south-​east PNG. However, even when village elders demand that their juniors display stret kastom (‘straight’ or proper custom) in ritual or exchange, this is for a definite purpose –​the attraction of tourists, the production of ‘authentic’ artworks, or the cultivation of the connections that might be fostered by the foundation of a cultural centre, for example (Taylor, Bolton). From this point of view, we can understand the questions of whether Melanesia is ‘Third World’ or ‘culturally distinctive’, a ‘Christian’ or ‘traditional’ society, and so on, not in terms of what those categorisations will reveal, but the kinds of undertakings that they make possible. Hence, Bonnemère, following Tuzin (1997) points out that the abandonment of initiation cults, once common in the Eastern Highlands and Sepik Basin of PNG was largely an indigenous affair, not something led by foreign missionaries or imposed by colonial authorities. Initiation cults with their men’s houses and secret regalia were generally destroyed by local Christians. The manner of this iconoclasm, as Tuzin argues, took a ritualistic form in many ways similar to the kinds of ritual transformations of social life Melanesians have long practised; in this sense, Christianity can be seen as an opportunity, grasped locally and in an indigenous idiom, for working out local cosmological concerns. Similarly, and more recently, the question of Melanesia’s contemporary Christianity often takes shape as a differentiation between adherents of ‘mainline’ established churches and those of the newer, often Pentecostal churches who see the former as insufficiently or improperly faithful. The question of how to be Christian thus creates a relation between Christians as an issue of concern for those involved. In turn, this issue imparts a form, force and direction to the things people do in order to resolve it. 27

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This view of Melanesia becomes significant in relation to efforts to construct state structures in the colonial and post-​colonial periods. The nation-​making project in Melanesia entailed the creation of a number of cultural and institutional forms, viewed as essential to a functioning nation-​state: a national art, national museums, a comprehensive education and health system, police forces, legal codes, prisons, and so on. Regionally, bodies such as the Melanesian Spearhead Group articulate a multilateral regional system to complement bilateral relations with metropolitan powers such as Australia, France and latterly China. Many of these developments were intended as explicitly ‘modernising’ projects –​the creation of legal codes, professional police forces and universal healthcare, for e­ xample –​which served to provide independent Melanesian states with the wherewithal to relate to other states and fulfilled the obligations of their colonisers under international law. Art, museums and education had a similar purpose, especially in PNG, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands, often being aimed at the production of a body of national citizens from often disparate linguistic and cultural groups whose primary loyalties and attachments were often very local. Today, a crucial political concern in the region remains the extent to which all of these interventions have failed. Nowhere is this more evident than in the collapse of PNG’s early post-​independence attempt to forge a new political-​economic model of governance based on a ‘Melanesian way’ of doing politics through ‘local’ norms of consensus and conciliation. This was aimed at avoiding the evident problems of post-​ colonial African states, and eschewing the pursuit of economic growth in favour of equitable development. This model was undermined in PNG by the closure of the Panguna gold and copper mine on Bougainville due to separatist violence in 1989, and a series of fiscal crises that ultimately led to PNG’s fiscal disciplining at the hands of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (Filer 1997; Connell 1997). Today, like many Third World countries, PNG is a primary resource exporter, dependent on extractive industries run by international corporations that deeply penetrate state structures. Politicians more or less explicitly sacrifice people’s lands and environmental resources in pursuit of the ‘development’ that accrues from new extractive projects (Banks). The effects of such political and economic predicaments are also evident elsewhere. The rule of law is often weak in Melanesia, especially in West Papua, but also in other areas of the region. Police forces are underfunded, factionalised, indulge in rough justice and are often seen as corrupted by moneyed interests like mining concerns, while prisons are inadequate and overcrowded (Dinnen). Healthcare and education are patchy and inadequate (Street). At the same time efforts to promote national cultures have often been of limited success. In PNG, an officially sponsored form of ‘national art’ foundered as the prescribed styles were found limiting by the artists involved (Raabe). Elsewhere, museums and cultural centres are often either chronically under-​resourced, as in Solomon Islands, or offer a conservative and abstract vision of culture mainly aimed at tourist audiences, as in New Caledonia. In some ways, such efforts to build cultural identities are most successful exactly where there is no prospect of their being recognised as ‘national’ cultures –​the propagation of Asmat art in West Papua and the success of Torres Strait Islander artists being cases in point (Bolton). The failure of nation-​and state-​building projects in independent Melanesia contributes strongly to the perception of the region as an ‘arc of instability’ in Australian foreign policy (Firth). 28

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None of these aspects of state-​building and failure are specific to the region but reflect a broader project of Third World modernisation in the post-​colonial period. From one perspective we could see Melanesian states like Solomon Islands and PNG as comparable to other ‘failed’, ‘weak’ or ‘limited’ states such as Angola or Yemen (see Firth). Yet from a certain point of view, neither the production of state structures, nor their failure should be seen as an end point. Rather, they become the issues of concern on the basis of which people enter into new undertakings, often in the context of material hardship and suffering. The productive nature of such state failure or weakness is perhaps most evident in the Solomon Islands. Here, conflict between Malaitans and local people on the island of Guadalcanal escalated to the brink of all out civil war in the so-​called Tension of 1998–​2003, as Allen and Firth describe. Ultimately, the situation was resolved when an Australian-​led and military-​backed policing and state-​building force, the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), was deployed. Yet rather than representing purely a ‘crisis’ or ‘failure’ of state, the Tension promoted new forms of social organisation in the shape of local, island-​based sovereignties and political movements (Allen), compelled the recruitment of ‘untainted’ police officers (Dinnen), opening new possibilities for many, and even introduced many indigenous artefacts into new circuits of exchange as they were either deposited in museums for safe-​keeping or stolen or sold from the same institutions (Bolton). It would clearly be a mistake to romanticise any of these developments or the violence that led to them. However, it would be equally misguided to fail to recognise the possibilities for new forms of social connection and the promotion of specific interests that they opened up. The role of (imperfect) state-​building activities in providing new affordances for the promotion of specific interests or of social experiments of one kind or another is perhaps clearest in Demian and Rousseau’s discussion of the adoption of law in Melanesia. Researchers in the colonial period were concerned about the ‘imposition’ of ‘alien’ laws on Melanesians. Melanesians, however, were keen to adopt and adapt legal conventions and language. The orthodox Western idea of law is that it is an external, impersonal set of rules, but at the same time people and circumstances are always bound up with law. Melanesian ideas of kinship are analogous to how Westerners live with respect to law: that is, it is always engaged with personhood. Western law can be understood as a feature of personal subjectivity; law is meant to internally constrain the person. In Melanesia, law commonly operates as a technique for presenting social relations in a particular way. Introduced Western legal systems offer a range of practices and forms, such as courts, by means of which people can be explicit about dimensions of their social life such as land, witchcraft or sorcery. Thus, law is neither epiphenomenal nor irrelevant to Melanesian life, nor does it fundamentally change its character. Rather, it provides a new medium for the expression of relations, and a new set of images through which to imagine how life ought to be lived. Law, in short, gives direction to interests and the projects, or ‘experiments’ in Demian and Rousseau’s terms, that Melanesians pursue in light of it. From a perspective that regards law or culture as definite things or contexts for action, this looks like corruption (the misuse of law or dilution of custom) or superficiality (since cultural life is not fundamentally modified). However, to regard Melanesian legality as a ‘failure’ on these terms is to neglect the distinctive shape law gives relationships and the new ‘roads’ it opens up. Law becomes the means of moving distinctively 29

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Melanesian forms of social life forwards, opening their horizons to new forms of connection. The power of new social forms to give direction and shape to interests is not confined to Melanesians, of course. It is also evident in the ways in which scholars and other commentators have appropriated Melanesia. Cox describes the efflorescence of fast money schemes in PNG and elsewhere, a collection of Ponzi-​type scams that claim to allow ‘investors’ to access international financial markets or vast funds held elsewhere. These scams, Cox argues, play on the relations Melanesians imagine or desire with powerful others, and the regard or care that they feel is their due. In certain cases, notably the breakaway ‘Kingdom of Me’eakumi’ on Bougainville (Allen), which runs such a scheme purporting to be the national bank, such fantastical banking is an aspect of a non-​existent state based on an apocalyptic covenant with God (Timmer). In other instances, they shade into conventional pyramid selling schemes for cosmetics and other household goods that mobilise casual labour and the recruitment of new sellers to deliver modest profits for participants (Cox). These schemes have been likened to ‘cargo cults’ (Bainton 2011; Macintyre 2013) inasmuch as they are characterised by ritualised and probably ineffective attempts to create beneficial or equitable relations with centres of power and wealth outside Melanesia. This invocation of cargo cult has considerable political significance both within and beyond Melanesia as an explanation of the multiple political and developmental ‘failures’ of the region. Both outside commentators and Melanesian politicians, especially in PNG, use accusations of cargo cultism to denounce what they see as dependence on development aid and outside assistance, a ‘something for nothing’ culture that discourages work and effort. Within anthropology, as Lindstrom (1993 and this volume) argues, cargo cult was a way of imagining Melanesian difference –​or failure –​but it was also an opportunity to engage more thoroughly with Melanesian ritual and social worlds, as well as a vantage point from which to see an alternative to Western forms of capitalist development and modernist state-​making. Cargo cult became a way of directing anthropological interest in the region, and, much like law in Melanesian hands, its reuse as an image or trope in the West enables Western people to make social life –​their own as much as others’ –​visible in new ways. Just as in debates over the character of Melanesian Christianity, forms matter in these cases, but not in the guise of identities or essences. Form, rather like a canoe or a road, operates as a vehicle for directing, shaping, and making visible or communicable what people are trying to do. What something is cannot, therefore, be static: a road is the means by which to travel, to open new horizons and forge new relations or attend to old ones as they develop. The material appearance of roads, hospitals, laws or mines is thus significant, but like the birth of a child cannot be thought of in isolation from the ongoing transformations that these things provoke –​including to themselves. Worrying about what Melanesia is (‘Third World’, ‘ontologically distinctive’, etc.) misses the ways in which these and other images are used not to define, but to shape the projects by which Melanesians continually make themselves into something new, much as the disproportionate significance of Melanesia to anthropological understanding arises from the region’s capacity to make scholars rethink and reshape their interests. That claim is substantiated here most clearly in Webb’s discussion of Melanesian music. Pre-​colonial musical traditions in the region were varied, based on drums and 30

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stamped percussion instruments, various wind instruments as well as song and dance. Colonisation brought its own musical influences, whether in the form of hymns and organs from missionaries or the music labourers heard when they were ‘blackbirded’ as bonded labour to Queensland. On the eve of the Second World War, Webb describes an eclectic musical environment in PNG towns –​jazz bands and marching bands competing with gramophones, gamelans, choirs and harmonicas. After the war, guitars, string-​bands and hip-​hop continued to transform the musical scene. Melanesians, on the whole, appropriated new instruments and musical styles with striking virtuosity from an early period. They also modified them, developing new and localised tunings for guitars and ukuleles, for example, which opened up new musical possibilities. Yet perhaps more obviously than anywhere else, form makes a difference: musical creativity exists within the envelope defined by the capabilities of instruments in use, their tunings and scales, and so on. Moreover, those forms have their own power in terms of what they offer. The Vanuatu hip-​hop artists Webb describes clearly grapple with local issues in their music, but the international form of hip-​hop itself renders it accessible (and saleable perhaps) to audiences beyond the limits of a local cultural grouping. Here, form defines a horizon that is both expansive in the connections it permits, and constraining, since it is only within the form that such expansiveness is possible. Although hip-​hop, Christianity and climate change seem to be very different things, they are all forms of social life that exist both ‘globally’ and ‘locally’. However, their global existence is in some ways a chimera. These forms only exist insofar as they are materialised in local enactments. This much is obvious of a musical style like hip-​hop. Music can, of course, be written or recorded, but ultimately depends on performance for its existence as music. The same surely applies to Christianity: liturgies may be written, but it is only through their enactment that Christianity exists, just as faith is something that particular people must have. There is no faith in the abstract. The need to ‘enact’ climate change is less obvious but nonetheless real. We could see climate change taking shape through our language, perceptions and measurements, its specific and localised effects. These enactments are local and will therefore vary. They are performed by people with different histories and styles of doing things, what anthropologists would conventionally call ‘cultures’. The inhabitants of the Marovo Lagoon, as we have seen, enact climate change in a specific way, which is very different from its enactment by the inhabitants of Greater London, for example. The same can be said of the enactment of Christianity throughout Melanesia, and even more obviously of music. In the relations between these enactments, which appear as so many analogous forms, the distinctiveness or singularity of this ‘world’ that has been called ‘Melanesia’ becomes visible. Different forms, of course, have different connective potential. While Christianity or hip-​hop are clearly expansive, in the sense that they are evidently enacted over a very large area, others are far more restrictive. Kula exchange, for example, is practised between certain islands in Milne Bay Province in south-​eastern PNG. It involves certain people elsewhere, particularly in Port Moresby, the national capital, but its range as a form of exchange is not very great (Battaglia 1986, 1995). Such restrictiveness is evident, from a certain point of view, in most forms of ‘customary’ activity, since they are closely related to the groups of people who perform them and the territories they occupy. However, it would be a mistake to think that there is a clear distinction between ‘modern’ expansive forms and ‘traditional’ restrictive 31

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ones. Rather, the extent to which a form is expansive is influenced by what people seek to do with it and, crucially, how they value the local specificity of their enactment. Thus, an element of kastom, deeply embedded in a specific place may be valued one moment as unique and tightly located, but in the next reimagined as an instance of a generalised kastom or ‘cultural heritage’, comparable to others across the region or even the world. This much is clear from Taylor’s discussion of the performance of the rom dance at Fanla in North Ambrym (Vanuatu), which is at once part of the kastom of the place, and an attraction for tourists and visitors from as far afield as France. Such forms only exist in networks of relations. The chapters we have assembled attempt to demonstrate the range of forms and connections that have shaped what has come to be known as Melanesia. One final example brings this argument to a close. Sweet potato appeared in the highlands of PNG around 1700, having followed a path that led through Polynesia around 1000 and back to its origins in Central or South America some time before that. The development of sweet potato cultivation in the highlands, particularly the use of composted mounds for planting supported the development of dense populations and elaborate systems of exchange. The distinctive forms of these exchanges which have done so much to shape scholarly ideas about Melanesian distinctiveness thus, on one hand, are themselves enmeshed in a network of relations that can be traced. At the same time, there is nothing to suggest that the distinctive forms of social life in the highlands came about with these connections in mind, nor did they arise from an interest in their material basis in a network of connections. The form itself and the relationships that arise from it are what is at issue for the people involved. Yet in other contexts, the connections that allow things to happen and forms to emerge are themselves the objects of people’s concern. Sweet potato cultivation supported large and dense populations in the PNG highlands because of its properties as an energy-​dense, robust crop, that allows intense cultivation. The same properties enabled the expansion of populations elsewhere and under different circumstances, notably on the Solomon Islands in the colonial and post-​colonial periods. Today, as burgeoning populations together with climate change threaten the sustainability of subsistence agriculture across Melanesia, for some people at least, the kinds of relations between crops, people and places that spread sweet potato across the Pacific are objects of intense concern. New networks of cultivars and agricultural techniques seem to be required to meet the pressing needs of the present, articulating Melanesia to wider regional and international problems around food security and ecological sustainability. What is crucial is that these alternative visions –​the ‘Melanesian distinctiveness’ of highlands PNG exchange, or the ‘Third World’ problem of food security in an era of climate crisis –​are not simply the effects of a perspective or point of view, but arise from what people who live, work, govern, think about or intervene in Melanesia are trying to do with the forms of connection and activity at their disposal. There is thus no way to transcend the opposition between Melanesia as a distinctive world and Melanesia as ‘Third World’. This is because this dichotomy is not simply an artefact of scholarly perspective, but of local and trans-​local interests; how people are positioned in the world is integral to the undertakings they pursue and that affect them. It is between these images or projects that we have tried to understand the Melanesian world. 32

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NOTES 1 In this introduction, we make extensive reference to chapters in this volume. These are rendered as the author’s name with no date to distinguish them from published sources for which a date is given. 2 Stasch (personal communication) notes that while West Papua is the designation most commonly used in activist networks outside of the country, and is the most internationally recognisable, it is in fact rarely used by indigenous people living in the western half of New Guinea. Local people are much more likely to use ‘Papua’ alone. They were enthusiastic in welcoming the redesignation of the territory as Papua in the early 2000s, a shift that was directed towards Papuan ambitions for independence. For them, ‘Papua’ holds the same separatist charge as ‘West Papua’ does for international audiences. 3 Certain of its proponents have also been accused (again, with some justice) of using the notion of ‘ontology’ interchangeably with culture, or as a shorthand for a bundle of stereotypical differences standing for an idealised ‘non-​western’ position (Scott 2013). 4 Indeed, in more recent formulations, leading proponents of the ontological turn seem to retreat from their stronger claims about the otherness of other worlds (e.g. Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007), insisting that all that was ever intended was a Strathern-​style thought experiment with the methodological possibilities of radical alterity (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). This move avoids criticisms of the ontological turn’s neglect of human ‘copresence’ (Chua 2015) at the expense of some of its more radical claims. 5 In January 2018 the vehicle Justice Injia was travelling in was ambushed and attacked while he was departing from his home in Enga Province. His car was targeted because his people had not paid compensation for the death of a man said to have been killed by sorcery. It was claimed the man who died had been killed by an illness caused by two women from the neighbouring village, home to Justice Injia (Davidson 2018). 6 Papua was the name given to the Australian Territory occupying the south-​east quarter of New Guinea between 1904 (when British New Guinea was transferred to Australia as Papua) and 1949 when Papua was administratively unified with the Territory of New Guinea, which occupied the north-​eastern quadrant of the island. 7 Williams was appointed assistant government anthropologist for Papua in 1922. He became government anthropologist in 1928, a position he held until his death during the war in 1943 after crashing in an aircraft on the Owen Stanley Range. Williams pursued detailed studies of ‘traditional’ Papuan society. Through his fieldwork he compiled a large photographic collection that recorded numerous aspects of the village societies he studied (Young 1990). By contrast, Chinnery was refused appointment as Papuan government anthropologist in 1921 because Murray did not believe him to be suitable. Instead he worked for New Guinea Copper Mines Ltd as labour adviser until 1924. He was then appointed government anthropologist of the Mandated Territory. In that role he published six official anthropological reports, and a series of papers and notes. His studies were survey-​based in contrast to the intensive studies made by Williams. In 1932 he became the territory’s first director of district services and native affairs and was instrumental in directing the extension of control in the newly discovered central highland valleys. In this capacity he promoted anthropological reporting by his staff and encouraged the training of field-​officer cadets in anthropology at the University of Sydney (West 1979). 8 In PNG’s Tok Pisin this word is sometimes rendered kastam. In Solomon Islands Pijin and Vanuatuan Bislama, it is usually spelt kastom, as here. Since these different spellings refer to generally similar concepts, we use kastom throughout. 9 Both path and road are used in the anthropological literature as translations of indigenous terms which often have wider connotations, for example as ‘ways of doing things’. Path 33

— ​ E r i c H i r s c h a n d W i l l R o l l a s o n —​ and road are therefore imprecise renditions of indigenous concepts and are usually interchangeable. However, the distinction between footpaths and vehicular roads is often very important to local people, even though it may not be linguistically marked.

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— ​ E r i c H i r s c h a n d W i l l R o l l a s o n —​ —​—​ 1972. Habu: the innovation of meaning in Daribi religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —​—​1974. Are there social groups in the New Guinea highlands? In M. Leaf (ed.), Frontiers of Anthropology, 99–​122. New York: Van Nostrand. —​—​ 1975. The Invention of Culture. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-​Hall. Wardlow, H. 2006. Wayward Women: sexuality and agency in a New Guinea society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weiner, A.B. 1976. Women of Value, Men of Renown: new perspectives in Trobriand exchange. Austin: University of Texas Press. Weiner, J.F. 1988. The Heart of the Pearl Shell: the mythological dimension of Foi sociality. Berkeley: University of California Press. West, F. 1979. Chinnery, Ernest William Pearson (1887–1972). Australian Dictionary of Biography. Available at: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/chinnery-ernest-williampearson-5583/text9527 (accessed 14 February 2019). Young, M.W. 1990. Williams, Francis Edgar (1893–1943). Australian Dictionary of Biography. Available at: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/williams-francis-edgar-9109/text16063 (accessed 14 February 2019). Zimmer-​Tamakoshi, L. 1993. Bachelors, spinsters and pamuk meris. In R.A. Marksbury (ed.), The Business of Marriage: transformations in Oceanic matrimony, 83–​104. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

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PART I

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

CHAPTER TWO

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MELANESIA Glenn Summerhayes

FIRST PEOPLE OF OCEANIA The migration of modern humans to western Oceania by 50,000 years ago was part of a global expansion out of Africa, during which these early migrants colonised and adapted to a wide variety of environments and landscapes. Their movement eastwards out of Africa prior to 60,000 years ago followed the Southern Dispersal Route passing through South Asia and into Southeast Asia (see Lahr 2016). At this time, the areas currently comprised of the Malay Peninsula and the western Indonesia islands were joined together to form the continent of Sunda. Migrations into the continent of Sahul (the landmass comprising Australia and New Guinea) from Sunda would have involved a series of water crossings across the Wallacean Archipelago, as part of an island hopping movement. Although the nature of the movement and specific route taken into Sahul have been widely debated, the first colonisers were relatively adept sea-​farers specialised in utilising coastal resources. By following coastlines, exploiting shellfish and marine resources, it has been argued that rapid colonisation of new areas could take place (O’Connell and Allen 2015).

Routes into Sahul Entering Sahul involved two possible routes (Figure 2.1): the first, a southern route, passes through Timor into either what is today the Sahul Shelf, or further north to what is today the Aru Islands. The second northern route passes through a series of islands including Halmahera and Seram, ending up in West Papua. The northern route best fits a model for the intentional movements of people as this route allowed for a better chance of survival in terms of being able to complete the return voyages critical for maintaining a colonising population. Based on the speed, distances covered and overall success of colonisation, the odds are that voyaging was deliberate and two way (O’Connell and Allen 2015). Confirmation of the northern route is also seen from DNA research suggesting Australia was populated from northern Sahul (Malaspinas et  al. 2016).

43

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325

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Figure 2.1  Map showing corridors of entry into Sahul. Sea levels shown at –​66 m (Summerhayes and Ford 2014).

— ​ T h e a r c h a e o l o g y o f M e l a n e s i a —​

Sites and dates Earliest evidence for the presence of modern humans in New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago dates from between 50,000–​ 45,000  years ago (Summerhayes and Ford 2014). Evidence for occupation older than 40,000 years comes from a handful of sites (Summerhayes et  al. 2016). One of the issues with reconstructing modern human migrations to Sahul is that any early sites located in coastal areas are likely to be submerged due to sea level rises during the Holocene. Exceptions to this are the sites of Bobongara (Huon Peninsula), Buang Merabak, Matenkupkum, and Kapona na Dari. See Figure 2.2 for the location of Pleistocene sites mentioned below. The site of Bobongara is found on the Huon Peninsula where evidence of past shorelines has been preserved by uplifted raised coral terraces. Here, stone tools were found dated to over 40,000 years ago (see Groube et al. 1986). The only other mainland Pleistocene New Guinea coastal site is the Lachitu rockshelter, which dates from 35,000 years ago (see O’Connor et al. 2011). Further east, two coastal sites from New Ireland (Buang Merabak and Matenkupkum) and one from New Britain (Kapona na Dari) provide evidence for occupation over 35,000 years ago (see Summerhayes and Ford 2014 for an update and references). Evidence for the nature of colonisation and adaptability of the early colonisers, however, is found away from the coastline, in the mountainous interior, as evident at two inland locations: the Ivane Valley and Yombon. At 2,000 metres above sea level, the Ivane Valley is located in the interior mountainous region of Central Province, PNG, with the earliest occupation dated to between 49,000 and 44,000 years ago (see Summerhayes et al. 2010). These early dates indicate that people were moving into the montane regions soon after first colonisation. Interior occupation is also witnessed at the site of Yombon, located in lowland rainforest some 33 kilometres inland from the central south coast of New Britain at an altitude of 500 metres. Occupation here begins from 42,000–​39,000 years ago (Pavlides 2004). The beginning of occupation in other parts of this region is later in time: the central highland site of Nombe from possibly 31,000–​29,000 years ago (Mountain 1991); at Kilu Cave on Buka about 33,000–​32,000 years ago (Wickler 2001); and from Manus, the site of Pamwak dating to at least 25,800 years ago (Spriggs 2001). Unfortunately, little archaeological work has been undertaken in the western half of New Guinea. The earliest archaeological evidence for people here dates from 31,040–​ 30,350 years ago from Toe Cave, in the central Bird’s Head of West Papua. No doubt earlier occupation dates will be found here in the future (Pasveer 2004).

A rapid expansion The evidence presented above suggests that the initial colonisation of New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago was rapid with little time separating the earliest dates for occupation of mainland New Guinea and New Ireland to the east. Sea crossings were necessary. Despite lower sea levels during the late Pleistocene (Lambeck and Chappell 2001), ranging from –​56 metres between 44,500 and 46,000 years ago to a maximum depth of –​130 metres between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago, mainland New Guinea, New Britain and New Ireland have always remained separated. 45

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0

Gebe Island

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Toe Cave

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Pamwak Seraba

Wañelek Kiowa

Yuku Manim

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Buang Merabak Kapona Na Dari

Matenkupkum Kilu

Kuk

Nombe

Matenbek

Batari

Kafiavana

Yombon Bobongara

Liang Lemdubu Ivane Valley –60m contour (50–60 kBP) –130m contour (21–18kBP; LGM)

Figure 2.2  Map showing Pleistocene sites in Northern Sahul. Earliest sites in bold.

— ​ T h e a r c h a e o l o g y o f M e l a n e s i a —​

Coastal adaptations Models of Sahul colonisation focused upon the maritime abilities of the early colonisers, suggesting that these people were adapted to exploiting coastal and marine environments, and able to rapidly move along coastlines (Summerhayes et al. 2016). Glimpses into this early coastal subsistence pattern are restricted to the New Ireland and northern Solomons’ assemblages. The earliest levels of Buang Merabak show a low-​density mixture of both inland and coastal species, including bats, lizards, fish and shellfish, which is consistent with a low-​intensity use of the cave site by small groups of mobile hunter-​gatherers, who visited the cave periodically to hunt bats and also utilised nearby coastal resources (see Leavesley 2005; Leavesley and Allen 1998). Similar patterns of activity are evident at Matenkupkum (Allen et al. 1989). People’s skills in seafaring are confirmed by the presence of pelagic fish at these coastal sites. Reef species dominate at Kilu Cave although pelagic fish make up 20% from the earliest levels (Wickler 2001). Possible fish hook manufacture is evident in the earliest levels of the the Pleistocene cave of Matenbek, dated to between 24,400 and 23,440 years ago (Smith and Allen 1999), while a perforated tiger shark tooth, likely worn as a pendant, was recovered from Buang Merabak (Leavesley 2007). The evidence suggests that the earliest colonists were small groups of mobile, broad-​spectrum foragers who exploited both maritime and terrestrial resources (see Summerhayes and Ford 2014). From New Britain, an indication of high mobility is also indicated by the presence of obsidian (see Torrence et al. 2004; Summerhayes and Ford 2014). The situation is different from coastal mainland New Guinea where heavy large-​waisted tools were found (Groube et al. 1986) and interpreted to be used in forest clearance allowing the promotion of grasslands which may have been beneficial to hunting or management of economic plant species (Groube 1989).

Interior adaptation People venturing further into the mountainous interior would have faced a completely different climate and vegetation than that found on the coast. Yombon is only 500 metres above sea level, so its early occupants would have faced similar temperatures to today, in a closed tropical lowland rainforest with mixed forest/​ grassland species (Pavlides 2004). The Ivane Valley, by contrast, is situated 2,000 metres above sea level, in the mountainous region of mainland New Guinea. The early (49,000–​44,000 bp) occupants faced colder conditions, with temperatures well below those of the coastal areas (Farrera et al. 1999). Palaeobotanical research confirms cooler and wetter conditions for the initial period of occupation (Hope 2009). These environments would have contained now extinct large mammal species, including Protemnodons and Diprotodontids, which could have been present in the montane region up to 15,000 years ago. Plant seeds and also starch remains from stone tools provide evidence for types of subsistence patterns from the Ivane Valley sites. Exploitation of wild pandanus and yam (Dioscorea sp.) is evident from the earliest levels. Pandanus nuts would have provided these early inhabitants with a rich source of protein and oil. The presence of Dioscorea starch grains on stone tools is significant as it would not have been possible to grow yam at this altitude at this time because of the low temperatures. 47

— ​ G l e n n S u m m e r h a y e s —​

Therefore, it would have had to have been brought up from warmer lower altitudes, demonstrating the territorial range of these peoples (Summerhayes et al. 2010). Stone for tools came from local sources with tool types including waisted forms that can be argued to have been used in forest clearance (Figure 2.3). Evidence for forest clearance and land management are found in the pollen record of the Ivane Valley, where an increase in charcoal after 45,000  years ago is associated with human firing of the wet montane forest (Hope 2009). Its impact would have been to replace the forest with grasses, treeferns and shrubs. The use of burning to create new

Figure 2.3  Pleistocene stone tools from 49,000–​44,000-​year-​old contexts, the Ivane valley. 48

— ​ T h e a r c h a e o l o g y o f M e l a n e s i a —​

ecotones provided areas conducive to growing food plants such as tubers and also attracting animal prey to the new growth inspired in these areas. The Ivane Valley provides evidence for important adaptations during the late Pleistocene, such as changing the landscape through firing, and the movement of plant food from lower altitude (yams) to provide carbohydrates, which can supplement locally available foods, such as the protein-​rich pandanus nuts. The movement of people into the interior soon after colonisation must be related to the calorific returns and fits well with models of foraging collecting strategies and optimal foraging theory which suggests regular residential mobility to allow use of widely distributed resources (Summerhayes and Ford 2014).

CHANGES IN LATE PLEISTOCENE ADAPTATIONS The evidence from these sites suggests small populations of highly mobile foragers moving across such large areas interacting with similar small mobile groups. After the initial colonisation of Sahul, there is no evidence for subsequent interaction with the west, nor between New Guinea and the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago to the east till much later. This scenario changes after some 30,000 years of occupation as the archaeological evidence suggest the definition of group boundaries (Summerhayes 2007). Changes seen in the archaeological record from 25,000 years ago suggest a widening of social interactions. First, the island of Manus was colonised by 25,000 years ago, probably from the north coast of New Guinea (Spriggs 2001). The colonisation of Manus implies some form of sophisticated water transport, as it involves a substantial water crossing of either 230 kilometres from the north coast of New Guinea, 200 kilometres from Mussau, or 230 kilometres from New Hanover/​Lavongai. This crossing was not an isolated event, with multiple phases of occupation evident at Pamwak. Second, obsidian from New Britain sources has been identified in southern New Ireland archaeological assemblages from 20,000  years ago, again suggesting a maritime transport strategy to access and procure obsidian from these sources (Summerhayes and Allen 1993). Third, from 25,000  years ago there is evidence for the movement by humans of animals (and diet) from mainland New Guinea to the Bismarck Archipelago (Leavesley 2005). Human-​induced environmental change is also witnessed at this time in the diminution of large edible shellfish (Turbo argyrostema) at Matenkupkum. That this overexploitation leading to an environmental impact took so long to manifest within the archaeological record is further testimony to the low population in the first 25,000 years of colonisation. Fourth, towards the end of the Pleistocene there is an increase in archaeological sites from highland New Guinea that were occupied for the first time, such as NFX, Batari, Wañelek, Yuku, Manim, Kafiavana and Kiowa (Figure  2.2; also see Summerhayes et al. 2016). These are seen as seasonal camps for hunting and collecting by foragers (Gaffney, Ford and Summerhayes 2015a) moving into mountain forests and intermontane valleys following game and perhaps for the collection of pandanus. The nature of human society, as evidenced by subsistence patterns, did not fundamentally change during the first 30,000–​20,000 years since colonisation. What may have been a critical change is the gradual filling up of the landscape. With population 49

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increase, group territories would be expected to slowly develop with defined boundaries, especially as different groups came into more frequent contact. Evidence for long-​distance exchange of animals and obsidian appeared at 25,000 years ago because that was the first time a chain of regular and frequent contacts could have developed between mobile communities. That is, widespread resource distribution requires the development of dependable exchange links with other communities. The late Pleistocene record from the western Oceania islands of New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago shows clear evidence for a competent maritime technology, as demonstrated by people’s ability to make substantial sea journeys and access coastal and marine resources. At the same time, it is also clear that at least some groups of colonisers were venturing inland soon after initial colonisation and were able to learn, modify and adapt to resources in these areas.

THE HOLOCENE –​ THE EARTH WARMS UP At the end of the glacial maximum and into the early Holocene when the global temperatures rose, there is evidence for an increase in the number of sites and their intensity of use. The effects of the warming were most felt in the highland region. The work of palynologists has been pivotal in providing archaeologists with an understanding of environmental changes that took place and the effects on human settlement. With the climatic changes, highland glaciers began to retreat, melting by 9000 bp. Vegetation cover changed with the replacement of alpine grasses with forest cover as the tree line increased from 2,000 metres at the height of the last maximum glacial to 4,000 metres above sea level today (for a review see Hope and Haberle 2005). Such change must have been conducive to human populations in the highlands, as after 10,000 bp there is evidence for increased human presence, with a dramatic increase in stone tools, burnt bone and other midden material in the archaeological site of Nombe (Mountain 1991). Occupation also returns in the Ivane Valley by 8,400–​8,200 years ago (Summerhayes et al. 2010). These increases in site use intensification suggest the beginning of territories and settled landscapes and are also associated with, first, the beginning of agriculture in the highlands (see below) and, second, evidence for the long-​distance movement of materials.

Beginning of agriculture It is important to understand that before 10,000 years ago, agriculture was not even a possibility in the highland region (Haberle and David 2004). However, with the warmer conditions crops from the lowlands would have been transferred to the higher altitudes (Golson 1991). At Kuk swamp, located at 1,650 metres above sea level just outside of Mt Hagen in the upper Wahgi Valley, a system of prehistoric water control channels (seen today in the walls of modern plantation drains) were dug to drain water from the catchments to a natural drainage channel, thus avoiding its build up in the swamp (Denham et al. 2003). Golson defined six phases, the earliest dating from 9000 bp with evidence of ‘plant exploitation and some cultivation occurred on the wetland margin’. In the 50

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second phase, dating from 6,950 to 6,440 years ago (Haberle et al. 2012), there are indications of major forest clearance probably related to agriculture, and evidence of taro gardens and raised beds for other crops such as bananas. The next two phases have changes in drainage systems with phase 4 having a grid-​like system of elaborate field ditches that drained a larger area. The last two phases (5 and 6) date from the last 400 years and were extensive drainage systems indicative of sweet potato cultivation (see Golson and Gardner 1990). What crops were grown? It is known that banana (Australimusa), sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum), other canes, kudzu (Pueraria lobata), breadfruit (Artocarpus alitilis), and some aroids (Colocasia esculenta [commonly called taro], Alocasia macroohiza [known as giant taro], and Cyrtosperma chamissonis [known as giant swamp taro]) were domesticated in New Guinea.

Holocene interactions The early to mid-​Holocene witnessed an increase in the movement of goods across the landscape, as seen in the transfer of obsidian, shell and stone into the highlands, and exchange across water gaps and from the beach to the interior. Marine shell, for instance, is found in the early Holocene from the highland site of Kafiavana (White 1972) and mid-​ Holocene levels at Yuku (Bulmer 1975: 30). Obsidian from the Bismarck Archipelago is also found in mainland mid-​Holocene contexts at Kafiavana (White 1972), and along the north coast of New Guinea (Swadling and Hide 2005). Mainland New Guinea has no natural occurrence of obsidian, with sources being located in west New Britain, the Admiralties and Fergusson Island (see Summerhayes et al. 1998). Isolated surface finds of stemmed tools from the Yodda Valley (sourced to New Britain) and Biak (sourced to Admiralty Island) have been argued to be the result of social exchange interaction networks (Torrence et al. 2013). The association of these obsidian tools to the mid-​Holocene is only based on shape and technology, as this tool type is found in New Britain in secure archaeological deposits and dated to prior to 3300 bp. Regional interaction links are seen in the distribution of stone pestles and mortars and in particularly bird-​shaped pestles. Their wide distribution suggests exchange networks operating across mainland New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago not seen in later periods (Swadling et al. 2008). Exchange between the highlands and the north coast is evident in the abundance of mortars and pestles in the Middle Ramu and Simbai areas (Swadling and Hide 2005: 299). The Kaironk and Simbai grassland valleys were the links with the Jimi and highland valleys, linking the north to the highlands in the south (Swadling and Hide 2005: 300). There is also evidence of links with Southeast Asia as seen in animal translocations from New Guinea to islands in the west. Phalanger orientalis, a native of New Guinea, is found in sites from East Timor from 6000 bp (Glover 1986). Also wallaby (Dorcopsis) and bandicoot (perhaps Echymipera) were found at Siti Nafisah cave (Gua Siti Nafisah), Halmahera, in 5500 to 3000 bp contexts and wallaby again found on Gebe Island in early Holocene contexts (Bellwood et  al. 1998; see Figure  2.2). It is also found on Misool and Japen, islands off the western part of New Guinea (Flannery 1995). 51

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AUSTRONESIAN DISPERSALS: REMOTE OCEANIA COLONISED FOR THE FIRST TIME The spread of agriculture outside of mainland New Guinea occurred much later, at the end of the fourth and beginning of the third millennium bp and is associated with the colonisation of Remote Oceania (areas to the east of the Solomon Island chain) for the first time by Austronesian-​speaking populations who originated from Taiwan. This has recently been confirmed by genomic research (Skoglund et al. 2016). These peoples brought with them agriculture and domesticated animals such as pig, chicken and dog (Kirch 2000). The archaeological signature of this early colonisation is pottery known as Lapita, named after the site excavated in New Caledonia by Gifford and Shutler in the 1950s. Although it is characterised by complex dentate-​stamping, half the assemblage is plain with a third of the vessels characterised by other forms of decoration including incision, fingernail impression and appliqué. Vessel forms included bowls and stands, jars and globular pots with everted rims (see Summerhayes 2000). These early Austronesian communities appeared at 3300 bp on mostly small islands at opposite ends of the Bismarck Archipelago: from Eloaua Island near Mussau, to the Arawe Islands in west New Britain, to the Anir Islands 60 kilometres off the coast of New Ireland (see Figure 2.4). Over 70 sites with Lapita dentate-​stamped pottery have been recorded from the Bismarck Archipelago (Summerhayes 2010). These colonists cleared rain forests for gardening as is evident in both the Arawe Islands and Eloaua where there is evidence of the infilling of reef flats by soil eroded from

Mussau Talepakemalai ADMIRALTY ISLANDS Etakasarai Etapakengaroasa

Emirau Tamuarawai Kavieng

Tabar

Lou Island

Lihir

Pam Island

Tanga NE

Lasigi

W

Duke of Yorks.

Obsidian source

Anir Kamgot

IR

EL

AN

D

Lapita

Watom Willaumez Peninsula

Long Is

Garua Is. Boduna Lagenda

NEW BRITAIN

ARAWE IS. Makekur Paligmete Apalo

Kandrian

Mopir

Jacquinot Bay

400 kms

Figure 2.4  Map of the Bismarck Archipelago with location of early Lapita sites and obsidian sources. 52

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Lapita 3300 BP

Aitape

New Guinea

Tuvalu

Hopo

Santa Cruz

Bogi 1 2900 BP

Samoa

Kasasinabwana Vanuatu

Fiji

Tonga New Caledonia 3100 BP

2900 BP

2900–2800 BP

Australia

0

200 miles

Figure 2.5  Map showing the spread of Lapita over the western Pacific.

further inland as a result of forest clearance associated with agriculture. It is these same communities that moved down the Solomon chain and broke the 350-​kilometre water gap between Near and Remote Oceania to colonise to the Reef Islands and Santa Cruz Island. The spread of Lapita across the western Pacific during this colonisation phase took over 300 years (see Figure 2.5). From the first appearance in the Bismarck Archipelago, to the Reef Islands and Santa Cruz sites by 3100 bp, to Vanuatu and New Caledonia by 3000/​2900 bp, to Fiji by 2900 bp, and eventually to Tonga and then Samoa by 2800–​ 2700 bp (Summerhayes 2010; Bedford 2015). These early Austronesian speakers were made up of socially related groups that kept strong communication ties during the colonisation phase. This is evident in the movement of resources such as obsidian from sources in New Britain and the Admiralty Islands out into Remote Oceania reaching the Lau Island group of Fiji and island chains in between. The dentate-​ stamped pottery also indicates continual interaction between these early coloniser groups (see Figure  2.6). The later sequences of the Bismarck Archipelago pottery assemblages are similar to those from Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, suggesting continued interaction (Summerhayes 2000, 2010). Identical pottery spread over thousands of kilometres was thought to have been a product of trade and exchange, however, we now know that most of these pots were produced on the islands where they were recovered. Similarities in assemblages over time are the product of continual interactions between originally socially similar groups. The 53

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Figure 2.6  Early Lapita pottery, Emirau Island, New Ireland Province, PNG.

dentate-​stamped motifs found on these Lapita ceramics, and their arrangement in structured patterns across the western Pacific from the Bismarcks to Samoa on pots that are a specialised component of a larger assemblage suggest that such motifs were socially active signifiers, conveying information, fostering group identity, and maintaining social boundaries.

THE END OF LAPITA: DIFFERENCES BETWEEN REMOTE AND NEW OCEANIA The duration of dentate-​stamped pottery varied between Near and Remote Oceania. 1 Remote Oceania: Lapita dentate-​stamped pottery was short lived in Remote Oceania, dropping out after a few generations. New pottery styles developed out 54

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of Lapita, where apart from dentate-​stamping and some vessel forms dropping out, new decoration appears on jars and bowls. These new pottery wares are localised and normally named after a particular area or feature peculiar to where they were found. The dropping out of dentate pottery, and the development of new regional styles, indicates the social transformation occurring within these Austronesian societies and the beginning of the area’s regional cultural groupings. Thus the disappearance of dentate-​stamped motifs equates with the changing social boundaries as these social markers are no longer needed. 2 Near Oceania: Lapita dentate-​ stamped pottery had a longer duration in the Bismarck Archipelago where it lasted over a thousand years at many locations. In contrast to Remote Oceania, the longevity of dentate-​stamped pottery as a signifier of social boundaries was no doubt related to the different social conditions faced by these Austronesian communities in the Bismarck Archipelago where they had to share the land with inhabitants whose ancestry went back 40,000 years. This possible conflict between peoples led to the reinforcement of the demarcation of social boundaries as reflected in the continued use of dentate-​stamped pottery. Until recently there was conjecture as to whether Lapita existed on mainland New Guinea with a solitary dentate-​stamped surface sherd said to have been found near Aitape. Recent finds from Ali Island, near Aitape (Terrell and Welsch 1997), Wanelek a c. 3000 BP site in Madang Province (Gaffney et al. 2015b) and a recently reported c. 3200 BP site in the Eastern Highlands (Huff 2016) point to an Austronesian influence penetrating into the interior of mainland New Guinea. Evidence for connections between the north coast of New Guinea and Lapita further afield is witnessed by the finding in early Lapita contexts from Emirau Island, New Ireland, of a jadeite gouge sourced to near Lake Sentani in West Papua (Harlow et al. 2012). The first unambiguous pottery dated prior to 2,000  years on the south Papua coast was excavated from the Kasasinabwana Shell Midden, Wari Island, Milne Bay Province (PNG), dated to 2,600–​2,800 years old (Negishi and Ono 2009). The vessel form is indistinguishable from late Lapita plain ware from the Arawes. Dentate-​ stamped Lapita pottery from in situ deposits has now been found from nine sites located on a parallel dune system in Caution Bay, approximately 20 kilometres north-​west from Port Moresby (McNiven et  al. 2011). The earliest pottery comes from Bogi 1 and Tanamu 1 and dates to c. 2,900  years ago, slightly earlier than the Kasasinabwana Shell Midden. Although not all the details have been published, the earliest pottery from Bogi 1 fits into a middle Lapita assemblage and resembles similar aged pottery from south-​west New Britain (see Summerhayes 2000). This is confirmed by the presence of shell impressions on pottery which are identical to other shell impressed ware in Lapita pottery which is only found in late Lapita assemblages and not from the earlier Lapita assemblages. Shell impressed ware from Lasigi, Garua Island, and the Arawe material, is identical to that reported by Skelly from the Hopo site, Gulf of Papua, dated to 2,600  years old (Skelly et  al. 2014). The presence of this shell impressed ware in late Lapita assemblages is a regional wide phenomenon suggesting continual interactions between far flung outposts. Although the nature of such interactions is unknown, early Lapita society was seen as highly mobile and an interactive community, which colonised Remote Oceania for the first time. We can now extend that movement onto the Papuan coastline. 55

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LAST 2,000 YEARS: ISLAND MELANESIA The last 2,000  years are marked by a number of changes in the archaeological records suggestive of continuing interaction between communities and, eventually, strong regionalisation and diversity during the last millennium. Continuing interaction is indicated by the changes in pottery assemblages. By 2000 bp the production of pottery ceases in New Britain and New Ireland. Where it is found soon after this date, such as in Lesu or Lasigi in New Ireland, the deposits represent mixing of earlier late Lapita material with later pottery brought in from Manus. Where pottery production does continue, major changes are seen across the region between 2200 and 2000 BP. From Manus, to Buka, to New Caledonia and Vanuatu changes occur in the form of pottery vessels and decoration. Gone are the bowls and stands, jars and globular pots with everted rims, and in are the incurving or inverted vessels, with complex incision, appliqué and punctation not seen before. In Fiji similar changes occur much later, dated to c. 850 BP. Although each area has a local flavour, similar changes occurring over island Melanesia suggest a continuation of interaction up to Vanuatu, and then some form of interaction with Fiji later. What this means in people terms is uncertain. Interaction could simply mean a continuing trade between socially unrelated groups, although the identification of traded items is rare and localised. Interaction could also mean the movement of peoples from further west in the Bismarck Archipelago. The marked changes occurring in Fiji at 850 bp do suggest some sudden and increased interaction with Vanuatu. Within the last millennium many changes occur within these island groups leading to strong regional entities. In the Bismarck Archipelago little is known of this period. In New Britain pottery from mainland New Guinea is found in deposits dated to 1300 bp in the Arawe Islands. From the rest of the island and New Ireland, apart from scatters of obsidian indicating a continuation of exchange, the evidence is meagre. In the stepping stone islands off the coast of New Ireland the development of exchange networks seen at European contact begins by 800 bp when pottery produced in Buka is found further to the north on Nissan and Anir Islands. Later Buka pottery from the last 200  years spreads further to Lihir and Tabar Islands. At contact, a complex exchange system was recorded linking these stepping stone islands off the New Ireland Coast to the north Solomons. One last important issue before leaving island Melanesia concerns Polynesian back migrations into this region. Within Melanesia, Kirch counts as many as 16 Polynesian societies, plus a further two in Micronesia (see Kirch 2012). These Polynesian societies are found on islands and atolls away from the major islands of Melanesia such as Nuguria east of New Ireland; Takuu near Bougainville; Bellona, Rennell, Sikaiana, Ontong Java and Nukumanu off the main Solomons chain; Tikopia and Anuta in the south-​east Solomons; Futuna, Fila, Emae and Mele in Vanuatu. These back migrations were not isolated occurrences and appeared at different times in the past. Kirch’s excavations on Anuta suggest their arrival at 1350 bp while at Tikopia it occurs at about 750 bp. These Polynesian societies, with their chiefly hierarchies, less prevalent in New Guinea, would have had a profound effect on the local social systems of the nearby communities.

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LAST 2,000 YEARS: MAINLAND NEW GUINEA There is a paucity of archaeological work for mainland New Guinea in this time frame, although research on the New Guinea south coast provides strong evidence for the development of the trading systems of the recent past. What is called the Early Papuan Pottery (EPP) is found from 2,100–​2,000 years ago spread along this 650-​ kilometre stretch of coastline (Oposisi on Yule Island, Nebira near Port Moresby and Mailu). It contains similar incised and shell impressed decorated pottery, whose origins are to be found in the earlier Lapita assemblages (as noted above –​and see David et al. 2012), that suggests common origin and continued interaction (Summerhayes and Allen 2007). Any similarities between EPP sites disappear by 800 BP with the beginning of local divergences and specialised exchange of pottery from the early Motu sites to the western Gulf areas (Sutton et  al. 2016; Vigalys and Summerhayes 2016). It is not only pottery that changes. From each site obsidian was eventually replaced by locally available chert (Sutton et al. 2015). This time period from 800 to 1,200 years ago is known as the Papuan Hiccup (Irwin 1991). Changes can be seen from Port Moresby at 1200 bp, yet change in other Papuan sequences is not so precise, except that it is argued that by 800 bp the change is complete in the assemblages from northern Milne Bay Province (PNG) (Bickler 2006). After 800 bp regionalised sequences appeared which later developed into the specialised exchange systems seen in the ethnographically described Kula and Hiri systems. This is evident from the assemblage at Motupore Island, 15 kilometres east of Port Moresby, whose prehistoric inhabitants made and exported pottery and shell beads to the Gulf of Papua in return for food (Allen 2010). Both Egloff (1979) who worked in the Collingwood Bay area and Lilley (2004) working in the Siassi Island exchange sphere demonstrated that the trade in pottery was more extensive in the past than that recorded a hundred years ago. The last millennium witnessed the introduction of the sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) from South America into Melanesia. The timing and method of the entry of sweet potato into island Melanesia is debated. Sweet potato from South America is found in Polynesia from 1,000 years ago, and may have been carried with Polynesian back migrations into island Melanesia (see Green 2005). It may also have been brought to New Guinea as a by-​product of sixteenth-​century Spanish exploration. Its presence in the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu was noted by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, and in New Caledonia in the late eighteenth century by the French (Allen 2005). Its presence is noted by AD 1700 at Kuk Swamp (Bayliss-​Smith et al. 2005: 109). Its introduction has been coined the Ipomoean Revolution (Watson 1965) because of the impact it had on New Guinea highland society through increased production, where it soon replaced taro as the staple. The introduction of this versatile crop led to a major population explosion, especially at high altitudes where taro cannot be grown, intensified agricultural production, increased pig husbandry and major structural changes within highland societies that were seen at European contact (Bayliss-​ Smith et al. 2005: 111). The complex modern day ceremonial exchange systems in the western highlands, in which men acquired status and power, could not have been

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maintained without sweet potato. Furthermore, not only was there a major population explosion, but people could sustain themselves in larger numbers at higher altitudes. Prior to the introduction of sweet potato these highland areas above 2,100 metres would have been sparsely populated, if at all, and used mainly for hunting and not permanent settlement (see Wiessner 2005).

THE FUTURE OF ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC The western Pacific has a rich history. It has a 50,000-​year-​old human past with some of the earliest evidence for the presence of modern people outside of Africa. It has one of the earliest centres for agriculture, and ancient long-​distance exchange systems. More recently, the western Pacific gave rise to Lapita culture and the expansion of Austronesian-​speaking peoples into Remote Oceania, leading to the colonisation of the Pacific region. Yet despite this rich history, its archaeology is poorly known. This situation will not change in the foreseeable future. Within Melanesia, archaeology is taught to a handful of students at the University of Papua New Guinea and at the University of New Caledonia. It is no longer taught at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. There are fewer worldwide institutions and archaeologists undertaking research in the western Pacific today than there were 20 years ago. To redress this situation the main aim of archaeologists today is, first, to make archaeology relevant to the people of Melanesia; second, to integrate archaeology into the secondary school history curriculum; and third, to attract students into major research projects as part of their university training.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Special thanks to Ben Shaw for help with Figure  2.2, and Dylan Gaffney for changes to the illustrations. Many thanks to Matthew Leavesley, Anne Ford, Ben Shaw, Judy Field, Nick Sutton, Gabriel Vigalys, Dylan Gaffney, Bruno David, Ian McNiven and Rob Skelly for rejuvenating archaeology in New Guinea. Special thank you to Alois Kuaso, Deputy Director of the National Museum and Art Gallery, for the support he has given to all researchers, and to the late Deputy Director, Herman Mandui, for holding archaeology in PNG together for the last 20 years.

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— ​ G l e n n S u m m e r h a y e s —​ Haberle, S.G., Lentfer, C., O’Donnell, S. and Denham, T. 2012. The palaeoenvironments of Kuk Swamp from the beginnings of agriculture in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Quaternary International 249: 129–​139. Harlow, G., Summerhayes, G.R., Davies, H. and Matisoo-​Smith, E. 2012. A jade gouge from Emirau Island, Papua-​New Guinea (early Lapita context: 3300 BP): a unique jadeitite. European Journal of Mineralogy 24: 391–​399. Hope, G. 2009. Environmental change and fire in the Owen Stanley Ranges, Papua New Guinea. Quaternary Science Reviews 28(23–​24): 2261–​2276. Hope, G. and Haberle, S. 2005. The history of the human landscapes of Papua New Guinea. In A. Pawley, R. Attenborough, J. Golson and R. Hide (eds), Papuan Pasts: studies in the cultural, linguistic and biological history of the Papuan speaking peoples, 541–​554. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. Huff, J. 2016. Revisiting NFB: ceramic technology in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea at 3200 calBP. Archaeology in Oceania: DOI: 10.1002/​arco.5109 Irwin, G. 1991. Themes in the prehistory of coastal Papua and the Massim. In A. Pawley (ed.), Man and a Half: essays in Pacific anthropology and ethnobiology in honour of Ralph Bulmer, 503–​510. Auckland: Polynesian Society. Kirch, P. 2000. On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands Before European Contact. Berkeley: University of California Press. —​—​2012. Baseline prehistory, the Polynesian Outliers: continuity, change and replacement. In R. Feinberg and R. Scaglion (eds), Polynesian Outliers: the state of the art, 17–​26. Pittsburgh: Ethnology Monographs 21. Lahr, M. 2016. The shaping of human diversity: filters, boundaries and transitions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Records Series B 371: 20150241. http://​ dx.doi.org/​10.1098/​rstb.2015.0241 Lambeck, K. and Chappell, J. 2001. Sea level change through the Last Glacial Cycle. Science 292: 679–​686. Leavesley, M.G. 2005. Prehistoric hunting strategies in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea: the evidence of the cuscus (Phalanger orientalis) remains from Buang Merabak cave. Asian Perspectives 44(1): 207–​218. —​—​2007. A shark-​tooth ornament from Pleistocene Sahul. Antiquity 81(3): 308–​315. Leavesley, M. and Allen, J. 1998. Dates, disturbance and artefact distributions: another analysis of Buang Merabak, a Pleistocene site on New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. Archaeology in Oceania 33(2): 63–​82. Lilley, I. 2004. Trade and culture history across the Vitiaz Strait, Papua New Guinea: the emerging post Lapita coastal sequence. Records of the Australian Museum, Supplement 29: 89–​96. Malaspinas, A.-​S., Westaway, M., et  al. 2016. A genomic history of Aboriginal Australia. Nature doi:10.1038/​nature18299 McNiven, I., David, B., Richards, T., Aplin, K., Asmussen, B., Mialanes, J., et al. 2011. New direction in human colonisation of the Pacific: Lapita settlement of South Coast New Guinea. Australian Archaeology 72: 1–​6. Mountain, M.J. 1991. Bulmer phase I: environmental change and human activity through the late Pleistocene into the Holocene in the highlands of New Guinea: a scenario. In A. Pawley (ed.), Man and a Half: essays in Pacific anthropology and ethnobiology in honour of Ralph Bulmer, 510–​520. Auckland: Polynesian Society, Auckland. Negishi, Y. and Ono, R. 2009. Kasasinabwana shell midden: the prehistoric ceramic sequence of Wari Island in the Massim, Eastern Papua New Guinea. People and Culture in Oceania 25: 23–​52.

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— ​ T h e a r c h a e o l o g y o f M e l a n e s i a —​ O’Connell, J.F. and Allen, J. 2015. The process, biotic impact, and global implications of the human colonization of Sahul about 47,000 years ago. Journal of Archaeological Science 56: 73–​84. O’Connor, S., Barham, A., Aplin, K., Dobney, K., Fairbairn, A. and Richards, M. 2011. The power of paradigms: examining the evidential basis for early to mid-​Holocene pigs and pottery in Melanesia. Journal of Pacific Archaeology 2(2): 1–​25. Pasveer, J. 2004. The Djief Hunters: 26,000 years of rainforest exploitation on the Bird’s Head of Papua, Indonesia. London: A.A. Balkema Publishers. Pavlides, C. 2004. From Misisil Cave to Eliva Hamlet: rediscovering the Pleistocene in Interior West New Britain. Records of the Australian Museum, Supplement 29: 97–​108. Skelly, R., David, B., Petchey, F. and Leavesley, M. 2014. Tracking ancient beach-​lines inland: 2600-​year-​old dentate-​stamped ceramics at Hopo, Vailala River region, Papua New Guinea. Antiquity 88: 470–​487. Skoglund, P., Posth, C., Sirak, K. et al. 2016. Genomic insights into the peopling of the southwest Pacific. Nature doi:10.1038/​nature19844 Smith, A. and Allen, J. 1999. Pleistocene shell technologies: evidence from Island Melanesia. In J. Hall and I. McNiven (eds), Australian Coastal Archaeology, 291–​297. Canberra: Research Papers in Archaeology and Natural History 31, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. Spriggs, M. 2001. How AMS dating changed my life. In M. Jones and P. Sheppard (eds), Australasian Connections and New Directions: Proceedings of the 7th Australasian Archaeometry Conference, 365–​374. Auckland: Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland. Summerhayes, G.R. 2000. Lapita Interaction. Canberra: Terra Australis 15, Centre of Archaeology, Australian National University. —​—​2007. Island Melanesian pasts: a view from archaeology. In J. Friedlaender (ed.), Genes, Language and Culture History in the Southwest Pacific, 10–​ 35. New  York: Oxford University Press. —​ —​2010. Lapita interaction: an update. In M. Gadu and Hsiu-​ man Lin (eds), 2009 International Symposium on Austronesian Studies, 11–​40. Taitong: National Museum of Prehistory. Summerhayes, G.R. and Allen, J. 1993. The transport of Mopir obsidian to late Pleistocene New Ireland. Archaeology in Oceania 28: 144–​148. —​—​2007. Lapita writ small. In S. Bedford, C. Sand and S. Connaughton (eds), Oceanic Explorations: Lapita and Western Pacific Settlement, 97–​122. Canberra: ANU E-​Press. Summerhayes, G.R., Bird, R., Fullagar, R., Gosden, C., Specht, J. and Torrence, R. 1998. Application of PIXE-​PIGME to archaeological analysis of changing patterns of obsidian use in West New Britain, Papua New Guinea. In S. Shackley (ed.), Advances in Archaeological Volcanic Glass Studies, 129–​158. New York: Plenum Press. Summerhayes, G., Leavesley, M., Fairbairn, A., Mandui, H., Field, J., Ford, A. and Fullagar, R. 2010. Human adaptation and use of plants in highland New Guinea 49,000–​44,000 years ago. Science 330: 78–​81. Summerhayes, G.R. and Ford, A. 2014. Late Pleistocene colonisation and adaptation in New Guinea: implications for modeling modern human behavior. In R. Dennell and M. Porr (eds), Southern Asia, Australia and the Search for Human origins, 213–​227. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Summerhayes, G.R., Field, J., Shaw, B. and Gaffney, D. 2016. The archaeology of forest exploitation and change in the tropics during the Pleistocene: the case of Northern Sahul (Pleistocene New Guinea). Quaternary International http://​dx.doi.org/​10.1016/​j.quaint.2016.04.023 Sutton, N., Summerhayes, G.R. and Ford, A. 2015. Climate and culture change: the effects of El Niño-​Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on the South Papuan cultural sequence. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 81: 343–​359.

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— ​ G l e n n S u m m e r h a y e s —​ Sutton, N., Vigalys, G., Summerhayes, G.R. and Ford, A. 2016. Revisiting mobility in the Port Moresby region of Papua New Guinea during the Papuan Hiccup: the evidence from Taurama. Archaeology in Oceania. DOI: 10.1002/​arco.5110. Swadling, P. and Hide, R. 2005. Changing landscape and social interaction: looking at agricultural history from a Sepik-​Ramu perspective. In A. Pawley, R. Attenborough, J. Golson and R. Hide (eds), Papuan Pasts: studies in the cultural, linguistic and biological history of the Papuan Speaking Peoples, 289–​327. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. Swadling, P., Wiessner, P. and Tumu, A. 2008. Prehistoric stone artefacts from Enga and the implication of links between the highlands, lowlands and islands for early agriculture in Papua New Guinea. Journal de la Société des Océanistes 1–​2: 126–​127. Terrell, J. and Welsch, R. 1997. Lapita and the temporal geography of prehistory. Antiquity 71: 548–​572. Torrence, R., Neall, V., Doelman, T., Rhodes, E., McKee, C., Davies, H., et al. 2004. Pleistocene colonisation of the Bismarck Archipelago: new evidence from West New Britain. Archaeology in Oceania 39: 101–​130. Torrence, R., Kelloway, S., White, J.P. 2013. Stemmed tools, social interaction, and voyaging in early–​mid Holocene Papua New Guinea. The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 8: 278–​310. Vigalys, G. and Summerhayes, G.R. 2016. Revisiting interaction and mobility of Early Papuan pottery during the Ceramic Hiccup on the South Coast of Papua New Guinea. Asian Perspectives 55(1): 61–​88. Watson, J.B. 1965. From hunting to horticulture in the New Guinea highlands. Ethnology 4: 295–​309. White, J.P. 1972. Ol Tumbuna: Archaeological Excavations in the eastern Central Highlands, Papua New Guinea. Canberra: Terra Australis 2, The Australian National University. Wickler, S. 2001. The Prehistory of Buka: a stepping stone island in the Northern Solomons. Canberra: Terra Australis 16, Centre of Archaeological Research, Australian National University. Wiessner, P. 2005. Social, symbolic, and ritual roles of the sweet potato in Enga.Oceania Monograph 56: 121–​130.

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CHAPTER THREE

MELANESIA A region and a history Max Quanchi

In the region known as Melanesia, histories have been told in men’s and women’s houses, in song and dance, in names passed down through generations, in stories told to children about early heroes, warriors and in the origin of names for butterflies, birds and mist-​shrouded peaks. These vernacular histories continue in the present. In the seventeenth century a written record of the region’s past was begun in European languages in books, ships’ logs and published journals. A  notable early form this history took was the travelogue, such as the three volumes by Dampier (1697, 1699 and 1703), which were popular but never seen by the subjects being written about. The telling of history became a pictorial narrative when the camera was invented and quickly spread across the region by missionaries, scientists, officials and travellers (Corbey 2010; Quanchi 2007; Wright 2013). Historical publications, usually in the form of academic monographs chronicling the past as a set of key events and changes, mostly focus on Europeans, European interests and Empire, with indigenous histories relegated to the margins. This has changed in a recent wave of islander-​centred histories (e.g. Matsuda 2012) and in greater attention to indigenous voice and epistemologies, but the history of the region presented in monographs, film, journals and exhibitions is still mostly a Euro-​American preoccupation. This chapter provides a narrative history in three phases –​colonial rule, the Pacific War and decolonisation. These three phases are simultaneously crosscut by two longstanding themes in the region, the mobility and relocation of populations, and systems of trade and exchange. Mobility and relocation is constant in the region’s history, beginning with the earliest migrations from Southeast Asia into the western Pacific (see Summerhayes, this volume). In more recent times, the movement of people became more limited as communities and language groups were attached to ancestral lands and moving meant the need to forge alliances or wage war. People were sedentary, but moved within defined borders. Through trade they knew of distant lands where desired items could be obtained. This pattern of semi-​permanent settlement and possession of specific lands was disrupted after colonial regimes introduced plantations and indentured labour and large numbers of young men were transported to other provinces or islands, and other colonies. A distinctive form of urbanisation also occurred throughout the region as port towns developed into capital cities (see Goddard, this volume). Trade and exchange also had been a characteristic of indigenous Melanesian societies and continued in the transformed circumstances of the 63

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colonial era (Golson 1966; Finney 1968, 1973; Healey 1990). Trade in the form of barter and exchange, long-​distance travel and personal commercial and prestige relationships was not something new to Island peoples when Europeans arrived in the region. The early European global networks were in Bird of Paradise feathers and then copra, and later logging, palm oil and mining. Toward the end of the nineteenth century cruise shipping routes opened the region to tourism (see Taylor, this volume). It must be stressed, however, that while Europeans drew a line around the western Pacific islands, declaring them to be a region called Melanesia, events tended throughout to be local, personal and often contained within single or contiguous language groups. Sweeping surveys of this region are also difficult because it is geographically vast, stretching from the Bird’s Head of West Papua1 through to the islands and archipelagos running southwards from the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to New Caledonia. This survey, therefore, presents the recent, modern and contemporary histories of the region as a moving frontier in two senses: as a knowledge frontier in Western research and world discourse, and as a classic frontier tale of European exploration and colonialism followed by decolonisation, independence and nation building.

COLONIAL RULE Colonial rule came late to the region, following a century of slow, irregular European exploration, trade, missions and in some areas only passing contact. This earlier era can be regarded as informal Empire, a prelude to the formal annexations of the late nineteenth century. The first foreign rule in Melanesia occurred many centuries before Europeans formally annexed territories. Ternate, a royal state that had adopted Islam, was at the peak of its power at the end of the sixteenth century under Sultan Baabullah (1570–​ 1583). Ternate and its neighbouring island, Tidore, maintained a sphere of influence over parts of Western New Guinea. The Sultan’s rule over the area was recognised by the Dutch in 1660 and lasted until 1824 when Ternate was incorporated into the Dutch Empire. Dutch impact was initially limited to a few ports and their immediate hinterlands, highlighting the clear distinction between informal Empire (initially a trade, mission and exploration presence) and formal Empire (claiming by annexation and ruling as a colony) that is a characteristic of the history of the region (Moore 2003; Ploeg 1995). Exemplifying this early period of informal colonisation is the relocation between 1860 and 1904, of more than 50,000 Solomon Islanders and niVanuatu who went to Queensland to work on three-​year contracts in the sugar plantations (Corris 1973; Moore 1985). This traffic was attractive to young men, with some opting to stay on for two or three terms as ‘ticket-​of-​leave’ workers. The rewards were measured in what could be achieved on return from Queensland by distributing wealth and stories. Nevertheless, Moore (1985) calls this ‘cultural kidnapping’ as it is unlikely the recruits would have understood the full extent of their fate under indenture. The story of labourers from Vanuatu who left their homes to work in the French colony of New Caledonia is a similar episode (Shineberg 1999). The mobility of populations within the region was paralleled by people moving in from neighbouring regions. These arrivals included the Tongans, Samoans and Fijians, arriving as pioneering 64

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pastors with the Methodists, Church of England and the London Missionary Society (LMS) when they opened new evangelical fields in the Torres Strait Islands and Papua New Guinea (PNG) (Munro and Thornley 1996; see Barker, this volume).

Formal colonialism In north-​eastern PNG,2 formal colonial rule began later than in the Dutch East Indies, during a global scramble for colonies in the later nineteenth century. The new German nation, a mere 13  years after its unification in 1871 and backed by noisy Kolonialfreunde (colonial supporters), who formed the groups Gessellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation in 1884 and the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft in 1887, annexed the north-​east mainland and offshore islands, initially through a chartered company in 1884, and then by state assumption of administration in 1900. Kokopo in 1899 and then Rabaul in 1910 became key towns when the capital was moved from the mainland to New Britain. A series of new port towns along the northern coast and offshore islands catered for a prosperous plantation economy (Firth 1976; Hempenstall 1978; Latukefu 1992; Waiko 1993). In the south-​east, in response to concerns expressed by the Australian colonies about German expansion, Britain annexed British New Guinea in 1884, and then transferred it to Australia at the constitution of the Commonwealth in 1901, although control was not formalised by an Act of Parliament until 1906. At the same time, the Torres Strait Islands became part of Australia, having been annexed by Queensland in 1879. British New Guinea was renamed the Australian Territory of Papua, more commonly known as Papua. The thin veneer of colonial rule found in PNG, the pervasive intrusion of copra and plantation economies (see below) and in some instances mining, followed the same pattern in the Solomon Islands and in Vanuatu3 (Mar 2016). At the outbreak of the First World War, Australian troops occupied German New Guinea and Australian rule was established, taking advantage of the infrastructure, local government and plantation system created by the Germans. When Germany formally lost its Pacific colonies after the First World War, Australia was granted a League of Nations mandate over the former German New Guinea. Japan was also active in the region, motivated by a policy of ‘Southward Expansion’, with numerous scientific reports, travelogues and fiction published well before the Second World War (Iwamoto 1999; Kleeman 2003; Peattie 1988). The British also established a protectorate over the southern Solomon Islands in 1892, agreeing to let Buka and Bougainville islands in the north be attached to German New Guinea as a source area for German labour recruiting. British impact was lightly felt in the south and traders, missions and planters were the main foreign presence. A small capital was established on Tulagi Island, comprising a few trade stores, jetties and houses for a dozen or so administration officials, with the neighbouring small islands of Guvatu and Mocambo as port, storage and wharf facilities for the companies, Levers and Burns Philp. The British Solomon Island Protectorate remained a colonial backwater until the Pacific War, and resumed this status in the post-​war period. The capital was moved to Guadalcanal after the war to take advantage of Henderson airfield, built by the Japanese and then captured by the USA in 1943. 65

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The British, with similar pressure from the Australian colonies, had also acted in neighbouring Vanuatu, but in a long series of treaties and Naval Commissions with France, neither power would step back, or take sole control. The result in 1906 was the establishment of a condominium, or joint administration. This meant niVanuatu people were schooled in either French or English, followed French or English laws, and used French or British postage. This dual system lasted until independence (Aldrich 1990, 1996; Henningham 1994). In New Caledonia, Kanaks, the indigenous people of the main island, have engaged in a long struggle to retain their lands and identity. France had annexed the main island, the Grand Terre and the Île des Pins in 1853, adding the neighbouring three Loyalty Islands in 1864. Sandalwood trading and missions were active in the 1840s, but mining became the dominant economic concern after the discovery of nickel. Ranching and farming also developed alongside the use of New Caledonia as a penal colony for 22,000 French convicts and déportés, or political prisoners, between 1864 and 1897.

Colonial commerce The institutional forms of colonialism had their counterpart in systems of trade and commercial activity. The incorporation of the region with Asia, Europe and America is most obvious in the history of exotic, tropical export items, dominated historically by the Maluku spice trade, but from early on including slaves and Bird of Paradise (Paradisaea sp.) feathers from West Papua and PNG. The earliest exchange network involved these birds, highly valued in Asian markets for many centuries (Kirsch 2006; Swadling 1996). Europeans became aware of the Bird of Paradise during the early modern voyages of exploration, when Magellan was presented in Maluku with several skins as presents for the King of Spain. They remained an exotic trade item, with demand peaking in the early twentieth century when a fad for feathers in headwear occurred in Europe and the USA. The demand for feathers as fashionable ornaments in ladies’ hats inspired Malay, Chinese and Australian hunters to seek their plumes. By the end of the nineteenth century, thousands of the Paradisaea species were being exported, with 155,000 skins sold in London alone between 1904 and 1908. A trade in ‘curiosities’ was also longstanding as visiting ships bartered for material possessions: tools and ceremonial, spiritual and decorative items to display or sell back in Europe, the USA and Australia (Barnecutt 2011; Gray 1999; Thomas 1991, 1994). In the nineteenth century, copra became the link between the region and the world, but this was at a massive scale compared to the earlier and irregular trade in Bird of Paradise feathers that had historically linked the region with Asian middlemen and then into European trade routes. Copra now linked the Solomon Islands direct to the USA and Europe through numerous corporations such as Levers from Britain, Burns Philp from Australia and Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes from France. These big plantation and shipping companies dominated trade. Vast plantations were harvested in the region using local and imported indentured labour, and billions of coconuts headed for factories on the far side of the world, creating a network of global trade and exchange. Beckert (2015) has argued for a global Empire of cotton, centred on Liverpool and a worldwide network of raw materials, manufacturing and export of finished cotton products flowing back and forth from source regions to 66

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European industrial centres and then back out to distant markets. A similar network existed globally which could be called the ‘Empire of Copra’. In this ‘Empire’, barrels of coconut oil, and later, bags of dried copra went from New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to factories in Europe and the USA. From there, through merchants, brokers and shipping companies, copra entered world markets, mainly for soaps and candles, and from early in the twentieth century, for use in margarine as well as feed stock, cooking oils, cosmetics and a variety of products. Copra in the Solomon Islands offered so much promise that the country was referred to as the ‘Jewel of the Pacific’ and a ‘Planter’s Paradise’ (Quanchi 2004). The European-​owned plantations, covering vast swathes of flat and coastal lands and connected to a circuit of jetties and offshore anchorages, came to dominate the economic landscape in the region. For both islanders and expatriates, ‘ship day’, the arrival of a small coastal ketch or schooner, or larger steam and screw freighter, punctuated a cycle of planting, harvesting, husking, drying, packing and loading, along with the excitement of new mail, cargo, goods, staff and labourers. Plantation labour became the normal life for hundreds of thousands of islanders. Copra production for export was significant well into the twentieth century, and remains a major market (Denoon, Mein-​Smith and Wyndham 2000).

The impact of colonialism Under the Dutch, German, French, British and Australians, colonial rule existed mainly to support traders, planters and miners, protect missions and play host to visiting scientific expeditions and only nominally to nurture and protect indigenous peoples (cf. Street, this volume). Patrolling, scientific expeditions and naval visits were the manifestations of colonial rule in outlying islands and districts. Such expeditions were acknowledged and observed by Islanders and then mostly ignored. For example, the USA Sugar Expedition which investigated sugar cultivation in PNG in 1928, innovatively pioneering airplanes for surveying, was featured in National Geographic Magazine and a documentary film. However, its presence in Port Moresby was momentary, and the majority of Papuans never knew of its existence, or that their photograph was being seen worldwide (Bell 2010). The colonial conquest of the region was largely peaceful, with some exceptions. Kituai (1998) recorded the unofficial, locally motivated violence associated with police patrolling in PNG. An instance of anticolonial resistance was the Marching Rule (Maasina Ruru) movement in the Solomon Islands in 1945–​ 1950 (Laracy 1971). Colonial powers also launched occasional punitive expeditions such as the French vessel Kersaint’s voyage arresting so-​ called rebels on Tanna in 1912–​ 13 and the Australian warship HMAS Adelaide’s bombardment of Malaita in 1921 (Hempenstall and Rutherford 1984; Keesing and Corris 1980). In New Caledonia, Kanaks, swamped by 60,000 indentured labourers brought in from Asia, Europe and Vanuatu, struggled against invasion in wars of 1856–​59, 1878–​79 and 1917, but French military force was superior and Kanaks were sent to reservations under a strict code, the Indigénat (Native Regulations), characterised by head taxes and forced labour (Connell 1987; Douglas 1980; Muckle 2008, 2010, 2012). In the 1980s, a political stalemate over autonomy, independence or staying within the French Republic led to street violence, road blocks and assassinations known as the 67

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événement (the ‘troubles’). The impasse was resolved by the signing of the Matignon Accord in 1988 and the Noumea Accord in 1998 allowing for a referendum on the fate of the territory to be held in 2018 (see Firth, this volume). The impact of colonial rule was considerable in some sites of commercial, shipping and missionary activity, but overall very light. In certain areas of intense contact and economic activity, the arrival of Europeans introduced exploitation, coercion and loss of control over trade and resources, upsetting earlier indigenous livelihoods and exchange networks. This was particularly significant in regard to gold mining (Nelson 1977; O’Faircheallaigh 1982). PNG underwent two gold mining booms. The first, an alluvial gold rush, and the second and more significant, a move to large-​scale, mechanised mining in the 1930s (see Banks, this volume). New Caledonia has been equally influenced by mining (see above; Thompson 1984). However, these developments were geographically uneven: such changes only had an effect on those living nearby, or involved as indentured labour in mining, plantations and shipment. The name given to a passage around the eastern tip of PNG, the China Strait, exemplifies the uneven and restricted engagement of Europeans in colonial Melanesia. The region was significant only as a hazardous sea and cluster of archipelagos to navigate on the way to making a profit from the import and export trade with China. Samarai Island, overlooking China Strait, with its banks, hotels, forwarding agents, provisioning merchants and safe anchorage, quickly became PNG’s busiest port and temporarily the de facto capital of the British, then Australian colony. When PNG’s gold wealth was tapped at Bulolo on the mainland, and exports started flowing direct to Europe, Samarai lost its maritime importance on the China route (Quanchi 2006). Likewise, the impact of administration patrolling was uneven, although patrol reports were given prominence in administration policy, and in the rhetoric of development and pacification. Schieffelin and Crittenden (1991), for example, retraced the route of the Hides expedition to the Strickland and Purari rivers in 1935 and then checked what six PNG societies could remember of the expedition in the 1970s and 1980s. Gammage (1999) retraced the famous Hagen-​Sepik patrol of 1938 to similarly record what was remembered in the 1990s of the time when the 350-​strong patrol passed through. A mere 50 years later, in both instances, memories were vague, or the patrols were regarded as of little significance by Papua New Guineans. Sustained impact in peacetime was primarily the work of missions (see Barker, this volume) as they introduced medical services, schools and forced communities to move their villages to the locations of the church and school.

THE PACIFIC WAR The Pacific War broke colonial rule into three distinct periods, a quiet presence before and a gradual development phase after the war, separated by four years of trauma, turmoil and destruction in 1941–​45. Colonial rule was interrupted when Japan invaded the north coast of PNG and the Solomon Islands in 1942, and then the Allies led by the USA, Australia and New Zealand, also invaded, attempting to win back territories taken by Japan. Expatriates were mostly evacuated south to Australia with a temporary administration, known as the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU) created to fill the vacuum in PNG. The sudden and 68

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massive deployment of servicemen, technology and infrastructure had a major impact on people caught in the fighting, used as labour or who lost gardens, pigs and villages in accidental bombing or pilfering. Other people inland, on remote islands, or outside the perimeter of war were bystanders, or hardly affected. The Allies quickly established superiority and the war moved north to the Philippines and Okinawa, isolating some Japanese forces until the war ended. The impact of the war changed from being violent, destructive and tragic, to a period of hard times, short supplies and, for some, the excitement of wage labour and new opportunities. For many islanders, it was the first time to ride in a truck, let alone an airplane or submarine, and to share food and wear boots and clothes freely passed down by GIs. Familiarity and the presence of African-​American personnel, complicated indigenous attitudes to Westerners. After the Pacific War, mobility expanded, with Kiribati people migrating to the Solomon Islands under a scheme between two British colonies to relieve population pressure in the southern Kiribati atolls (Knudson 1977; Maude 1968). After Wallis (Uvea) and Futuna Islanders moved to New Caledonia to secure jobs during the nickel boom, their population around Noumea exceeded 25,000, more than on their home islands, and they became a third factor in the society and politics of New Caledonia. After the war, the United Nations led an international move toward decolonisation (see UN resolution 1514 [XV,  1960]). The UN Charter (Chapter XI, articles 73–​74) enshrined the self-​determination of all peoples in international law. Likewise, the Charter established a system of ‘Trusteeships’ replacing the post-​First World War Mandates of the League of Nations. Unlike the Mandate system, the UN intended the Trust territories to be governed in the interests of their eventual independence. In Melanesia, this affected the Australian (formerly German) Territory of New Guinea. In 1960, the UN issued the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which demanded that the remaining non-​self-​governing territories be granted independence speedily and unconditionally. However, although the colonial powers moved to relinquish their colonies, it was often unclear how the newly created states should support themselves. The development of the Panguna mine on Bougainville represented one strategy to produce a financially viable post-​ colonial state in PNG (see Denoon 1997). At the same time, such massive mining infrastructure changed the relationship between core and periphery. Rather than a ‘colonial’ map, the post-​war region called Melanesia became an arena for borderless, transnational and multinational commercial empires.

DECOLONISATION The failure of colonial regimes to prepare territories for independence was made apparent when the changeover of bureaucrats and leaders occurred. Vanuatu, for example, was handed over with not one niVanuatu having gained a university degree. The transition period overseen by the Australians, British and French was embarrassingly brief. In the case of PNG, the country attained self-​government and responsible government in 1973 and independence in 1975. Britain had already given independence to Tonga and Fiji in 1970, and Australia to Nauru in 1969. In the south-​west Pacific, both Britain and Australia departed swiftly, and for some observers then and now, too early (Denoon 1997; Mar 2016). Colonial rule had come quickly to the 69

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region at the end of the nineteenth century, between 1884 and 1906, and now the colonial period ended in 1975–​1980 with a rush to decolonise. Each of the new nations in the region –​PNG (1975), Solomon Islands (1978) and Vanuatu (1980) –​followed a standard pattern of establishing local councils, holding national elections, forming political parties, taking up ministerial responsibility and writing a constitution, but the timing, success and implementation were specific to each national setting (Cannadine 2001; Holland, Williams and Barringer 2010; Maddocks and Wolfers 2010). Surprisingly, given the poor preparation and short transitional time spans, each nation successfully and peacefully moved to independent status. Historians agree that probably few subjects knew the meaning of nation or citizenship but mostly unprepared young men (few women were elected, a trend still evident today) stepped up and capably took over the reins of administration, bureaucracy and parliamentary proceedings (Bresnihan and Woodward 2002). It was an exciting period, characterised by a declaration by Michael Somare, PNG’s first prime minister when he told a national magazine in Australia, ‘It’s our turn’ (Maddocks and Wolfers 2010).4 New citizens everywhere had to learn an anthem, salute a new flag, adapt to new money, and vote responsibly in national elections and acknowledge the authority that lay in often chaotic parliamentary decision making. The new nations struggled with democratic institutions, rebellious provinces (e.g. Western Province in the Solomon Islands, New Britain in PNG) and dealing with the world of corporate giants and multinationals keen to exploit the resources being mapped across the region. Each country took a different path, creating unique nations out of what had been clumsily imposed colonial boundaries. Later, they joined fellow new nations in the Pacific Forum and other regional entities and non-​government agencies and in annoyance then created a platform for representing their own sub-​regional interests, claiming back the term ‘Melanesia’ and calling themselves the Melanesian Spearhead Group (see Firth, this volume). After independence, the social, political and economic domains in each new nation were initially businesslike and sedate as leaders and citizens learned new structures and opportunities. By the 1990s, however, commentators were labelling the region an ‘Arc of Instability’ (Dobell 2012; Fry 1997), characterised by turmoil, constant electoral upheavals, short-​lived governments and a serious level of corruption and inefficiency. Economic aspirations were sometimes met spectacularly, for instance in the coffee, palm oil and mining sectors in PNG, but higher GDP, export earnings and a burst of small business and entrepreneurial activity did not translate into a general improvement in living standards, well-​being, basic services or amenities for much of the population. The stark contrast between a few benefiting from prosperous cities and mining ventures and the majority struggling against rural under-​development and poor governance is unfortunately an accurate summary. An alternative perspective points to vibrant dance and theatre companies, an increasing number of university graduates, noisy campaigns and activist groups across civil society, a critical media and several niche success stories in tourism and tropical products. The new regimes had to deal with a number of internal conflicts. There was a short-​ lived but critical breakaway movement called the Santo Rebellion just as Vanuatu gained independence, which was quelled with the help of PNG troops. Later, PNG was embroiled in an ugly civil war in Bougainville 1989–​98 and the Solomon Islands collapsed into a civil conflict in 1998–​2003 (see Allen, Firth this 70

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volume). West Papua remained in a constant state of civil unrest from 1969 onwards, with the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (Free Papua Movement) fomenting local revolt and Indonesia being accused of genocide by international observers (Osborne 1985; Penders 2002; Saltford 2003). In general, colonial rule from the 1820s through to the decolonisation and nation status of the late twentieth century was characterised across the region by the same set of markers –​by infrastructure such as roads, bridges, hospitals and schools, by formation of political parties, electoral campaigning and parliamentary practice, and by economic campaigns such as agricultural extension, small and medium enterprise schemes, apprenticeships and technical training (often through scholarships to Australia and New Zealand). Economic interest in Melanesia took a new turn in the late twentieth century toward extractive industries. From the 1970s, the resource sector was re-​shaped as multinational and transnational corporations moved in and began wholesale forest clearing, and large-​scale, open-​cut mining with resultant damage to lands and waters (see Banks, this volume). The scale of this activity is considerable: New Caledonia, for example, is one of the world’s largest producers of nickel (Wacaster 2010). Logging plays a dominant role in the Solomon Islands where the industry has been the country’s biggest export earner since the 1980s. Similarly, since 2000, logs valued at more than K3.75 billion have been exported from the Sepik River region in PNG (PNG Mine Watch 2016; Waggener 2003). In this transformation, generally the profits from the exchange have been lopsided and brought little benefit to indigenous people. Even where Melanesian peoples have achieved independence, they have struggled to negotiate equitably with vast multinational corporations. The close relationship between administrations and commerce in the colonial era was transformed after independence into a dependent and accommodating marriage of convenience between newly formed governments and multinational corporations. The colonial era is not completely over as some indigenous people are still confronted with foreign rule. In New Caledonia, the massive wealth from nickel mining is only one factor in long negotiations over possible autonomy and independence. In a contrasting case, the Torres Strait Islands remain Australian as a result of a compromise over the border with PNG at independence. Islanders have variously expressed the wish to remain Australian and for autonomy or independence at different times (see Firth, this volume). West Papua’s fate within Indonesia is the focus of international campaigning, and also remains unresolved: West Papua remains a part of Indonesia. Immediately after the end of the Pacific War, a war of independence against the Dutch was won by Indonesia in 1949. The Dutch retained West Papua (then Nederlands-​Nieuw-​Guinea) and began a localisation project aimed at self-​government and self-​determination, starting schools and colleges, local government councils and an embryonic parliament. A migration programme, called transmigrasi, was initially started under Dutch rule. It escalated after Indonesia invaded West Papua, fought a short war against the Dutch and secured an international guarantee, known as the New York Agreement of 1963, that ensured Indonesian rule if an open and free referendum was held in 1969. This ‘Act of Free Choice’, widely regarded as fraudulent, cemented Indonesian control and government-​sponsored non-​Papuans flooded into West Papua. Though exact numbers are secret, a million Indonesian migrants or more reside in West Papua and 71

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now outnumber the indigenous population. This is most noticeable in the cities of Jayapura with 260,000 and Timika with 130,000 people. A West Papuan flag, now familiar on social media as the ‘Morning Star’, was flown in the Dutch period but the path to self-​determination it suggested was crushed by Indonesia’s invasion in 1961 and international approval in 1963 and 1969 (King 2004; Osborne 1985; Penders 2002; Saltford 2003; Verrier 1986).

MELANESIA IN HISTORY Popular understanding of the region in Europe, the USA, Australia and New Zealand in the early to mid-​nineteenth century was limited to missionary narratives and a few novels and travelogues. Knowledge of the region expanded rapidly at the end of the century and in the early twentieth century due to an increase in survey, naval and scientific expeditions, and the spread of illustrated newspapers, magazines, serial encyclopaedia, postcards and museum and exhibition displays of villages, so-​called cannibals, double-​hulled canoes, tree houses, and stilt houses over water, pot-​makers and tattooed bodies. Professional photographers such as Frank Hurley, J.W. Lindt and J.W. Beattie were commissioned by missions to visit New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to record development and amateur photographers and travellers including Thomas McMahon, Martin and Osa Johnson and Merl Le Voy toured, and then sent photographs to publishers and editors. Several films were made about PNG and the Solomon Islands in the 1920s and 30s including Black Shadows (1923), Gow the Headhunter (1928) and Gow the Killer (1931), while the missions in the Solomon Islands utilised film for propaganda and church use, such as Transformed Isle (1924) and Ten Thousand Miles with the S.Y. Southern Cross (1922). The first colour feature documentary film about the Solomon Islands, In the Wake of Mendana, appeared in 1956.5 Visiting anthropologists also took photographs and made films, but often these did not enter the public domain until much later (Geismer and Herle 2010). Early movie and documentary film makers such as Hurley in PNG and the Johnsons in the Solomon Islands ensured that right from the start of the film industry, the islands and people of the south-​west Pacific were a subject of interest. After the Pacific War, documentary makers were active everywhere in the region, producing award-​ winning films such as Dead Birds (1963, Bailem Valley, West Papua), Trobriand Cricket (PNG, 1975) and First Contact (PNG, 1982) (Connolly 2005; Connolly and Anderson 1987). Commercial movie makers have been slow to tackle Melanesian themes or events but movies such as the Thin Red Line (1998, on the Pacific War in Guadalcanal), the television mini-​series The Pacific (2011, also about the War), Rebellion/​L’Ordre et la Morale (2011, on the Ouvea massacre, New Caledonia), Mr Pip (2014, on the Bougainville Crisis) and Tanna (2015, a Vanuatu romance) might herald a more nuanced popular imagination about the region. All attempts to present an ‘objective’, historical narrative of the region supported by evidence, are challenged by old myths and misconceptions that remain alive in the media, however (see Lindstrom, this volume). Pacific Islanders and outsiders continue to use the term ‘Melanesia’ to define a geographic zone, an important economic sector in world resource trade networks, and as the third cultural segment in an ocean divided abstractly into Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia, three allegedly distinct cultural zones. The term is less frequently used 72

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by historians, acknowledging that people within the region are distinct and fiercely protective of their socio-​cultural particularity. There have been only a few indigenous historians writing about their past, the colonial period, or the post-​independence era. Waiko’s (1993) ground-​breaking history of PNG, the first by a Papua New Guinean author, the many essays and papers presented in a series of Waigani Seminars in Port Moresby and collections of essays on Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands at the time of independence initiated by the Institute of Pacific Studies at the regional university, the University of the South Pacific, have not been followed up. New Caledonia has a vibrant and remarkably prodigious publishing output but its histories are still mostly written by French authors in the French language. While each political unit in the region attracts a wide variety of scholarly attention, there are few histories of the region as a single polity or cultural group and few attempts are made to position it as a cohesive, unified entity. Historians are therefore still attempting discursively to unpack a single history of ‘Melanesia’.

NOTES 1 Since 2003, Indonesian New Guinea has been divided into two provinces, Papua and West Papua. It was previously a single province called West Irian, and then Irian Jaya. For the purposes of this chapter, I refer to Indonesian New Guinea in its entirety as West Papua. 2 For simplicity’s sake, I  will use the contemporary designation of ‘Papua New Guinea’ to cover the various designations applied to the British, German and Australian colonial possessions from 1884 to Independence in 1975, except where it is necessary to specify the particular colonies in question. 3 For clarity, I refer to ‘Vanuatu’ rather than the colonial designation, the New Hebrides. 4 Elected members and early prime ministers were often priests or ministers, although this relationship between religion and decolonisation is only now attracting the attention of researchers. 5 A listing of films on the Solomon Islands compiled by Clive Moore, can be found at www. solomonencyclopaedia.net/​biogs/​E000108b.htm

REFERENCES Aldrich, R. 1990. The French presence in the South Pacific 1842–​1940. London: Palgrave Macmillan. —​—​ 1996. Greater France: a history of French overseas expansion. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Barnecutt, V. 2011. Thomas Farrell: trading in New Ireland. In S. Cochrane and M. Quanchi (eds), Hunting the Collectors, 116–​125. Beckert, S. 2015. Empire of Cotton: a global history. New York: Knopf. Bell, J. 2010. Sugar plant hunting by airplane in New Guinea: a cinematic narrative of scientific triumph and discovery in the ‘remote jungles’. Journal of Pacific History 45(1): 37–​56. Bresnihan, B.J. and Woodward, K. (eds) 2002. Tufala Gavman: reminiscences from the Anglo-​ French Condominium of the New Hebrides. Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific. Cannadine, D. 2001. Ornamentalism: How the British saw their Empire. London: Allen & Lane. Connell, J. 1987. New Caledonia or Kanaky? The political history of a French colony. Canberra: ANU Press. 73

— ​ M a x Q u a n c h i —​ Connolly, B. 2005. Making Black Harvest: warfare, film-​making and living dangerously in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Sydney: ABC Books. Connolly, B. and Anderson, R. 1987. First Contact: New Guinea highlanders encounter the outside world. New York: Viking. Corbey, R. 2010. Headhunters from the Swamps. Leiden: KILTV. Corris, P. 1973. Passage, Port and Plantation: a history of Solomon Islands labour migration 1870–​1914. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Dampier, W. 1697. A New Voyage Around the World. London. —​—​ 1699. Voyages and Descriptions. London. —​—​ 1703. A Voyage to New Holland. London. Denoon, D. (ed.) 1997. Emerging from Empire: decolonisation in the Pacific. Canberra: RSPacS, ANU. Denoon, D. and Mein-​Smith, P. with Wyndham, M. 2000. A History of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific. London: Blackwell. Dobell, G. 2012. From ‘arc of instability’ to ‘arc of responsibility’. Security Challenges 8(4):  33–​45. Douglas, B. 1980. Conflict and alliance in a colonial context: case studies in New Caledonia, 1853–​1870. Journal of Pacific History 15: 21–​51. Finney, B.R. 1968. Big-​fellow man belong business in New Guinea. Ethnology 7(4): 394–​410. —​—​ 1973. Big-​Men and Business: entrepreneurship and economic growth in the New Guinea highlands. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Firth, S. 1976. The transformation of the labour trade in German New Guinea 1899–​1914. Journal of Pacific History 11(1): 51–​65. Fry, G. 1997. Framing the islands: knowledge and power in changing Australian images of the South Pacific. The Contemporary Pacific 9(2): 305–​344. Gammage, B. 1999. The Sky Travellers: journeys in New Guinea 1938–​1939. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Geismer, H. and Herle, A. 2010. Moving Images: John Layard, fieldwork and photography on Malakula since 1914. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Golson, J. 1966. Papua and New Guinea Society: 50,000  years of New Guinea history. Port Moresby. Available at: https://​catalogue.nla.gov.au/​Record/​4665815 (accessed 18 March 2019). Gray, A. 1999. Trading contacts in the Bismarck Archipelago during the whaling era 17969–​ 1884. Journal of Pacific History 34(1): 23–​43. Healey, C. 1990. Maring Hunters and Traders: production and exchange in the PNG highlands. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hempenstall, P. 1978. Pacific Islanders under German Rule: a study in the meaning of resistance. Canberra: ANU Press. Hempenstall, P. and Rutherford, N. 1984. Protest and Dissent in the Colonial Pacific. Suva: University of the South Pacific. Henningham, S. 1994. France in Melanesia and Polynesia. In K.R. Howe, R.C. Kiste and B.V. Lal (eds), Tides of History, 119–​145. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Holland, R., Williams, S. and Barringer, T. (eds) 2010. The Iconography of Independence: freedoms at midnight. London: Routledge. Iwamoto, H. 1999. Nanshin: Japanese Settlers in Papua and New Guinea, 1890–​ 1949. Canberra: Journal of Pacific History, Australian National University. Keesing, R. and Corris, P. 1980. Lightning Meets the West Wind: the Malaita massacre. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. King, P. 2004. West Papua and Indonesia since Suharto: independence, autonomy or chaos? Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Kirsch, S. 2006. Reverse Anthropology: indigenous analysis of social and environmental relations in New Guinea. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 74

— ​ M e l a n e s i a : a r e g i o n a n d a h i s t o r y —​ Kituai, A. 1998. My Gun My Brother: the world of PNG colonial police 1920–​1960. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Kleeman, F.Y. 2003. Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese colonial literature of Taiwan and the south. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Knudson, Kenneth E. 1977. Sydney Island, Titiana, and Kamamleai: Southern Gilbertese in the Phoenix and Solomon Islands. In Michael D. Lieber (ed.), Exiles and Migrants in Oceania, 195–​241. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Laracy, H.M. 1971. Marching rule and the missions. Journal of Pacific History 6: 96–​114. Latukefu, S. 1992. Papua New Guinea: a century of colonial impact. Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea Press. Maddocks, I. and Wolfers, E.P. (eds), Living History and Evolving Democracy. Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea Press. Mar, Banivanua T. 2016. Decolonisation and the Pacific: indigenous globalization and the ends of empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matsuda, M. 2012. Pacific Worlds: a history of seas, peoples, and cultures. London: Cambridge University Press. Maude, H. 1968. Of Islands and Men: studies in Pacific history. Oxford: Oxford University  Press. Moore, C.R. 1985. Kanaka: a history of Melanesian Mackay. Port Moresby: IPNGS/​ UPNG Press. —​—​ 2003. New Guinea: crossing boundaries and history. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Muckle, A. 2008. Kanak experiences of WW1: New Caledonia’s tirailleurs and rebels. History Compass 6/​5: 1325–​1345. —​—​2010. Troublesome chiefs and disorderly subjects: the internment of Kanak under the indigénat—​New Caledonia, 1887–​1946. Journal of French Colonial History 11: 131–​160. —​—​ 2012. Specters of Violence in a Colonial Context, New Caledonia, 1917. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Munro, D. and Thornley, A. (eds) 1996. The Covenant Makers: islander missionaries in the Pacific. Suva: IPS/​USP. Nelson, H. 1977. Black, White and Gold: gold mining in Papua New Guinea 1878–​1930. Canberra: ANU Press. O’Faircheallaigh, C. 1982. Mining in the Papua New Guinea Economy. Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea Press. Osborne, R. 1985. Indonesia’s Secret War: the guerrilla struggle in Irian Jaya. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Peattie, M. 1988. Nan’yō: the rise and fall of the Japanese in Micronesia 1885–​1945. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Penders, C.L.M. 2002. The West New Guinea Debacle. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Ploeg, A. 1995. First contact, in the highlands of Irian Jaya. Journal of Pacific History 30(2): 227–​239. PNG Mine Watch 2016. Logging exposes Frieda river mine lies. Available at: https://​ramumine. wordpress.com/​2016/​06/​30/​logging-​exposes-​frieda-​river-​mine-​lies/​ (accessed 18 March 2019). Quanchi, M. 2004. Jewel of the Pacific and planter’s paradise: the visual argument for Australian sub-​imperialism in the Solomon Islands. Journal of Pacific History 39(1):  43–​58. —​—​2006. Photographing Samarai: place, imagination and change. Paper presented to the Social Change in the 21st Century Conference, 27 October 2006, Centre for Social Change Research, Queensland University of Technology. —​—​ 2007. Photographing Papua: representation, colonial encounters and imagining in the public domain. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Saltford, J. 2003. The UN and the Indonesian Takeover of West Papua 1962–​1969. London: Routledge. 75

— ​ M a x Q u a n c h i —​ Schieffelin, E. and Crittenden, R. (eds) 1991. Like People You See in a Dream: first contact in six Papuan societies. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Shineberg, D. 1999. The People Trade: Pacific Island laborers and New Caledonia, 1865–​1930. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Swadling, P. 1996. Plumes from Paradise: trade cycles in outer Southeast Asia and their impact on New Guinea and nearby islands until 1920. Brisbane: Robert Brown. Thomas, N. 1991. Entangled Objects: exchange, material culture and colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —​—​ 1994. Colonialism’s Culture: anthropology, travel, and government. Cambridge: Polity Press. Thompson, A. 1984. The uses and misuses of capital: New Caledonia’s mining industry 1870–​ 1901. Journal of Pacific History 15(1–​2): 66–​86. Verrier, J. 1986. The origins of the border problem and the border story to 1969. In R.J. May (ed.), Between Two Nations: the Indonesia-​Papua New Guinea border and West Papuan nationalism. Brisbane: Robert Brown. Wacaster, S. 2010. The Mineral Industry of New Caledonia, USGS Minerals Yearbook. Available at: https://​minerals.usgs.gov/​minerals/​pubs/​country/​2008/​myb3-​2008-​nc.pdf (accessed 18 March 2019). Waggener, T.R. 2003. Logging Bans in Asia and the Pacific: an overview. FAO. Available at: www.fao.org/​docrep/​003/​x6967e/​x6967e04.htm (accessed 18 March 2019). Waiko, J.D. 1993. A Short History of Papua New Guinea. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Wright, C. 2013. The Echo of Things: the lives of photographs in the Solomon Islands. Durham: Duke University Press.

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CHAPTER FOUR

MISSIONARIES IN THE MELANESIAN WORLD John Barker

The sparsely populated, roadless northern coast of Milne Bay Province in Papua New Guinea is among the most spectacular regions in a part of the world awash in grand scenery. Rugged green slopes fall sharply from the towering ridgeline of the Owen Stanley Range to a narrow coastal strip of mangroves broken by occasional groves of coconuts shading the bush material houses of small villages. The tiny number of tourists who make their way into what appears to be a nearly pristine Old Melanesia environment are invariably stunned by the unexpected appearance on a high plateau above the village of Wedau of a massive twin towered concrete cathedral (Figure  4.1). When it was consecrated in 1939, the Anglican Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul was the largest permanent building in the Australian colony of Papua (Anonymous 1980).1 Its looming Norman-​Romanesque whitewashed bulk appears as an incongruous European implant set against the wild mountain backdrop and coconut groves. Yet looks can be deceiving. When I first began working with the Maisin people who live in Collingwood Bay, around 80 kilometres to the west, it did not take long before I began hearing of the cathedral on the Dogura plateau. Deacon Didymus Gisore proudly recalled joining a work crew for three months in the mid-​ 1930s, helping to mix coral cement and lifting blocks into place –​one of the 170 men from 35 language groups up and down the coast who devoted their labour to the monument. Several older Maisin men had trained as teachers and evangelists there. Since the 1970s, a large number of Maisin women had attended a girls’ high school built in the shadow of the cathedral. In January 1982, I walked and paddled from Collingwood Bay to Dogura with a Maisin companion. Impressive on the outside, the empty cathedral seemed spare and sad as I entered. Yet it was redolent with history. When the idealistic if impractical Reverend Andrew Maclaren arrived in 1890 with a small group of helpers to establish a kingdom of God on the northern coast, he was directed to set up the mission in no man’s land –​the traditional battleground between neighbouring tribes. Four months later, he was dead and the mission barely survived the next few years until a dynamic bishop, John Montague Stone-​Wigg, came to the rescue. Externally a monument of European missionary triumph (if not folly), the cathedral secretes within its walls numerous references to the surrounding Melanesian world. These include Tauribariba, a famed stone that assured fertility of gardens as well as two ‘sorcery stones’ embedded upside down in the foundation of the pulpit. An expansive 77

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Figure 4.1  Cathedral on the Dogura plateau.

three-​panel mural adorns the wall above the High Altar (Figure 4.2). This was painted in the early 1950s by Canon James Benson, an Australian missionary who survived a horrifying captivity by the Japanese during the Second World War to later establish a thriving Christian cooperative movement in the late 1940s before retiring to Dogura. The mural depicts people of various races facing the figure of a Euro-​Melanesian Christ in the middle panel. Until recent years, most secular scholars working in the Pacific Islands thought of missionaries –​when they thought of them at all –​as adjuncts to the grand imperialist projects of the European nations (Barker 1992). It is tempting to view the slowly crumbling cathedral at Dogura as a somewhat embarrassing relic of a colonial past receding from memory as Melanesians have embraced Christianity and made it their own. Yet this would be a mistake in two respects. First, the cathedral remains in use, as the seat of an Anglican bishop and as a house of worship. Second, when understood in terms of its actual construction and internal symbolism, the cathedral appears less an imposition and more an artefact of the long engagement between a version of European Christianity and Melanesian spiritual experience. Every year, the villagers of Wedau convene below the cathedral to re-​enact and celebrate the arrival of the first missionaries. And they continue to relate oral traditions about Tauribariba and his relationship with remaining standing stones in the village that embody ancestors (Kahn 1990). Although Melanesia has one of the highest percentages of church membership found in the world, long-​established mission institutions continue to shape the Melanesian world, as do encounters with the emissaries of newly arrived missions and sects.

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Figure 4.2  Mural above the High Altar.

This chapter reviews three dimensions of the missionary presence in the Melanesian world. In the first section, I discuss the evolving organisation of mission systems as they were formed on the ground behind an ever expanding mission frontier. I then turn to the key question of engagement between missionaries and Melanesians  –​ ‘conversion’ in the broadest sense. I conclude the essay with some reflections on the missionary legacy. Some cautions and caveats are in order. A short essay like this cannot possibly convey, let  alone cover, the complexities of the mission history of Melanesia. Readers interested in the details should consult Garrett’s (1982, 1992, 1997) excellent three-​volume work on Christian missions in Oceania as well as Trompf’s (Trompf 1991; Trompf and Swain 1995,) overviews of the missionary period in Melanesia. There are, in addition, many excellent scholarly works on individual missions and missionaries, referenced in the above sources. Finally, it must be stressed that there is no clear line when a foreign mission ends and an indigenous Christian community emerges. Indeed, foreign missionaries continue to flock to the region, a handful seeking the last remnants of ‘untouched paganism’, the vast majority seeking to convert Christians from sects they regard as little better than paganism. In this chapter, I focus mainly on the period between early contact in the 1840s to the beginnings of late colonialism in the late 1950s. Most of my examples come from lowland Papua New Guinea, the area I  know best. While this cannot be said to be representative of the whole, I hope that it still gives some insights into the dynamism, impact and lasting legacy of missions in this part of the world. 79

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MISSIONARY ORGANISATION 23 November 1872. The Reverends A.W. Murray and William Gill of the London Missionary Society were impressed by the large Motu village of Manumanu on Redscar Bay as they searched the southern coast of Papua New Guinea (hereafter PNG), seeking out possible locations for a new mission venture into the mostly uncharted island of New Guinea. The village looked clean and orderly, its houses arranged in neat rows on posts over the water. The missionaries were equally impressed by the relatively light skins of the Manumanuans compared to the Papuans they had encountered to the east, as this suggested, according to the racialist thinking of the time, a higher degree of civilisation (Barker 1997). Additionally, given a common Austronesian ancestry, the Motu language sounded familiar to Murray and Gill from their long experience in Polynesia as opposed to the inscrutable non-​Austronesian languages they had encountered to the west. It thus appeared a promising base for the Christian conquest of New Guinea. The missionaries dropped off six Cook Islands evangelists with their wives and one child. They provided the landing party with few supplies on the assumption that the host community would support them as fellow natives whereas the appearance of property might prompt theft or worse. The rented schooner then returned the European missionaries to their temporary base in the Torres Strait Islands (Crocombe 1982). Fifty years earlier, the London Missionary Society had established ‘The Native Agency’ in the Society Islands. A delegation of inspection had taken some Tahitian converts to Hawaiʻi and were greatly impressed by their ability to win Hawaiians to Jehovah. They reasoned that this was because the parties did not have to overcome the supposedly vast gap in civilisation between Europeans and islanders. And there were practical advantages. It was very expensive to bring Europeans to the field and maintain them, while islander evangelists (it was assumed) could rely upon locals for most of their support. In 1822, John Williams began to recruit and train teachers from his base on Raiatea (Society Islands). In the next 17 years, indigenous evangelists trained in missionary-​run seminaries took the lead in spreading Christianity across central Polynesia and Fiji, reaching Vanuatu in 1839.2 This set the pattern along the missionary frontier thereafter, particularly in the Protestant missions. With variations, the Protestant missions relied heavily upon converts from one recently evangelised area to work as evangelists, catechists, and teachers in newly opening regions (Lange 2005). Roman Catholic orders, in contrast, drew more upon European lay brothers and nuns to assist missionary priests, but even in their cases, expansion depended upon the recruitment and training of indigenous catechists, teachers and eventually, indigenous clergy. As we shall see, this development had several important consequences for the shaping of missionary outreach in Melanesia. For the moment, it is enough to note that most Melanesians then, as now, first learned about Christianity at the feet of brown rather than white missionaries. The experience of the Cook Islands missionaries in Manumanu in 1873–​74 serves to illustrate the challenges faced by missionaries, particularly in the years prior to the establishment of colonial administrations (Crocombe 1982). Although the party appears to have been well received by the villagers (who, according to oral traditions, at first assumed the Polynesians were returned ancestors), they had arrived during the ‘famine’ season when Motu people were most reliant on sago traded with groups 80

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to the west as their own gardens recuperated. There was little food to spare for the newcomers. One man died from an infection and two wives perished in childbirth. The rest of the party succumbed to malaria and starvation until rescued the next May by Captain John Moresby, then mapping the coastline of south-​eastern New Guinea for the British navy. The general picture that emerges from accounts of the early missionary period in Melanesia is one of tremendous hardship. On his maiden voyage into southern Vanuatu in 1839, John Williams dropped off three Polynesian teachers on Tanna before being clubbed to death alongside a young British companion at Erromango. The missionary frontier advanced in the early years in tandem with sandalwood traders, labour recruiters, gold prospectors, European material culture (steel axes, guns, alcohol), and diseases which often, in combination, encouraged and provoked a wide range of responses from local populations. With poor communication to the outside world, dependent upon local communities for security and food, and largely ignorant of local customs and language, the pioneers were vulnerable to all manner of suffering. A number of missionaries were attacked, in a few cases murdered, as local warriors retaliated against violence and theft they had suffered from traders and recruiters. On Erromango, successors to John Williams may have provoked their own murders by attributing the epidemics sweeping the island to a vengeful God (Lawson 1994). Violence was a real danger in much of the region, but the chief threat to missionary efforts was disease, particularly malaria and dengue fever. In the first 26 years of the London Missionary Society’s expansion to PNG, at least 130 out of 250 Polynesian teachers died, along with an unknown number of wives and children, mostly from malaria (Lovett 1899: 387). Hunger, disease and loneliness were regular companions for many if not most of the early missionaries. Indeed, suffering was an expected and celebrated aspect of the missionary quest, particularly in the impoverished Roman Catholic orders (Langmore 1989: 43–​44). Martyrs such as Williams or James Chalmers –​a famous Scottish missionary in the mould of David Livingstone struck down and eaten on the southern coast of PNG in 1901 –​played an enlarged role in the books and magazine articles that poured out from mission presses (Langmore 1974). Yet the purpose of the missions was to seek not death but converts who would, in time, assume responsibility for local churches in transformed Christian communities. In the years following the London Missionary Society’s initial forays into the region in the 1840s and the establishment of effective colonial control over the islands and coastal regions in the 1880s and 90s, the first missions adopted a range of strategies. From 1849 to 1920, the Anglican Melanesian Mission transported young men from northern Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands to receive training at seminaries, initially in Auckland and from 1866 on Norfolk Island, before serving as evangelists within their own communities. White missionaries only began settling in the islands after the process of planting Christianity undertaken by the ‘scholars’ was well under way (Hilliard 1978). Roman Catholic missions in PNG tended to follow a communal model based on monastic traditions, with priests, lay workers and nuns settling together in self-​supporting communities. These provided bases from which nearby villages could be visited but in time also became hubs to which local people migrated and resettled (Gostin 1986; Huber 1988; Laracy 1976). Methodist missionaries approached the founding of their mission in south-​eastern PNG with the discipline and might of a military invasion. In June 1891, a flotilla of 81

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three ships landed 72 men, women and children (mainly Fijian) on the beach of Dobu Island led by a small party of well-​armed missionaries with police protection. On board one of the ships was a disassembled house designed in three concentric circles around a central armory. They faced no opposition (Wetherell 1977: 27–​28). There were many variations reflecting local conditions, the funding available to particular missions, and the ecclesiastical order of the founding churches. As the missions became established, spread and consolidated, however, a hub and spoke pattern of head and out-​stations tended to emerge regardless of the denomination. Head stations provided the administrative centres within regional missions. At a minimum, they housed the white staff and, apart from Roman Catholic areas, their spouses. In addition, head stations often contained store houses, workshops, schools for advanced students, and medical clinics. Seminaries were established in head stations like Dogura in the Anglican diocese (see above) or Port Moresby in the London Missionary Society regions in PNG. A few head stations grew into large affairs managing commercial copra plantations and a variety of industries such as boat-​building. Out-​stations, in contrast, tended to be integrated into local villages –​comprised of simple churches, classroom and teachers’ houses, made of bush materials. This arrangement reflected a division of labour between white and brown missionaries that solidified into an organisational hierarchy as missions expanded their territories. While all missionaries engaged in evangelism, the most immediate outreach occurred in village schools and churches under the tutelage of islanders most of whom, in the early years, were recent converts to Christianity themselves. White staff became increasingly specialised and distanced, both physically and experientially, from ordinary villagers. Senior missionaries in particular found their time increasingly taken up with routine administrative matters of managing large mission districts, writing reports to home missions in support of continued funding, and (especially in the Protestant missions) translation work. Their visits to villages tended to be periodic and brief, usually to perform baptisms and Communion services. This typical racial and work division inevitably generated tensions. Supervisory missionaries suspected, with good reason, that evangelists in the out-​stations taught rather unorthodox versions of Christianity. Native staff, with even better reason, chaffed over their poor compensation and blocks to rising within mission hierarchies. This could sometimes lead to conflict, but generally the system in its various forms worked effectively in spreading missionary influence across the region (Wetherell 2002). The missions relied to varying extents on financial support, personnel and direction from missionary societies and churches in home countries. All depended, however, upon local support in the form of land, labour, food and eventually converts to survive. In Polynesia, missionaries had formed alliances with powerful chiefs who, in turn, compelled their communities to replace temples with churches (Barker 2005b). Such a top-​down strategy could not work for Melanesian communities which tended to be much smaller and politically egalitarian. Mass conversions occurred in a few areas but progress generally was slow, with a generation or more passing before a community fully accepted the new religion. While adults were by no means neglected, village schools were the principal means of recruiting new Christians. Teachers provided the rudiments of literacy and mathematics while accustoming pupils to key Christian doctrines and rituals (Barker 2005a). While the terminologies varied, all missions distinguished between unbaptised villagers attending services and catechism 82

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classes, baptised Christians, and full members of the church who could participate in Communion services. The most promising of the male students often received further education and training from white missionaries at the head stations, eventually becoming missionaries or clergy in their own right. While there was some overlapping and competition between Roman Catholic and Protestant missions, for the most part, through mutual agreement later enforced by colonial administrations, the missions carved out separate areas of influence. Over time, a certain geographical distribution emerged in the long-​missionised areas in the Melanesian islands and coastal PNG: Presbyterians in Vanuatu, Roman Catholics in the mountain interior of southern PNG, Anglicans in the north-​eastern coastal area, and so forth. Such arrangements broke down following the Second World War, as the various missions openly competed for souls in the large populations of the newly contacted highlands regions of PNG and West Papua. Even as the mission frontier advanced into the last remaining ‘pagan areas’, the missions were transforming into national and regional churches through programmes of localisation, especially the training and ordination of indigenous clergy to replace foreign missionaries. By necessity as much as principle, the mission churches engaged in more ecumenical outreach, forming partnerships in areas of common interest. This bonding process of what became known as the ‘mainline churches’ was further encouraged by the arrival of nondenominational para-​church organisations engaged in evangelical activities such as Bible translation (e.g. Wycliffe Bible Translators) and support services (e.g. Mission Aviation Fellowship). It was also encouraged by the fierce opposition of the long-​established churches to increasing incursions from the late 1960s onwards of more theologically conservative missions and churches (see Eriksen and MacCarthy, this volume).

THE MISSIONARY ENCOUNTER During the early decades of the twentieth century, a remarkable experiment was conducted on the tiny island of Kwato (Milne Bay Province, PNG). Convinced, as were many at the time, that the Melanesian ‘race’ was doomed to disappear as Europeans swept into the region, the Reverend Charles Abel embraced a radical plan to save a remnant of the Suau people. He gathered children  –​surrendered voluntarily, sold by or stolen from their parents –​to confine on Kwato and be raised as ‘proper’ industrious Christians. Abel and his wife Beatrice carefully monitored all aspects of life: daily work and worship, clothing, marriages and cricket matches (for which Abel held a passion equal to his Christian faith). Abel’s ambitions outpaced the finances of the London Missionary Society, especially after the purchase of large copra plantations in nearby Milne Bay to occupy his growing colony, forcing Abel to set Kwato up as an independent mission. The community continued to grow and thrive. By the time of Abel’s death in 1930, Kwato had become a quasi-​autonomous multiracial community with its own uniforms, anthem, tax system and elections: a quiet challenge to the colour bar enforced elsewhere and the firm conviction of the backwardness of Melanesians (Wetherell 1996). Abel’s Kwato is an extreme but instructive instance of some of the key paradoxes underlying the missionary endeavour. Abel found little to admire in the Suau culture and did all he could to remove his Kwato ‘family’ from its influence. Yet he would 83

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have likely agreed with the sentiment expressed by Bishop Patterson of the Anglican Melanesian Mission in 1866: ‘We don’t aim at making Melanesians Englishmen but Christians’ (quoted in Garrett 1982: 184–​185). Indeed, Abel was a relentless critic of Western corruption whether in PNG or Western countries. What drove Abel, Patterson and other missionaries, despite wide differences in theology and education, was the religious conviction that they had been called to their task by God. For some, particularly in the Catholic orders, this was a calling to martyrdom. Most of the missionaries in the Melanesian world, however, were practical men and women who perceived their vocation as teachers working to bring their charges into the One True Faith, a goal that required spiritual, moral and material transformations (Forman 1978: 40–​43). Lacking an authoritative model of what a perfected Christian society should look like, missionaries drew from their own backgrounds and the routines and requirements of their churches as they established new rules for Christian lives among Melanesian converts. Yet, at the same time, missionaries condemned the moral laxity and corruptions of modern Western culture. A key motivation of the Kwato experiment was to give its family members the tools not only to ‘lift themselves from paganism’ but to demonstrate to the wider world what a true Christian community should look like. This is not to suggest that Abel was typical of missionaries of his time. His abhorrence of Suau cultural practices was extreme, as was his fundamentalist piety, matched only by an earlier generation of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries in southern Vanuatu and by the South Sea Evangelical Mission on Malaita in the Solomon Islands –​all of which insisted that converts completely separate themselves from their unconverted neighbours and the ways of the past (Burt 1994). Most missionaries, by necessity as much as intent, were more patient in pushing for change. They found much to criticise; yet the harsh condemnations of local ‘superstition’, lax marriage practices and the abuse of women were leavened in missionary propaganda with praise of Melanesians’ technical skills, family loyalty and supposed ‘childlike’ simplicity which they assumed would make them into exceptionally faithful Christians. Even Abel was careful not to paint ‘savage life’ so darkly that Melanesians appeared to readers to lack common humanity, to be irredeemable (Abel 1902; cf. Thomas 1992). Several missionaries dabbled in ethnographic studies and a handful became accomplished ethnologists, including Robert Codrington, George Brown and Maurice Leenhardt (Codrington 1891; Gardner 2006; Leenhardt 1979). Yet they were the exception rather than the rule. Learning a local language was essential for the purpose of translating liturgies, hymns and the Bible as well as simple communication. Intimate knowledge of local customs was not. In any case, the heavy burden of administration, teaching, preaching, translating, reporting to the head office, and basic survival left little time for luxuries like ethnological research. As a result, the pattern of missionary outreach derived far more from the institutional forms and liturgical rhythms of the sponsoring churches than strategies of socially engineering new Christian communities, although there could be considerable variation depending on the missionary as to how vigorously Christian regulations were imposed (Barker 1987; Handman 2014). Following a 1916 tour of inspection along the southern coast of PNG, ending at Kwato, the Director of the London Missionary Society wrote, ‘Amid the wilderness each station is an oasis … you will feel that you have reached a haven for spirit as for body … the place is physically and morally clean’ (Lenwood 1917: 202–​203). 84

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Outside the European-​run head stations  –​and usually not very far outside  –​the situation was very different. The Polynesians, Fijians and Melanesians who largely staffed the out-​stations often possessed only a tentative grasp of Christian theology and, like their white supervisors, tended to draw upon their own backgrounds in their assumptions of how Christians ought to live and behave. Some Tongan pastors, wearing the heavy black frock coats common in their home churches, imposed strict Sabbatarian laws on their congregations; some Samoans insisted that their congregations acknowledge their high status with regular payments of tribute; some Melanesian evangelists insisted on replacing local forms of dancing or magic with ‘Christian’ versions from their homelands (Chowning 1969; Wetherell 2002). Given short infrequent inspections, supervising missionaries often had only a slight idea of what was going on in the out-​stations. The presence of other Europeans further complicated the communication of Christianity. Missionaries arrived in Melanesia prior to the imposition of colonial rule, in some areas by decades, but by the 1890s all of the region had been claimed by the Great Powers. Underfunded and undermanned, colonial administrations relied heavily upon the missions for the provision of schooling and medical care. In turn, missionaries relied upon government officers for protection of themselves and their staffs. Missionaries greatly outnumbered government officers and their relationship with local villagers tended to be more cooperative and intimate. In addition, missionaries tended to perceive themselves as the chief protectors of the interests of local people, particularly against plantation owners after local lands and labour. Inevitably, there were clashes of interest, but for the most part missionaries and government officers alike respected their mutual areas of authority and activity. Villagers quickly learned to distinguish between missionaries who set up schools and churches and government officers who used their police to suppress warfare, impose regulations on village life, set taxes and recruit labourers, creating a typical space of interaction which Burridge (1960) dubs the ‘triangle’. While there were pockets of firm rejection by traditionalists, particularly in parts of Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, it is remarkable how quickly missions expanded and established themselves across the islands and lowland regions of Melanesia, usually with skimpy resources and staffs. In exchange for coveted sticks of twist tobacco and steel tools, villagers built schools, churches and housing for missionaries and teachers. While adult interest in church services tended to wane, they nevertheless allowed their children to attend schools, submit to the corporal punishments meted out by the teachers, and be baptised. Within a generation or two, the presence of the mission church and school became normalised, occupying an ever more important centre of village life and identity. Missionaries’ ability to regulate lives beyond the classroom and the church, however, was much more limited. Supervising missionaries were frequently surprised to learn that individuals who faithfully attended church also participated in formally banned ‘heathen’ ceremonies, practised various sorts of magic, and remained convinced of the power of ancestral spirits and sorcerers. The regulation of marriage was a particularly frustrating issue for missionaries. Some missions tolerated polygyny and divorce with the view that in time converts would embrace Christian monogamy; others were more forceful in disciplining non-​ compliant parishioners. It made little difference. Nor were periodic campaigns to ban bridewealth exchanges, which missionaries perceived as purchasing women, any more successful in most of the Melanesian communities they worked. This is not 85

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to suggest that indigenous customs and institutions did not change after the arrival of the missions, but that the changes often cannot be attributed directly or solely to missionary influence. The elaborate male cults of the Papuan Gulf and along the Sepik River, for instance, survived years of missionary opposition (Tuzin 1997; Williams 1940; see Bonnemère, this volume). Their eventual collapse is at least partly attributable to changing social and economic conditions, particularly the absence of young men engaged as labourers in European-​run plantations and mines. While missionaries’ ability to direct change was often compromised, their intrusion into the Melanesian world was, nevertheless, hugely consequential. They came bearing a message of an all-​powerful God, often in apocalyptic terms. Moreover, they conveyed this message in the company of a multitude of unprecedented ideas and things such as tobacco and steal axes, Polynesian crops and mat technologies, deadly diseases and medicines that (sometimes) cured them –​all of which quickly diffused along established trade routes and, in time, mission networks (Latukefu 1978). Initial responses along the missionary frontier varied. In much of the coastal areas of PNG, villagers selectively chose elements of Christianity while continuing with key ancestral rituals and traditions. In the Solomon Islands, newly converted zealots destroyed ancestor shrines to demonstrate the superior power of the Christian God (White 1991). On Tanna in southern Vanuatu, Presbyterian converts set up courts, flogging converts and traditionalists alike who failed to conform with church rules (Rowley 1965: 142). In 1893, as Abel was setting up the Kwato mission, a young man named Tokeriu living on nearby Milne Bay experienced a revelation. He urged the people to destroy all of the European technologies they had adopted along with their gardens and their villages and relocate in the mountains. The ancestors would then return in a European ship filled with taro, yams and traditional wealth (Worsley 1968: 35–​37). Future Melanesian prophets embraced European goods, elevating ‘cargo’ into a symbol of a past and future moral equivalence of Melanesians and whites, fusing indigenous and Christian mythologies (Burridge 1969; see Lindstrom, this volume). So-​called ‘cargo cults’ and instances of iconoclastic desecration of spirit houses and shrines have, not surprisingly, attracted the most attention from scholars who have considered the impact missionaries had on Melanesians (e.g. Tuzin 1997). Striking as these incidents are, it is likely that missions exerted a greater influence by virtue of the routines they introduced to village society, including routine teachings. Attending school and church exposed Melanesians to Western disciplines of time, money and singular authority; women’s church groups challenged local notions of gender relations and domesticity; and the spiritual hierarchies of Christian theologies and church organisations rubbed against Melanesian egalitarianism (Eriksen 2008; Jolly and Macintyre 1989; Smith 1994). Churches and their associated rituals provided a centre of community affairs and identity, distinct (in principle at least) from kinship and exchange loyalties. Those who entered the missions as teachers, evangelists, nurses and ministers acquired knowledge of European languages and the typical procedures of Western institutions, giving them a distinctive advantage when colonial administrations gave way to national churches and new nation-​states. Most of the first generation of indigenous political leaders emerging from the late 1960s were products of mission education, and several, such as Walter Lini of Vanuatu and Jean-​Marie Tjibaou of New Caledonia, were ordained clergy. 86

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Figure 4.3  Memorial chapel on Kwato.

The Melanesian world also exerted a subtle influence on foreign missionaries, particularly those who spent decades ministering there. A  few European missionaries in more remote stations underwent initiation and joined in traditional dancing and other ceremonials. Melanesian teachers and clergy engaged in competitive exchanges and linked themselves to local families through marriages. Even the most hardened missionaries grew to appreciate aspects of the societies they came to change. Charles Abel was convinced that his Kwato ‘children’ could be trained to build excellent boats because he knew their parents were excellent craftsmen and artists. In turn, Suau tolerated Abel’s excesses in part because his ability to force his will on natives and Europeans alike spoke of considerable spiritual potency. It is somehow fitting, then, that the memorial chapel built on Kwato a few years after Abel’s death was constructed in the form of a Suau meeting house and that tales continue to be told around Milne Bay of the missionary’s command over disease and the elements, who did not hesitate to use his powers to take down those, including seemingly powerful Europeans, who stood in his way (Wetherell 1996).

CONCLUSION The 1960s witnessed the final great missionary push into unconverted Melanesia as the Australian and Dutch colonial administrations asserted control over the large populations living in the interior of New Guinea. The expansion coincided with the end of the classic mission period in the region. Home churches had decreased their support for years, forcing missions to accelerate the training and promotion of local 87

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clergy to assume control over emerging national churches. At the same time, colonial governments established their own educational and medical systems while setting standards for those run by the churches (see Street, this volume). The rapid expansion of the civil service, in preparation for independence, opened opportunities for educated Melanesians. Many of those trained at mission expense in newly created secondary schools and theological colleges opted to work in government and run for legislative office. If censuses are to be believed, by the early 1960s the majority of Melanesians were baptised Christians; a decade later, the rate of affiliation was approaching an astonishing 95% of the population (Ernst 2006). For many years now, Melanesia has been sending missionaries to other parts of the world (Lutkehaus 2007). For all this apparent success, however, foreign missionaries continue to pour into Melanesian countries. Many represent theologically conservative sects and denominations that seek to convert Christians in the long-​established churches; but arguably a larger component is made up of teachers, technical workers and senior clergy answering calls to work as volunteers in the impoverished mainline churches. Despite the presence of innumerable churches in towns and villages, with the exception of the French colony of New Caledonia, the Melanesian territories continue to feel like missionary country in many respects. The second largest airline in PNG is the Missionary Aviation Fellowship; the Summer Institute of Linguistics, dedicated to biblical translation, is one of the best endowed and most active agencies in the region; and everywhere one encounters ‘crusades’ and rallies condemning ‘satanic’ customary practices (see Eriksen and MacCarthy, this volume). Ethnographic research reveals that Christianity has been received and understood in different Melanesian communities in distinctive ways. For some, acceptance of Christianity entails a total rejection of the ways of the past, whereas others find validation of ancestral customs and morals in Christian teachings. Some communities associate the church with Western-​style modernity whereas others see Christianity as more aligned with traditional moral values associated with collective village life (Barker 2007). Despite the ambiguities and contradictions, several scholars have made bold claims about the deeper impact of the missionary intrusion in Melanesia and elsewhere: as a ‘colonisation of the mind’, a shift from a collectivist to an individualist conception of personhood, or a cognitive/​ontological revolution (Beidelman 1982; Robbins 2004; Whitehouse 2000). Such speculation has, in turn, been met with sometimes fierce critiques pointing to alleged connections and continuities between pre-​and post-​Christian Melanesian worlds (Mosko 2010). Perhaps the least contentious theory has been put forth by Burridge (1991): that missionaries are a disruptive force by avocation. By urging converts to critique and renew their lives and communities, missionaries communicate a project of renewal with no defined end points. Given historic contingencies, some converts followed paths toward building national churches and secular institutions while others have pursued the lure of millenarian New Heavens and New Earths. Certainly, the missionary experience in Melanesia is replete with ironies and surprises, none more so than the monuments erected within a few years of each other at Dogura and Kwato, both the product of native labour and materials. The mission most sympathetic to local village culture at that time constructed a fortress-​ like cathedral looming over the waters of Bartle Bay as its most visible symbol. And the missionary most determined to erase that same culture from the face of 88

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the earth is memorialised by a modest chapel in the graceful shape of a traditional village house. Perhaps the greatest irony of the missionary intrusion into the Melanesian world has been the transformation of the older mission churches from ardent critics of indigenous tradition to its embodiment. In part, this represents a shift in Catholic and Protestant theologies toward doctrines of ‘inculturation’ and ‘contextualization’: in brief, the notion that Christian values only achieve authenticity when embedded in local cultures. On a more experiential register, it reflects the fact that Christianity is solidly grounded in generations of Melanesians’ experiences, particularly in the villages where the church is identified with a host of indigenous traditions to which it has long accommodated itself. In recent years, Christian fundamentalists have renewed iconoclastic attacks on traditional rituals and arts across the region, which they regard as satanic. Late in 2013, the Speaker of the PNG Parliament ordered the removal and destruction of the carved heads decorating the entrance of the Parliament building, declaring them to be ‘ungodly images and idols’ (Eves and Haley 2014). The Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church, the largest Christian body in the country, was among the first to condemn this act of desecration. The most visible symbol of the Catholic faith in Port Moresby is St Mary’s Cathedral, designed in the form of a Sepik cult house, its mural adorned with ancestral faces in the same style as those removed from the Parliament lintel.

NOTES 1 For simplicity’s sake, hereafter, I use the contemporary designation of ‘Papua New Guinea’ to cover the various designations applied to the British, German and Australian colonial possessions from 1884 to Independence in 1975. 2 As with PNG, for clarity, I refer to ‘Vanuatu’ rather than the colonial designation, the New Hebrides.

REFERENCES Abel, C.W. 1902. Savage Life in New Guinea: The Papuan in Many Moods. London: London Missionary Society. Anonymous. 1980. A Short History of the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, Dogura, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. London: Papua New Guinea Church Partnership. Barker, J. 1987. Optimistic pragmatists: Anglican missionaries among the Maisin of Collingwood Bay, Oro Province. Journal of Pacific History 22(2): 66–​81. —​—​1992. Christianity in Western Melanesian ethnography. In J. Carrier (ed.), History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology, 144–​173. Berkeley: University of California Press. —​—​1997. Way back in Papua: representing society and change in the publications of the London Missionary Society in New Guinea, 1871–​1932. Pacific Studies 19(3): 107–​142. —​—​2005a. An outpost in Papua: Anglican missionaries and Melanesian teachers among the Maisin, 1902–​1934. In P. Brock (ed.), Indigenous Peoples and Religious Change, 79–​106. Leiden: Brill. —​—​2005b. Where the missionary frontier ran ahead of Empire. In N. Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire, 86–​106. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —​—​ (ed.) 2007. The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond. Aldershot: Ashgate. Beidelman, T.O. 1982. Colonial Evangelism: A Socio-Historical Study of an East African Mission at the Grassroots. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. 89

— ​ J o h n   B a r k e r —​ Burridge, K. 1960. Mambu: A Study of Melanesian Cargo Movements and Their Social and Ideological Background. New York: Harper and Row. —​—​ 1969. New Heaven, New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activities. New York: Schocken Books. —​—​ 1991. In the Way: A Study of Christian Missionary Endeavours. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Burt, B. 1994. Tradition & Christianity. London: Harwood. Chowning, A. 1969. Recent acculturation between tribes in Papua-​New Guinea. Journal of Pacific History 4: 27–​40. Codrington, R.H. 1891. The Melanesians: Studies in their Anthropology and Folk Lore. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Crocombe, M.T. 1982. Ruatoka: A Cook Islander in Papuan history. In M. Crocombe and R. Crocombe (eds), Polynesian Missions in Melanesia, 55–​78. Suva: University of the South Pacific. Eriksen, A. 2008. Gender, Christianity and Change in Vanuatu: An Analysis of Social Movements in North Ambrym. Aldershot: Ashgate. Ernst, M. (ed.) 2006. Globalization and the Re-​Shaping of Christianity in the Pacific Islands. Suva: Pacific Theological College. Eves, R. and Haley, N. 2014. Ungodly images and idols: debating national identity in the national parliament. In R. Eves et al. (eds), Purging Parliament: A New Christian Politics in Papua New Guinea? Canberra: State, Society & Governance in Melanesia, Australian National University. Available at: http://​ssgm.bellschool.anu.edu.au/​experts-​publications/​ publications/​1303/​purging-​parliament-​new-​christian-​politics-​papua-​new-​guinea (accessed 15 February 2017). Forman, C.W. 1978. Foreign missionaries in the Pacific Islands during the twentieth century. In J.A. Boutilier, D.T. Hughes and S.W. Tiffany (eds), Mission, Church, and Sect in Oceania, 35–​63. Lanham: University Press of America. Gardner, H.B. 2006. Gathering for God: George Brown in Oceania. Dunedin: Otago University Press. Garrett, J. 1982. To Live Among the Stars: Christian Origins in Oceania. Geneva: World Council of Churches. —​—​ 1992. Footsteps in the Sea: Christianity in Oceania to World War II. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies. —​—​ 1997. Where Nets Were Cast: Christianity in Oceania Since World War II. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies. Gostin, O. 1986. Cashcropping, Catholicism and Change: resettlement among the Kuni of Papua. Canberra: National Centre for Developmental Studies, Australian National University. Handman, C. 2014. Critical Christianity: Translation and Denominational Conflict in Papua New Guinea. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hilliard, D. 1978. God’s Gentlemen: A History of the Melanesian Mission, 1849–1942. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Huber, M. 1988. The Bishop’s Progress: A Historical Ethnography of Catholic Missionary Experience on the Sepik Frontier. Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Press. Jolly, M. and Macintyre, M. (eds) 1989. Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kahn, M. 1990. Stone-​faced ancestors: the spatial anchoring of myth in Wamira, Papua New Guinea. Ethnology 29: 51–​66. Lange, R. 2005. Island Ministers: Indigenous Leadership in Nineteenth Century Pacific Islands Christianity. Canberra: Pandanus Books. Langmore, D. 1974. Tamate: a king. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. —​—​ 1989. Missionary Lives: Papua, 1874–1914. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. 90

— ​ M i s s i o n a r i e s i n t h e M e l a n e s i a n   w o r l d —​ Laracy, H. 1976. Marists and Melanesians: A History of the Catholic Missions in the Solomon Island. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Latukefu, S. 1978. The impact of South Sea Islands missionaries on Melanesia. In J.A. Boutilier, D.T. Hughes and S.W. Tiffany (eds), Mission, Church, and Sect in Oceania, 91–​108. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lawson, B. 1994. Collected Curios. Montreal: McGill University Libraries. Leenhardt, M. 1979. Do Kamo: Missionary Tales from the South Seas. New York: Antheneum. Lenwood, F. 1917. Pastels from the Pacific. London: Oxford University Press. Lovett, R. 1899. History of the London Missionary Society, 1795–​1895 (Vol. I). London: Henry Frowde. Lutkehaus, N.C. 2007. ‘In the way’ in Melanesia: modernity and the new woman in Papua New Guinea as Catholic missionary sister. In J. Barker (ed.), The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond, 149–​168. Aldershot: Ashgate. Mosko, M.S. 2010. Partible penitents: dividual personhood and Christian practice in Melanesia and the west. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16(2): 215–​240. Robbins, J. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rowley, C.D. 1965. The New Guinea Villager: A Retrospect from 1964. Sydney: F.W. Cheshire. Smith, M.F. 1994. Hard Times on Kairiru Island: Poverty, Development, and Morality in a Papua New Guinea Village. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Thomas, N. 1992. Colonial conversions: difference, hierarchy, and history in early twentieth-​ century evangelical propaganda. Comparative Studies in Society and History 34: 366–​389. Trompf, G.W. 1991. Melanesian Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trompf, G. and Swain, T. 1995. The Religions of Oceania. London: Routledge. Tuzin, D. 1997. The Cassowary’s Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wetherell, D. 1977. Reluctant Mission: The Anglican Church in Papua New Guinea, 1891– 1942. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. —​—​ 1996. Charles Abel and the Kwato Mission of Papua New Guinea 1891–​1975. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press. —​—​2002. Teachers all: Samoan, Fijian, and Queensland Melanesian missionaries in Papua, 1884–​1914. Journal of Religious History. 26(1): 78–​96. White, G.M. 1991. Identity through History: Living Stories in a Solomon Islands Society. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Whitehouse, H. 2000. Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, F.E. 1940. Drama of Orokolo: The Social and Ceremonial Life of the Elema. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Worsley, P. 1968. The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo Cults” in Melanesia. New York: Schocken Books.

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PART II

GEO-​P OLITICAL, LINGUISTIC AND REGIONAL OVERVIEWS

CHAPTER FIVE

GEO-​P OLITICAL OVERVIEW OF MELANESIA Stewart Firth

This volume defines Melanesia as encompassing the independent Pacific states of Papua New Guinea (PNG), Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, France’s territory New Caledonia, the Torres Strait Islands of Australia, and West Papua (which consists of the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua). By some accounts, Melanesia is a far-​flung cultural area extending from the south-​west Pacific, and into eastern Indonesia. In order to bolster its claim to the western half of the island of New Guinea, the Indonesian government has for years claimed that its provinces of Maluku, North Maluku and East Nusa Tenggara  –​together with Papua and West Papua, the two Indonesian provinces in western New Guinea –​are as Melanesian as anything in the Pacific. Indeed, by this reckoning, Indonesia is home to 11  million Melanesians, a population greater than all the Melanesians normally counted east of the Indonesia/​ PNG border and the inclusion of West Papua is therefore unremarkable. To engage in these definitional debates is to be reminded of the arbitrariness of the label applied to the Melanesian region and its diverse peoples. Melanesia’s modern international borders arise from its colonial history (see Quanchi, this volume). The great island of New Guinea was partitioned in the nineteenth century along the 141st meridian east between the Netherlands on the western side and Germany and Great Britain on the eastern. Today that meridian, which suited statesmen at the time but carries no cultural logic, forms much of the border between Indonesia and PNG. A similar observation applies to the border between PNG and the Solomon Islands, drawn to divide Bougainville from the Shortland Islands. Solomon Islands itself is a European construction of the late nineteenth century, partitioned and then re-​partitioned into its modern form by Germany and Britain at a time when they were competitors for Pacific territory. Islands that are now part of Solomons’ neighbours, PNG and Vanuatu, could just as reasonably be its own. Independent Vanuatu and the French collectivity of New Caledonia also owe their borders to colonial activities in the nineteenth century, mainly on the part of France. The Torres Strait Islands were added to the British colony of Queensland in 1879, and therefore became part of Australia at Federation in 1901. As a consequence, the modern independent states of Melanesia are artificial in character, with no pre-​colonial existence and with little sense of the shared national identity that might underpin the authority and legitimacy of government (see Allen, 95

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this volume). Except in the case of Vanuatu, and then only to a minor extent, the colonial masters were not expelled from these Melanesian territories by the force of an outraged nationalism appealing to the common experience of humiliation under colonial rule. On the contrary, the colonial masters left because they wanted to do so and under the pressure of international opinion. Australia granted independence to PNG for reasons of its own and almost before all but a tiny elite knew what was happening. The United Kingdom departed Solomon Islands in 1978 as one of the final stages of relieving itself of burdensome overseas possessions on the other side of the world, a process begun decades before. And in 1980 the United Kingdom, together with France, granted independence to Vanuatu, previously the joint Anglo-​ French condominium of the New Hebrides. The rest of Melanesia remains part of some other state –​Indonesia in the case of West Papua, France for New Caledonia and Australia for the Torres Strait Islands.

MELANESIAN POLITICAL SYSTEMS Before we examine independence movements in Melanesia, let us focus on the way politics works in the three Melanesian countries that are already independent: PNG, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. If more independent states are formed, we might expect similar political systems to emerge. The assumption behind the vast effort by Western aid agencies to bring ‘good governance’ to the independent countries of Melanesia might be called the ‘Weberian expectation’, namely that there exists a path that will lead Melanesian politicians from relationships of patronage to an enlightened understanding of the need for impersonal authority, national rather than kin loyalties, and neutral following of rules. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs prefers the term ‘effective governance’, which is one of the six priorities of its aid programme. In its view, ‘Governance affects virtually all aspects of a country’s prosperity. An effective public sector and functioning, predictable institutions provide the foundations for economic growth, private sector investment and trade’ (Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade 2017). This agenda suggests a teleology of politics that ends in Western liberalism. While it is beyond dispute that services would be better delivered, and living standards higher in Melanesian countries if they were in a position to meet the Weberian expectation, they are not. Linguistic diversity, particularism and cultural norms count against it. Melanesian political systems are better understood in their own terms, and in a way that incorporates the cultural setting in which they are embedded. Concepts such as clientelism and neo-​patrimonialism are misleading in the context of Melanesian political systems. They are typified by lack of party discipline and ideology (‘unbounded politics’), adherence to democratic elections as a source of legitimacy (‘democratic persistence’), powerful and overriding loyalties to kin (‘primacy of kin obligations’), and the ineffectiveness of government in general (‘the limited state’). At the same time law and justice are delivered at the local level in local ways, through custom, church and state. Writing about a day in the life of a Solomon Islands member of parliament, Rick Hou wrote that he

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came to understand the reality of the Solomon Islands political landscape: there are no political parties –​only a ‘numbers game’. In fact, the so-​called political parties going into the elections are usually just collections of individuals with certain interests, not necessarily anything to do with national interests. One sees these interests coming out at the time of the election of the prime minister. It is not unusual to have successful candidates from a political party ending up on opposite sides of the political aisle after the election of the prime minister. (Hou 2016: 2) The weakness of political parties in Melanesia breaks the link between voting and the formation of government. Voters vote for individuals, who then gather to undertake the second, unpredictable process of forming a government. Money changes hands as leaders who have the most to offer amass cliques of followers. As Kabutaulaka says, ‘Ordinary citizens have no direct control over the formation of government and the choice of prime minister’ (Kabutaulaka 2008: 97). Melanesians mostly accept the government the politicians give them, expecting little and getting little, but on one occasion the choice of prime minister was so unpopular  –​when Snyder Rini, rumoured to be corrupt, emerged as Solomons’ prime minister in 2006 –​that a riot ensued, ensuring that he would be replaced by someone more acceptable. The second, almost paradoxical, characteristic of Melanesian political systems is democratic persistence. For all its many failures as an effective state, PNG fulfils the criteria customarily required of a democracy. Since independence more than 40  years ago, PNG has held regular elections and conducted peaceful transfers of power. Plagued for years by frequent changes of government caused by votes of no confidence, it developed its own unique answer in the form of legislation that banned such votes in certain periods and mandated party loyalty for MPs in order to prevent them switching sides. In a modified form, this legislation remains in place, and PNG can be expected to continue holding national elections every five years. Similar democratic persistence applies to Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, though Vanuatu continues to see one government quickly replaced by another as MPs desert leaders. The Vanuatu prime minister Charlot Salwai was the tenth politician to hold that position in eight years when he won the elections in 2016, and he led a coalition of ten parties. Melanesian custom dictates the primacy of kin obligations, broadly construed, in the business of politics. The local MP is seen as the ‘government’ whether he is in government or opposition, and is expected to act like a ‘chief’ by responding to the tiniest problems of his constituents. In the age of the mobile phone, says Rick Hou, constituents call their MP on anything and everything. They call for assistance with funeral expenses of dead relatives, assistance with school fees, to attend a wedding, to follow up on their project application, to attend a meeting on the local hospital project or just to ask for ‘top up’ of phone credit. (Hou 2016: 2)

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The focus of these loyalties and obligations is overwhelmingly local, and the consequence is a lack of attention to national policy on the part of MPs. An institutional expression of these obligations is the growing proportion of government funds being directed to MPs for them to spend on their constituencies, rather than being funnelled, as would be normal in Western democracies, through national departments responsible for different areas of government such as education or health. ‘Such “handouts” from the state’, wrote Ketan of PNG in 2007, are often invested in personal networks to secure support for large-​scale group enterprises (business, elections, warfare, ceremonial exchange). Politicians rely on localized support bases to win elections and thus tend to devote much of the resources at their disposal to their strongholds, to the exclusion of the wider electorate. (Ketan 2007: 1) The system is not new, and has existed in the form of Electoral Development Funds in PNG since the early 1980s, but it has grown in recent years. By one estimate, 45% of the Solomons’ 2015 development budget came under the direct control of MPs in the form of Constituency Development Funds, skewing the entire political system dramatically in the direction of local patronage (Batley 2015). The state–​citizen relationship, in other words, is being mediated as much through individuals who can use it for personal patronage as through state bureaucracies. The limited state is a final characteristic of Melanesian political systems, or at least of the states in which they operate. As the ongoing epidemic of tuberculosis in PNG suggests (The Diplomat 2016), the PNG government is poor at delivering health services, and the rural aid posts of the colonial period often lie abandoned or without medicines (see Street, this volume). When medicines arrive, they might come from a local multinational resource company, such as China’s MCC Ramu NiCo Limited, which supplies the Ganglau aid post (Madang Province, PNG) with medical supplies every fortnight. Government supplies are never enough to meet demand. As the PNG opposition leader said in 2016: ‘Our children, women and other citizens are dying due to lack of basic services like medicines in the health centres. Schools have been shut down due to lack of funds’ (ABC News 2016). In addition to this, in economies dependent on the export of a few key commodities, government spending on services can be subject to sharp cutbacks, as happened in PNG when commodity prices fell in 2015 (ABC Pacific Beat 2015).

INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENTS IN MELANESIA The modern map of Melanesia is, to some extent, provisional, as might be expected of a region where borders owe everything to a colonial legacy and where independent states lack strong central authority. For many people in the Melanesian populations of Indonesia and overseas France the achievement of independence remains a burning ambition, inspiring a West Papua independence movement that began with Indonesia’s occupation of former Dutch New Guinea in the 1960s, and one for an independent New Caledonia that sparked small-​scale armed conflict in the 1980s and initiated a complex process of 98

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devolution to local control. Many Bougainvilleans believe that they too are part of a state to which they owe no allegiance. Here secessionists fought the national government of PNG in the 1990s, seeking an independent Bougainville, before a final peace agreement was reached in 2001.

West Papua Indonesia remains firmly in control of the Melanesian territory that came under its control in 1963. Consisting of two provinces, Papua and West Papua (collectively designated as ‘West Papua’ here), the population according to the 2010 census was about 2.6 million, equally split between Melanesians and Indonesian citizens of other origins, most of whom have migrated to this part of Indonesia in the last half century. Some observers fear the Melanesians will be systematically outnumbered in their own country (Elmslie 2010). Decades of armed struggle by the West Papuan independence movement produced fierce repression of separatists in what one observer called the ‘forgotten war’. Not until the resignation of Suharto as Indonesian President in 1998 did political space seem to open. But the authorities saw treason when activists in Sorong, Nabire, Wamena and on the island of Biak raised the flag of free West Papua in July 1998. In what became known as the Biak massacre, Indonesian soldiers shot dead numerous people. Under President Abdurrahman Wahid, the Indonesian government permitted the meeting of Kongres Papua as a forum for discussion, but soon determined that it too was treasonous. Arrests followed and in 2001 the prominent West Papuan leader Theys Eluay was kidnapped and murdered, probably by Indonesian special forces, though this is disputed (Inside Indonesia 2007). Since then Indonesian governments have veered between concession and repression in their approach to West Papua, and the Indonesian armed forces remain an oppressive presence. Divisions weakened the independence movement for many years, but since the founding of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua in 2014 and the emergence of a non-​violent policy, it has proved more effective in garnering international support and organising popular protest. The year 2016, for example, saw a succession of popular demonstrations in West Papua, culminating in a demonstration in Wamena of 6,000 to 8,000 people marking Human Rights Day (Radio New Zealand International 2016a). No foreign policy issue arouses popular interest, outrage and support in independent Melanesia as much as West Papua, whose people are seen as Melanesian brothers suffering from endless human rights abuses and whose release from bondage can come only in the form of independence. Organisations such as the PNG Union for a Free West Papua and Solomon Islands for West Papua represent a phenomenon rare in the region –​associations pressing for foreign policy change. A particular focus for the energies of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua in recent years has been to gain membership of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), the one regional organisation that might appear most sympathetic to their aspirations. The MSG dates from the 1980s, when its formation was inspired by solidarity with the Kanak independence struggle against the French in New Caledonia. For that reason, its membership is unusual, consisting of four independent states (PNG, Solomons, Fiji and Vanuatu) and one political party, the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS), its name recalling the FLN of 99

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Algeria. The MSG Secretariat, initially funded by China, is located in the Vanuatu capital, Port Vila. For long a minor talking-​shop on regional matters, the MSG has gained prominence in recent years as the focus of a rejuvenated regionalism that encompasses labour mobility schemes, police cooperation and even vague plans for a Melanesian peacekeeping force. Belonging to the MSG has suddenly assumed new importance, not least for Indonesia, which for years has feared its potential to become a rallying point for a pan-​Melanesian nationalism that might endanger its position in West Papua. Having concluded that it was better to be in the MSG than out of it, Indonesia became an observer member in 2011. In 2014, the United Liberation Movement for West Papua initiated its own campaign for membership, appealing to sentiments of Melanesian solidarity and provoking a vigorous campaign of Indonesian diplomacy directed at preventing this from happening. Visits to independent Melanesia by the Indonesian foreign minister and the Indonesian president followed hard upon each other, as the Indonesians promised development aid in return for diplomatic support. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono gave the keynote address at the Second Summit of the Pacific Islands Development Forum in Fiji in 2014, Indonesian foreign minister Retno Marsudi visited Fiji, Solomons and PNG in March 2015, and President Joko Widodo followed her with an official trip to PNG two months later. The result was a compromise in Indonesia’s favour: Indonesia became an associate member of the MSG in 2015 and the United Liberation Movement an observer member. In the minds of many West Papuans, full membership of the MSG now became the next goal, a symbol of their struggle for international recognition, and they marched in this cause in large numbers in Jayapura, Yakuhimo, Manokwari, Merauke and Sorong in 2016 (Radio New Zealand International 2016b). Meeting in Solomon Islands a few months later, MSG leaders deferred a decision on the issue, which is one that poses diplomatic dilemmas for the countries of independent Melanesia. PNG, a small state of fewer than eight million people that shares a border with the fourth most populous country in the world (258  million), cannot afford to antagonise its neighbour and has always recognised that the provinces of Papua and West Papua are integral parts of Indonesia. Solomon Islands, a microstate of 600,000 people, has been more critical of Indonesia, but only tiny Vanuatu (population 260,000), too small to affect events, has consistently stood on principle in support of West Papuan independence. The issue of West Papua reached the UN in 2016, when leaders from six Pacific countries including Vanuatu and Solomon Islands condemned alleged human rights abuses by the Indonesians. The Solomons’ Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare described ‘human rights violations in West Papua and the pursuit of self-​ determination’ of West Papua as ‘two sides of the same coin’ (Radio New Zealand International 2016c). The international legal argument in favour of West Papuan independence, however, is weaker than its equivalent was for Timor-​Leste during its occupation by Indonesia, 1975–​1999. Timor-​Leste was a former Portuguese territory invaded by Indonesia, and regarded by the UN as a case of incomplete decolonisation. West Papua was a former Dutch possession, and is regarded by the UN as having been added legally to Indonesia (the former Dutch East Indies) as the successor state 100

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in the UN-​supervised Act of Free Choice of 1969. That is why supporters of West Papuan independence emphasise the farcical nature of the Act of Free Choice, when well-​documented intimidation of the few West Papuans who were consulted ensured a result in Indonesia’s favour (Saltford 2000; see Quanchi, this volume).

New Caledonia A French territory since 1853, and now called a sui generis collectivity of France, New Caledonia is home to an indigenous population of Melanesians known as Kanaks (around 40%), together with a migrant population many of whom trace their origins to France, or to other French territories such as Wallis and Futuna and French Polynesia. Like Australia, New Caledonia was a settler colony in the nineteenth century. Those of European descent make up about 29% of the population, and the so-​called caldoches are French who have been there for generations, sometimes with ancestors who were convicts or political prisoners. Other French people have moved in recent decades to what is, after all, an overseas part of France itself. Nowhere in Melanesia is the composition of the population of such political importance as in New Caledonia, because there it determines who will be permitted to vote in the forthcoming referendum on independence. An indigenous independence movement emerged in the 1970s, at a time when other Melanesian countries were lowering the colonial flags and raising their own. In the 1980s Kanaks declared a provisional government and a low-​level armed struggle ensued, during which France stationed thousands of troops in the villages of the territory. The renowned Kanak leader at the time was Jean-​Marie Tjibaou, who gave expression to the widespread Kanak desire for self-​determination. After a massacre in 1988, France organised negotiations between the contending parties delaying an independence referendum for a decade, and when 1998 arrived, the referendum was again deferred in favour of a more comprehensive agreement called the Noumea Accord. The Noumea Accord provides for the irreversible devolution of certain powers to the territorial government, the retention by the French State of the powers over justice, public order, defence, foreign affairs and currency, and the holding of a referendum on the future political status of the territory by 2018. Just who will be permitted to vote in this referendum has long been contentious in the territory’s politics, with pro-​independence parties seeking the narrowest electorate in order to favour the Kanaks, and anti-​independence parties seeking the widest. There is now a ‘frozen electorate’ of eligible voters who arrived in New Caledonia before the date of the referendum on the Noumea Accord, 5 November 1998, 20 years before the new referendum, but debate continues over who will constitute the final electorate, and the political situation is volatile. French President Emmanuel Macron announced during the 2017 election campaign that, while he would respect the result of the referendum, he would prefer to see New Caledonia remain part of France (Baker 2017).

Bougainville Bougainville’s 2001 peace agreement with PNG came after years of armed conflict which reduced the island from one of the country’s most prosperous and developed 101

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provinces to one of its poorest. The agreement provided for Bougainville to become an autonomous region, and for a further referendum on future political status to be held by 2020. Since 2005 it has conducted its own elections every five years, elected its own president, maintained its own parliament and legislated its own mining law. The 2015 elections returned the veteran politician John Momis as president once again. Bougainville’s Panguna copper mine, the world’s largest when it opened in 1972, brought environmental damage, loss of customary land and an influx of ‘foreigners’ from other parts of PNG (see Allen, this volume), problems that appeared to be solved with its forced closure in 1989. Now, however, Bougainvilleans confront the enticing but daunting prospect of re-​opening the mine as a way of financing an independent Bougainville, with the possibility that some of those problems may return. Speaking in 2015, Momis said: Right now we Bougainvilleans are not much better than beggars. We beg for our entitlements from the National Government. We beg and cajole the donors. True autonomy, or true independence, will only come when we have our own sources of revenue, capable of providing the best possible services to our people. It is an unfortunate truth that … the only way any of us can see of generating this revenue is mining. But we need to approach this with great care. (Bougainville News 2015) To complicate matters further, the multinational company with a controlling stake in Bougainville Copper Limited, Rio Tinto, divested itself of its shares in 2016, splitting them between the PNG government and the Autonomous Bougainville Government. The PNG government then gave its shares to the landowners of Panguna, the original mine site, potentially opening the way to divisions between the landowners and the Bougainville government. The PNG government and the Autonomous Bougainville Government have agreed to work toward 15 June 2019 as the target date for the holding of the independence referendum, with the PNG Electoral Commission and the Bougainville Electoral Commission cooperating on its organisation. But a key element of the 2001 agreement may yet frustrate independence ambitions among Bougainvilleans: the vote will be advisory only, and the PNG government, still ultimately responsible for the region, is not legally obliged to accept it. Added to that are continuing internal divisions. The conflict not only pitted Bougainville against PNG, but Bougainvilleans against each other. Tensions linger despite a comprehensive peace process overseen by the UN and regional powers such as Australia (Regan 2013).

Torres Strait Islands The population of Torres Strait Islanders in Australia in 2011 was more than 60,000: 38,100 of Torres Strait origin only and 25,600 whose parentage and ancestors were of both Torres Strait and Aboriginal origin (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011). Around 6,000 islanders live in the Torres Strait, with the rest on the mainland, especially Queensland. Together with Torres Strait Creole and English, the islanders speak two indigenous languages, Merian Mir in the eastern islands and in the central and western groups a language with two dialects, Kala Lagaw Ya and Kala Kawaw Ya 102

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(Commonwealth of Australia 2016: iii; see Rumsey, this volume: n.4). The islanders are recognised as a distinct ethnic group and have a strong sense of identity, one that gave rise to the establishment in 1994 of a representative body. Locally elected, the Torres Strait Regional Authority is charged with numerous responsibilities including offering advice to the minister for indigenous affairs and maintaining ‘the special and unique Ailan Kastom of Torres Strait Islanders living in the Torres Strait area’ (Torres Strait Regional Authority 2017). The idea of full independence has emerged intermittently. At the time of the bicentenary of the European settlement of Australia in 1988 a group of Torres Strait Islanders declared themselves to be an independent people who did not accept the laws imposed by British colonisers (Sanders and Arthur 2001: 2–​3). More commonly the demand has been for greater autonomy or territorial status, as in 2011 when islanders called on Queensland Premier Anna Bligh to permit their homelands to secede from her state. She supported the call in an appeal to the prime minister of Australia (Future Directions 2011).

MELANESIA IN THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY We have already examined Indonesia’s role in Melanesia. Other external powers, such as Japan, the European Union, Malaysia, India, Israel and even Cuba have links with the region, but here we will focus on Australia, France, the USA and China. East of the Indonesian border, Melanesia falls into the geo-​political orbit of Australia, which traditionally regards this region as of high significance for its own national security. To simplify a more complex historical picture, we can identify three phases in Australia’s engagement with Melanesia.

Australia In the first phase from the 1860s to 1901, the islands of Melanesia  –​especially in Solomons and Vanuatu –​were sources of labour for the sugar plantations of Queensland in what was known as the labour trade (see Quanchi, Rumsey, both this volume). When the British colonies came together as ‘Australia’ in 1901, the first bill passed by the new federal parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act, which not only barred the immigration of Asians but also provided for the expulsion of non-​white immigrants such as the Melanesians, thousands of whom were repatriated to make way for white labour in the sugar fields. The few thousand permitted to stay were the forebears of Australia’s present Melanesian population of ‘South Sea Islanders’. In the second phase from 1901 until the 1970s, the dominating theme in Australian official thinking about Melanesia was that it should serve as a strategic barrier against threats from the north. Such threats materialised when Japan invaded and occupied the Australian territory of New Guinea during the Second World War. From 1906 in the case of Papua (former British New Guinea) and from 1914 in the case of New Guinea (former German New Guinea), Australia was the colonial administering authority, ensuring that the most populous and largest Melanesian territory remained safe for Australian interests. In 1975, these territories became independent as PNG. In the third phase from the 1970s to today, Australia has assumed the role of the most important development partner by far in this region. The strategic objective 103

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remains the same. Australian defence white papers have for decades identified ‘a secure near region’ as Australia’s second strategic defence interest after the defence of the continent itself. In the words of the 2016 Defence White Paper, ‘Australia cannot be secure if our immediate neighbourhood including PNG, Timor-​Leste and Pacific Island Countries becomes a source of threat to Australia’ (Defence White Paper 2016: para. 3.7). The means to reach this objective take the form of longstanding programmes of official development assistance, support for regional institutions such as the Pacific Islands Forum and, in the case of Solomon Islands, an Australian-​ led regional intervention in response to civil conflict (see below). Together with New Zealand, Australia is also the default external partner for independent Melanesia in the case of disaster relief, expected by its neighbours and by the international community to lead interventions in the case of natural events such as cyclones, tsunamis and earthquakes. Both countries were quickly on the scene following the devastation wrought by Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu in 2015 and Cyclone Winston in Fiji in 2016, as they were for the Samoan tsunami of 2009. The Australian government has largely spared aid for Melanesia and the rest of the Pacific from the massive cuts in its overall aid programme in recent years, a measure of the importance it attaches to the region. The Australian-​led state building exercise in Solomon Islands has been evidence of the same motive in Australian foreign policy, namely a desire to maintain regional stability for the sake of national security. Initiated in 2003, soon after 9/​11 and terrorist bombings in Bali in which 88 Australians lost their lives, the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) brought together personnel from across the Pacific. It was a joint endeavour to return Solomon Islands to political stability after five years of inter-​ethnic conflict had removed effective government (see Allen, this volume). The mission went at the invitation of the Solomon Islands government, which saw intervention from abroad as the only solution to its problems. In Australia, the mission produced a ‘whole-​of-​government’ approach that familiarised government agencies with Melanesia for the first time since independence was granted to PNG in 1975. Military-​backed and police-​led, RAMSI was generally judged a success in restoring law and order (despite anti-​Chinese riots in the capital, Honiara in 2006), fostering efficiency in public administration, and contributing to economic recovery. Public opinion polls pointed to strong popular support for RAMSI among Solomon Islanders. Most of the Regional Assistance Mission left after a decade, in 2013, but the police training component did not leave until mid-​2017 and will be replaced by a similar team from the Australian Federal Police, suggesting that Australia wants to sustain the stability brought by RAMSI (SBS World News 2017). Australia has demonstrated itself to be an interventionist power in Melanesia, albeit one invited to intervene and supported by the international community in doing so. The precedent has been created for future interventions, and much will therefore depend upon events in Melanesian countries. As things stand, Australia remains active in police cooperation and defence support. Australia has moved toward closer defence links with PNG since 2013, for example, and has a long-​established defence cooperation programme with the PNG Defence Force. Australian police have also worked alongside their PNG counterparts for some years in an attempt to reduce lawlessness in the cities of Port Moresby and Lae.

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France France’s reputation and influence in Melanesia has grown in recent years. The memory has faded of the decades from 1966 to 1996 when nuclear tests in French Polynesia spread radioactive fallout in the Pacific (until they went underground in 1975) and inspired the formation of a Pacific Nuclear Free Zone in 1985. France’s reputation as a coloniser has also softened since the 1980s. At that time thousands of French troops were sent to New Caledonia to counter the independence movement. These days, New Caledonia is prospering in the wake of a nickel boom, although its benefits are spread unequally, and Noumea remains a capital with mostly French stores at one end and mostly Kanak ones at the other. New Caledonia is unique in Melanesia as its only territory that was a settler colony. A measure of France’s changing image in Melanesia came at the 2016 meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum, the organisation formed in 1971 to represent the independent and self-​governing states of the region. This time independent Melanesian states joined with the rest of the Pacific in expanding Forum membership to include the French territories of New Caledonia and French Polynesia, in effect giving France itself unprecedented sway over Forum decisions and activities. At the 2015 France-​Oceania summit in Paris, French President François Hollande looked forward to France’s Pacific territories being ‘our representatives’ in the Forum. As the President of New Caledonia, Philippe Germain told a journalist, ‘It will certainly allow us to participate in discussions about the management of our region in all sectors: not only the environmental questions that are worrying the whole world, but also issues of economy, health, education and governance’ (Maclellan 2016). Australia, which sees France as a force for stability in the Pacific, had been quietly working toward this outcome for years and PNG, with growing ties of investment with France, favoured the Forum expansion.

USA Melanesia ranks low in the foreign policy priorities of the USA, which has traditionally looked to its allies, Australia and New Zealand, to maintain stability and a pro-​Western orientation in the region. The rise of China in the Pacific, however, has prompted a response by the Americans, who restored a USAID office in Port Moresby in 2011 after an absence from the region lasting 16 years. High-​level visits by American officials to Melanesia have become more frequent since 2010, and Washington has been paying closer attention to the regional body, the Pacific Islands Forum, whose annual meeting was attended for the first time by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she went to the Cook Islands in 2012. US aid to Melanesia is on a small scale: a 2016 bilateral assistance agreement between the USA and PNG targeting climate change adaptation and environmental resilience, for example, is worth $US7.5 million (US Embassy 2016). Defence cooperation is on a similar scale, although PNG Defence Force members train regularly with US forces, and in 2016 trained for the first time with the Marines. US military forces worked with the PNG government on security arrangements for the Asia-​Pacific Economic Co-​operation (APEC) leaders’ meeting in Port Moresby in 2018 –​one of a number of partners assisting PNG on this issue –​and a continuing US presence in Melanesia is assured given US interests in East Asia and the Pacific. That presence, however, will be low-​level. 105

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China and Taiwan Beyond Australia, France and Indonesia  –​the three states with considerable Melanesian territory in the past and present –​numerous other external actors hold a stake in the region, from New Zealand, Japan, the USA and the European Union to South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan and China. Of these the one that looms largest is China, whose influence in Melanesia has grown rapidly since 2006, when the Chinese government put into effect its policy of ‘going global’, involving state support and encouragement for Chinese investment in the developing world. Since then, Chinese investment in Melanesia has intensified, above all in mining projects and infrastructure. Two-​way trade between China and the 14 Island states of the Pacific Islands Forum doubled to US$7.5 billion between 2014 and 2015, larger even than Australia’s two-​way trade with those countries. PNG’s exports to China –​ mainly timber and liquefied natural gas –​represented US$2 billion of the regional total of US$2.5 billion (Radio New Zealand International 2016d). The largest Chinese investment in the South Pacific, valued at more than $2 billion, is Ramu Nickel, a large mine with its own processing plant at Basamuk Bay (Madang Province, PNG). The joint venture is 85% owned by MCC Ramu NiCo Limited, a subsidiary of MCC-​JJJ Mining, whose shareholders include the state-​owned Chinese Metallurgical Group Corporation. Chinese construction companies have built key port, road and bridge facilities in PNG, including the Lae tidal basin, freeways around the capital Port Moresby, and bridges for the Hiritano Highway which connects it with Kerema in the west (Hannan and Firth 2015). More than 20 Chinese state-​ owned enterprises have a presence in PNG. Among China’s aid projects in Melanesia are two National Convention Centres, both completed in 2016. The first is in Port Moresby, designed to assist in accommodating the major international meetings that will take place in 2018 when PNG hosts the APEC leaders’ meeting. The second is in Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, and was partly reconstructed after damage wrought in 2015 by Cyclone Pam, which laid waste large parts of the country. Speaking at the opening of the centre in May 2016, the Chinese ambassador to Vanuatu, Liu Quan, described it as a ‘hurricane-​resistant “strong house”, which showcases the high standard and quality of Chinese workmanship’ (Loop: your news now 2016). Chinese tourism to the Pacific Islands is growing rapidly, especially in Micronesia, and may be expected to spread to Melanesia. Already a destination for cruise ships from Australia and the USA (see Taylor, this volume), Vanuatu will soon host cruise ships from China in Port Vila as well as the provincial centre of Luganville, where a Chinese aid project is funding construction of a new wharf to accommodate large vessels. The combination of aid in the service of Chinese investment is characteristic of China’s development assistance in Melanesia. In 2016 Vanuatu became the first country in the world to publicly support China’s position on the expansion of its territorial waters in the South China Sea, following a direct request from China to do so (Sydney Morning Herald 2016). The government said it fully understood and supported China’s proposition on the issue of the South China Sea. PNG did not follow suit, but has asserted China’s ‘legitimate and lawful rights and interest in the South China Sea, and its right to independently choose the means of dispute settlement in accordance with law’ (Radio New Zealand International 2016e). PNG has signed agreements with China on civil aviation and 106

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development cooperation as well as a memorandum of understanding that may lead to a China-​PNG free trade agreement. Like other Melanesian states, PNG signed agreements with China on infrastructure, climate change technology, trade and investment when President Xi Jinping visited the region in 2014. The Pacific Islands was once an arena for competition between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan over the issue of recognition by other states as the ‘true China’, but for more than a decade the issue has been dormant, with the PRC recognised by eight Pacific Island states, including PNG and Vanuatu, and Taiwan recognised by six, including Solomon Islands. A  truce followed the election of Ma Ying-​jeou as President of Taiwan in 2008 and his re-​election in 2012, but his defeat by Tsai Ing-​wen in 2016 –​combined with an apparent shift in US policy toward China under the Trump administration –​seems likely to usher in a new period of competition over this issue. Under these circumstances, the PRC might encourage Solomon Islands to change its position on recognition. Solomon Islands has recognised Taiwan as the true China since 1983, but the sheer size of its China trade might also trigger a shift. More than 57% of Solomons’ exports were to China in 2014, with the next largest market Australia at 11%, and Taiwan insignificant.

CONCLUSION In recent years, the independent Melanesian countries have asserted themselves more forcefully on the regional and international stage. Led by Fiji, they have elevated the importance of the Pacific Islands Development Forum, a regional body which, unlike the long-​established Pacific Islands Forum, excludes Australia and New Zealand. They have strengthened the MSG. They have diversified their international diplomacy. Together with other Pacific countries they have become vocal in pressing for global action on climate change, an issue on which their position differs considerably from Australia’s. PNG has even embarked on its own development assistance programme to other Pacific countries, and is in the process of doubling the size of its defence force. PNG will hold the APEC leaders’ meeting in 2018, and Port Moresby will briefly play host to the presidents of the USA, China, Russia and Indonesia, among others, in what the country’s leaders see as evidence of their full acceptance into the international community. For all this, the development challenges of the independent Melanesian states remain formidable, and all three rank poorly on the UN Human Development Index. In New Caledonia the fate of the Melanesians depends upon the 2018 referendum on independence. In West Papua and the Torres Strait Islands the future is highly likely to lie within the larger states of which they are already a part.

REFERENCES Note: All Internet sources were accessed on 27 May 2017. ABC News 2016. APEC summit should not be held in Papua New Guinea, Opposition Leader says. ABC News, 25 Oct. 2016. Available online: www.abc.net.au/​news/​2016-​10-​25/​papua-​ new-​guinea-​opposition-​leader-​calls-​to-​cancel-​apec/​7965048 107

— ​ S t e w a r t   F i r t h —​ ABC Pacific Beat 2015. Papua New Guinea budget facing ‘extraordinary’ revenue collapse over lower commodity prices. ABC Pacific Beat, 30 Oct. Available online: www.abc.net.au/​ news/​2015-​10-​30/​png-​budget-​facing-​revenue-​collapse-​economist-​says/​6900622 Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011. Estimates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, June 2011. Available online: www.abs.gov.au/​ausstats/​[email protected]/​mf/​3238.0.55.001 Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade 2017. Effective governance: policies, institutions and functioning economies. Available online: http://​dfat.gov.au/​aid/​topics/​ investment-​priorities/​effective-​governance/​Pages/​effective-​governance.aspx Baker, K. 2017. What Macron means for the French Pacific. East Asia Forum, 20 May 2017. Available online: www.eastasiaforum.org/​2017/​05/​20/​what-​macron-​means-​for-​the-​french​pacific/​ Batley, J. 2015. Constituency Development Funds in Solomon Islands: State of Play, SSGM In Brief, 2015/​67. Available online: http://​bellschool.anu.edu.au/​sites/​default/​files/​publications/​ attachments/​2016-​07/​ib2015.67_​batley.pdf Bougainville News 2015. New mining law a rejection of the past: Momis. 26 Mar. 2015. Available online: https://​bougainvillenews.com/​2015/​03/​26/​bougainville-​news-​press-​ release-​and-​full-​speech-​new-​mining-​law-​a-​rejection-​of-​the-​past-​momis/​ Commonwealth of Australia 2016. Torres Strait Regional Authority Annual Report, 2015–​ 2016. Available online: www.tsra.gov.au/​_​_​data/​assets/​pdf_​file/​0011/​12035/​TSRA-​Annual-​ Report-​2015–​2016.pdf Defence White Paper 2016. Commonwealth of Australia, 2016 Defence White Paper. Available online: www.defence.gov.au/​whitepaper/​docs/​2016-​defence-​white-​paper.pdf Elmslie, J. 2010. West Papuan Demographic Transition and the 2010 Indonesian Census: ‘Slow Motion Genocide’ or not? Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies Working Paper No. 11/​1, University of Sydney, Sept. 2010. Available online: https://​sydney.edu.au/​arts/​peace_​conflict/​ docs/​working_​papers/​West_​Papuan_​Demographics_​in_​2010_​Census.pdf Future Directions 2011. Torres Strait Islanders Push for Secession. 26 Oct. 2011. Available online: www.futuredirections.org.au/​publication/​torres-​strait-​islanders-​push-​for-​secession/​ Hannan, K. and Firth, S. 2015. Trading with the dragon: Chinese trade, investment and development assistance in the Pacific Islands. Journal of Contemporary China 24(95): 865–​882. Available online: www.tandfonline.com/​doi/​abs/​10.1080/​10670564.2015.1013377?journa lCode=cjcc20 Hou, R. 2016. A Day in the Life of a Member of Parliament in Solomon Islands. SSGM Discussion Paper, 2016/​ 2. Available online: http://​ ssgm.bellschool.anu.edu.au/​ experts-​ publications/​publications/​4068/​day-​life-​member-​parliament-​solomon-​islands Inside Indonesia 2007. The life and death of Theys Eluay. 29 July 2007. Available online: www. insideindonesia.org/​the-​life-​and-​death-​of-​theys-​eluay Kabutaulaka, T. 2008. Westminster meets Solomons in the Honiara Riots. In S. Dinnen and S. Firth (eds), Politics and State-​Building in Solomon Islands, 97. Asia Pacific Press and ANU E Press. Available online: http://​press.anu.edu.au/​publications/​politics-​and-​ state-​building-​solomon-​islands Ketan, J. 2007. The Use and Abuse of Electoral Development Funds and their Impact on Electoral Politics and Governance in Papua New Guinea. CDI Policy Papers on Political Governance, 2007/​02. Available online: http://​archives.cap.anu.edu.au/​cdi_​anu_​edu_​au/​ .png/​2007–​08/​D_​P/​2007_​08_​PPS4_​PNG_​Ketan/​2007_​08_​PPS4_​KETAN.pdf Loop: your news now 2016. New National Convention Centre signifies strong ties between Vanuatu, China. 17 May 2016. Available online: www.loopvanuatu.com/​content/​new​national-​convention-​centre-​signifies-​strong-​ties-​between-​vanuatu-​china Maclellan, N. 2016. France and the Forum. Inside Story, 13 Oct. 2016. Available online: http://​ insidestory.org.au/​france-​and-​the-​forum

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— ​ G e o - p o l i t i c a l o v e r v i e w o f M e l a n e s i a —​ Radio New Zealand International 2016a. Major demonstrations staged in Papua. 13 Dec. 2016 Available online: www.radionz.co.nz/​international/​programmes/​datelinepacific/​ audio/​201827540/​major-​demonstrations-​staged-​in-​papua Radio New Zealand International 2016b. West Papua demonstrations result in 44 arrests: thousands take to streets supporting MSG membership. 14 April 2016. Available online: www.pireport.org/​articles/​2016/​04/​15/​west-​papua-​demonstrations-​result-​44-​arrests Radio New Zealand International 2016c. Indonesia accuses Pacific countries of interference. 27 Sept. 2016. Available online: www.radionz.co.nz/​international/​pacific-​news/​314234/​ indonesia-​accuses-​pacific-​countries-​of-​interference Radio New Zealand International 2016d. China-​Pacific trade doubled in 2015 to $7.5B. 31 Aug. 2016. Available online: www.pireport.org/​articles/​2016/​08/​31/​china-​pacific​trade-​doubled-​2015-​75b Radio New Zealand International 2016e. PNG respects China position on South China Sea. 10 July 2016. Available online: www.radionz.co.nz/​international/​pacific-​news/​308349/​ png-​respects-​china-​position-​on-​south-​china-​sea Regan, A. 2013. Bougainville: conflict deferred. In E. Aspinall, R. Jeffrey and A.J. Regan (eds), Diminishing Conflicts in Asia and the Pacific: why some subside and others don’t, 119–​133. London and New York: Routledge. Saltford, J. 2000. United Nations involvement with the Act of Self-​Determination in West Irian (Indonesian West New Guinea 1968 to 1969). Indonesia 69 (April). Sanders, W.G. and Arthur, W.S. 2001. Autonomy Rights in Torres Strait: from whom, for whom, for or over what? Centre for Aboriginal Economic Research, Discussion Paper 215/​2001. SBS World News 2017. Unarmed AFP take on Solomon Islands police training mission. 25 May 2017. Available online: www.sbs.com.au/​news/​article/​2017/​05/​25/​unarmed-​afp​take-​solomon-​islands-​police-​training-​mission Sydney Morning Herald 2016. South China Sea dispute: China is trading aid for support for claims. 6 June 2016. Available online: www.smh.com.au/​world/​south-​china-​sea-​dispute-​ china-​is-​trading-​aid-​for-​support-​for-​claims-​20160605-​gpc7qf.html The Diplomat 2016. Papua New Guinea’s tuberculosis pandemic. Available online: https://​ thediplomat.com/​2016/​03/​papua-​new-​guineas-​tuberculosis-​pandemic/​ Torres Strait Islands Regional Authority 2017. What we do. Available online: www.tsra.gov. au/​the-​tsra/​what-​we-​do US Embassy 2016. U.S. Government and Papua New Guinea forge new partnership to strengthen the country’s environmental resilience. Media Release, US Embassy Port Moresby, 25 Aug. 2016. Available online: https://​portmoresby.usembassy.gov/​bilateral-​signing.html

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CHAPTER SIX

MELANESIA AS A ZONE OF LANGUAGE DIVERSITY Alan Rumsey

In linguistic terms Melanesia is the most diverse region in the world. Approximately 1,400 languages are spoken there –​about 22% of the world’s languages –​by people inhabiting less than 1% of the earth’s landmass. This chapter will open with a survey of that diversity, describing the present-​day distribution of the languages across the region and what we can tell from comparative-​historical linguistics and archaeology about how they got there. In addition to the indigenous languages of Melanesia there are also a number of pidgin and creole languages, that is, ones that developed as contact languages used between people with different first languages. I will describe those languages and discuss how they developed. I will then discuss and exemplify a sample of different ways of speaking (‘speech genres’) within given languages. Finally, I  will examine patterns of multilingualism and alternation among the languages (‘codeswitching’) in contemporary Melanesia and their implications for the future of linguistic diversity in the region.

THE LANGUAGES In order to understand the range of languages found in Melanesia it is important to know what is meant by ‘language family’. A language family is a group of languages that have developed from a common source or ‘proto-​language’. An example would be the so-​called ‘Romance’ family of languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, which have all developed from the vernacular forms of spoken Latin (‘Vulgar Latin’) that were used by the Roman troops who conquered the parts of Europe where the Romance languages are now spoken. In the case of the Romance family there are of course written records of the proto-​language, or something fairly similar (Classical and late literary Latin as distinct from Vulgar Latin), allowing us to trace the development of its various branches from a common source. But linguists have also developed methods for doing the same thing in the case of language families for which there are no written records of the proto-​languages from which the current languages have developed, through systematic comparison of their vocabularies and grammatical features. Examples are the Germanic family, which includes English, German, Dutch, Icelandic, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian; the Slavic family, including Russian, Polish, Czech and Slovenian, and the Indo-​European family, which descends from an earlier proto-​language and includes the Romance, 110

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Germanic and Slavic families as branches within it, as well as the Celtic languages, Persian, Sanskrit and most of the languages of northern India. The biggest language family (in terms of number of languages) that has yet been established by using the comparative method  –​the Austronesian family  –​is one that includes several hundred of the languages of Melanesia. All of them belong to a single branch of the Austronesian family known as the ‘Oceanic’ branch. Not all Oceanic Austronesian languages are found within the Melanesian region: the Oceanic branch includes within it, as a sub-​branch, the entire Polynesian language family  –​Hawaiian, Samoan, Tongan, Maori, etc.  –​and some languages of Micronesia such as Truk, Pohnpeian, and Yapese. In addition to the Oceanic branch the Austronesian family includes most of the languages of Indonesia, the Philippines, Madagascar, the indigenous languages of Taiwan and several languages of mainland Southeast Asia. It extends over more than half the circumference of the earth, from Rapanui (Easter Island), off the coast of Chile, to Madagascar, off the coast of Mozambique, including languages with a total of approximately 380 million speakers. From the comparative-​linguistic evidence it has been reliably established that all of those languages have developed from a single source language –​Proto-​Austronesian –​that was spoken in Taiwan. From a combination of linguistic and archaeological evidence it seems likely that Proto-​Austronesian was spoken between four and five thousand years ago. Besides Austronesian languages, the other ones that are found within the Melanesian region are known as ‘Papuan’ languages. Unlike the term ‘Austronesian’, ‘Papuan’ does not refer to a language family in the sense defined above. Rather it is a residual term, referring to non-​Austronesian languages of Melanesia. These languages are found mainly on the island of New Guinea,1 where they comprise by far the majority of the languages there, and are spoken over a much larger area on the island than the Austronesian ones, the latter being confined mainly to small coastal pockets and offshore islands in the south-​eastern and northern part of the island.2 In the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville and the Solomon Islands this situation is reversed: there Austronesian languages predominate and Papuan ones are found only within small pockets. Further to the east and south-​east, in Vanuatu and New Caledonia, no Papuan languages are found, only Austronesian ones. A few Papuan languages are also found to the west of New Guinea, on the islands of Halmahera and Timor, and the Alor Archipelago. As suggested by the fact that they do not comprise a single family, the Papuan languages are much more different from each other than the Austronesian languages of Melanesia –​indeed much more diverse than the approximately 1,200 languages within the whole Austronesian family. For example, within many parts of New Guinea it is not uncommon to find neighbouring languages with vocabularies that are as different from each other as those of English, Russian and Hebrew, and far more different from each other than are the Austronesian languages Rapanui and Malagasy, which are spoken halfway around the world from each other.3

LANGUAGE PREHISTORY The above picture of language diversity within Melanesia becomes more understandable when we consider it in light of what is known from various perspectives about language change, and from archaeology and biology about the settlement of the 111

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Pacific (cf. Summerhayes, this volume). From ordinary experience, we know that all languages change over time. Consistent with this, from historical linguistics we know that, other things being equal, the more language diversity we find within a given region where the languages have been developing in situ, the longer they are likely to have been spoken there. From archaeology we know that humans have been on the island of New Guinea for approximately 50,000 years and in the Bismarck Archipelago for about 40,000 years. We also know that about 3,300 years ago a distinctive new cultural complex appeared in the Bismarck Archipelago that was associated with a style of finely decorated pottery –​nowadays called ‘Lapita’ pottery –​and that within a few centuries it spread from there to the south-​east and east across much of the area where Oceanic Austronesian languages are spoken. Based on this and other evidence it seems highly likely that the Bismarck Archipelago was the homeland of the language from which all the present-​day Oceanic Austronesian languages developed –​ ‘Proto-​Oceanic’ –​and that its speakers had arrived in the archipelago shortly before that, as the latest in a series of migrations of Austronesian-​language speakers from the west-​north-​west that had been going on over the previous millenium, originating in Taiwan as discussed above (Pawley 2010). Given this chronology it is evident that those incoming Proto-​Oceanic speakers arrived not on uninhabited islands but on ones that were already populated by speakers of Papuan languages. The Austronesian languages that developed out of Proto-​Oceanic over the next three millennia eventually displaced most of the pre-​existing Papuan ones within the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville and the Solomons, and some of the ones on the island of New Guinea. But this should not be taken to imply that the speakers of those newly developing Oceanic Austronesian languages continued to exist as distinct populations which displaced the earlier Papuan-​speaking ones. As archaeologist Spriggs (1997: 100) has put it: ‘There may have been a moment in the Bismarcks when there was a single people using Lapita pottery, genetically, linguistically and culturally distinct from their neighbours. But this unity and distinctiveness would have been short-​lived’. Where Austronesian languages displaced Papuan ones within given regions, the process seems to have been one that took place mainly within their populations, as a matter of intergenerational shifts whereby the children and descendants of speakers of Papuan languages came to speak Austronesian ones. This is suggested by the results of a detailed molecular genetic study which showed that in the Pacific, and specifically in Near Oceania [which includes most of Melanesia], there is only a modest association between language and genetic affiliation. Oceanic languages were introduced and dispersed around the islands within the last 3,300  years, but there was apparently only a small infusion of accompanying “Austronesian” ancestry that has survived. (Friedlaender et al. 2008: 0182) The smallness of that infusion contrasts markedly with the fact that the Oceanic languages themselves survived to such an extent that they are now the most widely spoken ones in Island Melanesia. 112

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An important factor to consider in relation to those processes of language spread is multilingualism. As one of the most monoglot populations that the world has ever known, native speakers of English tend to be unaware of the extent to which people elsewhere in the world are competent in two or more languages. That is currently the case almost everywhere in Melanesia. Nowadays, in addition to the local languages, almost everyone speaks one of the pidgin/​creole languages that are widely spoken across the region as lingua francas as discussed below. But it is also not uncommon for people to speak or at least understand more than one local language. And there is a good deal of evidence that this has long been the case. As an example of that, and of the interaction between Austronesian and Papuan languages in Melanesia, let us turn to a case from Bougainville near the border between the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea (PNG). The southern part of Bougainville has long been an area of contact and interaction among diverse groups, including speakers of both Austronesian and Papuan languages. This is evident over the long term on molecular genetic grounds (Friedlaender et al. 2008), as well as archaeological ones (Spriggs 1992). It is also attested for the recent past by anthropologists working in the area (Ogan 2005). On linguistic grounds, long-​term social interaction between speakers of Austronesian languages and Papuan ones is evident from the fact that the Austronesian languages in the area have become more like the Papuan ones. Concurrently, the affected Austronesian languages have become less like others to which they are related by common descent from a single proto-​language, but with whose speakers they have not been in such close social interaction as they have been with the speakers of the Papuan ones, as shown in a detailed study by Evans and Palmer (2011). A very important communicative feature of most languages of the world is word order. For example, in sentences in English that have a subject (S), a verb (V) and an object (O), the order of those three elements is S-​V-​O (‘John saw Mary’), and that is one of the main ways in which subjects are distinguished from objects. Word order is also important in most Austronesian and Papuan languages, including the ones spoken in southern Bougainville. In most of the Austronesian languages within the wider region, the usual order of the three elements discussed above is V-​S-​O. But just within a group of three closely interrelated South Bougainville Austronesian languages that are spoken in areas adjacent to Papuan ones  –​the Mono-​Uravan group  –​the usual order is S-​O-​V. S-​O-​V word order is also found in the nearby Papuan languages (as in many others). Another area of relevant variation is in the expression of relations of possession. In most Oceanic Austronesian languages the word for the possessor comes after the word for the thing that is possessed. Just within the Mono-​Uravan group of Austronesian languages spoken on Bougainville the order is the other way around: possessed followed by possessor. This matches the word order that is found in the nearby Papuan languages. This provides evidence for a long period of interaction between people who were bilingual in Austronesian and Papuan languages, or multilingual in various combinations of them. For languages do not converge in this way simply from being spoken by neighbouring peoples. It only happens when they are spoken by at least some of the same people, and generally quite a few of them. In other words, it only happens where people are bi-​or multilingual, and interacting regularly with each other across language boundaries. Furthermore, unlike the borrowing of individual words from 113

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one language to another, which can happen relatively quickly, the kind of change referred to above, which in this case has affected some basic aspects of the structure of the languages, generally happens much more slowly, and so can be taken as evidence that the cross-​linguistic social interactions that produced it are ones that went on for a very long time. Evidence of this kind is by no means limited to South Bougainville. It has been discovered and described for many other areas of Melanesia where Austronesian languages are spoken in proximity to Papuan ones, including east New Britain (Reesink 2005), north central New Ireland (Ross 1994), and the Madang region in north-​eastern New Guinea (Ross 2008).4

CONTACT LANGUAGES In addition to the local Papuan and Austronesian languages that are found throughout Melanesia there are also several ‘pidgin’ languages that have arisen more or less spontaneously as means of communication in the context of interactions between people who had no other language in common. Most of these languages developed in the first instance as simplified forms of English during the colonial era. Some of them, however, arose earlier as simplified forms of pre-​existing local languages, also in the context of interaction between people with no other common language. Perhaps the best-​known example of such a pre-​colonial Melanesian pidgin was the simplified form of the Austronesian language Motu that was spoken in south-​eastern New Guinea, in the area that was later to become Port Moresby, the national capital of PNG. This language developed in the context of interactions between Motu people and speakers of other languages in the region. (The Motu were skilled sailors and had many such contacts.) When colonists began to arrive there in the 1880s they soon saw the potential for that simplified form of Motu to serve as a lingua franca for the newly established colony of British New Guinea. To that effect it was widely adopted for use by the colony’s Armed Native Constabulary and in its Village Constable system (Dutton 1985: 59–​81). For that reason, it became popularly known as ‘Police Motu’.5 But over the next 80 years it was readily taken up for general use in a wide range of contexts both between colonists and Papuans and among Papuans of different language backgrounds: the 1971 census registered a total of nearly 150,000 speakers (Dutton 1985: 3). Since then the numbers have declined and nowadays it is spoken mostly by older people in the region, having been displaced as a lingua franca by Tok Pisin and English.

ENGLISH-​B ASED PIDGINS Tok Pisin, referred to above, is nowadays spoken throughout much of PNG. It is one of the three English-​based pidgin languages of Melanesia, the others being Solomons Pijin, spoken in the Solomon Islands, and Bislama, spoken in Vanuatu. Those three languages are similar enough to be mutually intelligible to some extent, and are historically related, all having developed out of a single pidgin that was spoken in tropical Queensland, in the north-​eastern part of Australia (Tryon and Charpentier 2004). Its speakers were Melanesians who had been brought there between 1860 and 1901 from the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and the Loyalty Islands of New Caledonia to work in sugar cane plantations (see Quanchi, 114

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this volume). They spoke scores of different local languages (Keesing 1988) and came to use the pidgin as a lingua franca. The development of pidginised forms of the colonists’ language was not limited to the southwestern Pacific, but took place in several different regions within the colonial world, including West Africa, the Caribbean and French Indochina. A general fact about those colonial pidgins was that they became most highly developed in settings where they were not used only or primarily between the colonisers and the colonised, but among colonised people without any other common languages who were brought into close, long-​term contact with each other. The Queensland sugar cane plantations were a prime example of such a setting. In that regard they present a close parallel to plantation settings in the Caribbean, where enslaved Africans were brought together from linguistically diverse areas of Africa and came to communicate with each other in pidginised forms of French and English. An important difference, however, was that in the Queensland case the colonial subjects were indentured labourers, who in the end were not only allowed to return to their home islands, but in most cases required to do so by the racist Pacific Island Labourers Act of 1901 that was passed in the first parliamentary session of the newly formed Commonwealth of Australia. One consequence of this deportation was that the Melanesians who returned to their home islands brought with them a new lingua franca that could be used there among people of diverse language backgrounds as it had been in Queensland. And this at a time when the newly established colonial orders across much of Melanesia created circumstances in which there was more mobility than there had previously been (especially for young men), bringing more people into regular contact with each other across language regions. The result by the 1970s was the development of what become de facto national languages for the newly independent states of PNG (1975), Solomon Islands (1978) and Vanuatu (1980).6 As these languages have come to be used in an ever widening range of social contexts they have developed an expressive range and subtlety that establishes them as languages in their own right (or as regional variants of a single ‘Neo-​Melanesian’ language, as it is sometimes called) rather than merely as simplified versions of English. This process has been put on a new footing by the fact that these so-​called pidgins are no longer used only as ‘contact’ languages between people who speak another language: especially in urban areas, but also in some rural ones, children are now growing up who speak the ‘pidgins’ as their first language. Insofar as this is the case, in technical-​linguistic terms they are no longer pidgin languages –​which by definition do not have first-​language speakers –​but ‘creoles’, which is the technical term for languages that develop out of pidgins after they begin to have native speakers (as happened long ago in the Caribbean, for example). In some respects the grammar of these languages, especially in their pidgin phase, is simpler than that of other languages, including the ones that are spoken as first languages by speakers of the pidgin. For example, in Tok Pisin the distinction between past and present tense is an optional one. Past is marked not by changing the form of the verb (look/​looked, go/​went, etc.) but by adding a separate modifying word pinis (from English ‘finish’) or other temporal modifier such as asde ‘yesterday’. So, for example mi lukim em can mean either ‘I see him’ or ‘I saw him’, but to specify that the seeing took place in the past the speaker can optionally say 115

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Meaning

Word for it Word for it in in English Tok Pisin

I and you

we

yumi(tupela)

I and you and one or more others

we

yumi

I and another person who is not you

we

mitupela

I and two or more other people not including you

we

mipela

you (one person)

you

yu

you and one other person not including me

you

yutupela

you and two or more other people not including me

you

yupela

mi lukim em pinis. In this respect, the grammar of Tok Pisin is not only simpler than English but much simpler than many New Guinea languages, which have obligatory distinctions not just between present and past but with respect to how far back in the past the event took place, for example earlier today vs yesterday vs before yesterday, etc. In other respects, Melanesian pidgins and creoles have preserved grammatical distinctions that are typically found in indigenous languages of the region but not in English. For example, English has two pronouns ‘we’ and ‘you’ that are used in reference to a total of seven different sets of people as shown in Table 6.1. As shown in the right column, Tok Pisin has six different words that make finer distinctions than English regarding the matter of how many people are referred to, and/​or whether those people include the person spoken to. In this respect, the grammar of Tok Pisin and other languages of the region is more complex than English (or other languages of Europe). As will be evident from Table 6.1, the relevant distinctions are made in Tok Pisin with elements that originally came from English (yu for from ‘you’, tu from ‘two’, pela from ‘fellow(s)’, etc.) but which are put together in new ways in order to make those distinctions. For a more detailed example of how this works, and of how things are expressed in Tok Pisin, consider the opening lines of a standard Tok Pisin translation of the first few lines of the Book of John:7 Bipo tru Tok i stap.

In the beginning was the Word,

Tok i stap wantaim God.

and the Word was with God,

Na Tok em yet i God.

and the Word was God.

Bipo tru em i stap wantaim God.

He was in the beginning with God;

Em i wokim olgeta samting.

all things were made through him,

Na i no got wanpela samting i kamap long narapela rot.

and without him was not anything made that was made.

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As in Table 6.1, the Tok Pisin words used in this translation all come originally from English, but the resulting apparent resemblance is deceptive, for the words have developed quite different senses in Tok Pisin. For example stap from English ‘stop’ means ‘be, exist’ or as a modifying verb, ‘continue’; wantaim from English ‘one time’ means ‘with’, ‘together with’; wokim, from ‘work him’ means ‘make’ and olgeta samting, from English ‘altogether something’ means ‘everything’. And i, although presumably derived from English ‘he’ actually functions not as a pronoun,8 but as what linguists call a ‘predicate marker’, in ways that closely parallel the syntactic patterns of Austronesian languages of Melanesia. Accordingly, the more one learns to put aside false preconceptions based on English and comes to understand Tok Pisin in its own terms, the more one comes to appreciate its regularity, economy and expressive power.

WAYS OF SPEAKING In Melanesia as elsewhere there are different ways of speaking that are associated with particular social contexts. As in many other languages, some of the most obviously distinctive ways of speaking are ones that are used in public performances of various kinds. One of the most important contexts for these is in the conduct of political events such as disputes, negotiations, intergroup exchange events and, nowadays, electoral campaigns. Across a wide range of Melanesian societies a typical feature of their traditional political orders was that the maximal-​level named groupings that people belonged to (often referred to in English as ‘clans’ or ‘tribes’) were relatively small, and that insofar as there were recognised leaders within them (almost always men), that status was one that the leaders achieved during their lifetime on a competitive basis rather than one to which they were entitled by birth, as for example in the traditional political systems of Tonga, Samoa or Hawaii with their established chieftainships (see Martin, this volume on this distinction). One of the main kinds of competition among would-​be leaders in many, perhaps most, Melanesian societies was in speech-​making. This continues to be the case at the local level throughout much of Melanesia, where the speeches in many places are still given in the local languages, and now in new ways at the national level, where they are generally given in the pidgin/​creole languages discussed above. Especially at the local level, a key feature of oratory, particularly when used in contentious circumstances, is its relatively indirect forms of expression. Frequent use is made of metaphor, allegory and allusion. For example, among the Managalase in Oro Province of PNG orators make use of stories with allegorical themes associated with particular bird species. But instead of naming the bird and the theme associated with it the orator ‘may mention only the kind of tree used by that bird as a roost. The listener must determine which bird is referred to from the kind of roost mentioned to be able to identify the corresponding allegorical theme’ (McKellin 1984: 112). Similar forms of indirect expression are also attested in public speaking on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu (Lindstrom 1983), in the PNG highlands (e.g. Strathern 1975; Merlan and Rumsey 1991) and many other Melanesian locales. Besides figurative and allusive forms of expression, other common features of Melanesian speech-​ making of the most ‘formal’ kind include special intonation

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patterns (Merlan and Rumsey 1991; Strathern 1975) and the parcelling out of speech into poetic lines, many of which are shorter than the sentences they belong to (Merlan and Rumsey 1991; McKellin 1984). All of these features are exemplified in the excerpt below from an English translation of a speech given in 1982 by a leading ‘Big man’ in the Ku Waru region of the Western Highlands, Kopia Noma. The speech was given at an event attended by several hundred people, at which Noma’s tribe were paying compensation to another tribe, the Laulku, for injuries that some of its men had suffered during a battle into which they were recruited as allies of Noma’s tribe. If there were a plume on the shield I would really think I’m fighting If I fought on the back of the mek bird I would really think I’m fighting Instead I’m just going around quietly I’m just giving [money] for potatoes I’m just giving it for sugar cane My ‘man’ You take it for him The man from Tikiyl You go into Tikiyl There, where, as you know There is a Kilkai spirit-​cult place There, where, as you know There is a Maip spirit-​cult place And there, half sunk into the ground There’s the rotting trunk of a karaip tree Watch out, lest you slip and fall on it. The entire speech was intoned in a melodic pattern based on alternation between two pitches. Each line in the Ku Waru original ended with an added vowel -​a or -​o. Within this excerpt there are two instances of figurative speech or what Ku Waru people call eke ung, ‘bent speech’. The first is the reference to fighting on the back of the mek bird (Princess Stephanie’s bird of paradise). This is an allusion to feathers which are attached to the wooden shields that were used in battle, and to the fact that that particular kind of feather is only used when the fighting is of the most intense sort. By contrast, in the battle for which compensation is here being paid no one was killed, so less compensation is owed –​which Noma downplays even further by suggesting it can be used for buying sugar cane and potatoes. The second poetic figure is the one of the fallen tree trunk, which Noma is suggesting lies across the path through the mountains along which the Laulku will be returning to their homeland on the other side. That alludes to a far older, unrequited debt that is owed to Noma’s tribe by the Laulku. As Noma explained to me, karaip (Nothofagus sp) logs take an unexpectedly long time to decay, remaining firm and slippery underfoot when you think they have decomposed, just as the old grievance for which compensation is owed remains a live one long after the Laulku might think it has ‘died’.9 118

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Besides speech-​making, another kind of speech genre that is highly elaborated across Melanesia is story telling. In many areas, there are stories that are sung by groups of people in unison, often accompanied by drums and other musical instruments.10 Often a distinction is made between two kinds of spoken stories, one of which is set in the real world and the other of which is more fantastic. While these are told by nearly everyone, across a large region in the New Guinea highlands that includes at least six language areas there are genres of sung tales that are performed only by specialist bards who are skilled at composing, arranging and singing them, sometimes for as long as five hours at a stretch. These are quite different from the other kinds of sung stories referred to above in that they are always unaccompanied solo performances, for which the texts are not entirely set, but partly composed in the act of performance.11 Besides sung stories, throughout Melanesia there are many kinds of songs or ‘sung poems’, including for example love songs, mortuary songs and praise songs. In some of them the kind of language used is more or less the same as in everyday speech, while in others at least some of the words are ones that are found only in songs. An example occurs in the following song, from Motalava in northern Vanuatu, shown here in English translation. I am lying and listening hearing sounds all around The breakers keep roaring upon the western cape They shatter on the reef and pull back to the deep And as they slam the cliffs and pound their echo resounds all over the land (François and Stern 2013: 94) In the original Mwotlap-​language version of this song an expression sol dun̄ is used. The translators François and Stern (2013: 95) say that this expression has no equivalent in the spoken language, but forms a poetic topos in the song language of Motalava: it captures the contrast between the normality of a running liquid (sol ‘flow’), and the surprise caused by the sound of a sudden shock (dun̄ ‘bang’). Here sol dun̄ conveys the force of the waves shattering loudly onto the reef. In another song the same term evokes the lava ‘flowing’ and ‘blasting’ as it suddenly cools off in contact with the sea. Elsewhere, the compound sol dun̄ renders the force of torrential rain … or the power of a huge cascade. This is just an example, among many, of the way the poetic tradition of northern Vanuatu can make the most of a specific theme or motif, adapting it from one text to another, based on a verbal compound that only exists in song lyrics. (ibid.)12 119

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Similarly striking, specialised forms and uses of language are found in the other speech genres discussed above from elsewhere in Melanesia, both in the indigenous languages and in the pidgin/​creole ones.

MULTILINGUALISM, CODE SWITCHING AND SOCIAL IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY MELANESIA As described above, multilingualism is common throughout Melanesia and has evidently been so for a long time. As in all multilingual speech communities, the use of this or that language in a given context is generally not a matter of random fluctuation, but rather, a socially significant one: language is an integral aspect of social identity. So, too, is the alternation among different languages that are shared by multilingual speakers, a process that sociolinguists call ‘codeswitching’. In order to understand how that works in Melanesia it is useful to make a broad distinction between codeswitching among indigenous languages of the region and codeswitching that involves more recently introduced colonial and post-​colonial languages, whether they be pidgins, creoles, or metropolitan languages such as English, French or Indonesian. In the many areas of Melanesia where there is a high rate of multilingualism in indigenous languages, it has generally been of a kind that Jourdan (2008), in reference to the Solomon Islands, calls ‘reciprocal multilingualism’ and what François (2012), in reference to northern Vanuatu, calls ‘egalitarian multilingualism’. In these cases, multilingualism is fairly evenly spread across the languages, with no major differences of prestige among them. Stasch (2007) reports much the same thing about the Korowai people of southern lowland West Papua, while also observing that ‘Korowai assume that a language, like a type of people, is a territorial entity. A  language is defined by and associated with the lands of its speakers’ (Stasch 2007: 102). Accordingly, Korowai (in common with many other Melanesians) call themselves by a term that means ‘place people’. When asked why, ‘they typically answer that it is because they all speak the language that they do. They take the land-​focused ethnonym to be self-​evidently explained by their linguistic code’ (Stasch 2007: 103). This territorial-​cum-​linguistic identification does not amount to an overall differentiation in the value accorded to languages: each is significant for its own ‘metaphysical link’ to land (Stasch 2007: 103), whereby ‘[t]‌o be speakers of a particular language is to be centered in a place of belonging and centered in a category of the human’ (Stasch 2007: 104). In the case of the transborder region of southern New Guinea,13 described by Evans (2012), what he (after François) calls the ‘egalitarian’ character of indigenous multilingualism is associated with a particular marriage system (also found in many other lowland areas of the island of New Guinea) in which a brother and sister from one family marry a sister and brother, respectively, from another. After marriage, a woman is expected to go and live with her husband’s people, who often speak a different language from hers. The children born of such marriages generally grow up learning the languages of both parents. This makes the marriage an exchange not only of sisters but also of languages, thereby assuring the perpetuation and proliferation of multilingualism across the generations. 120

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This aspect of Melanesian multilingualism has usually not been carried over into the relations between indigenous languages and the more recently introduced colonial and post-​colonial ones. In that regard, there has been considerable variation across Melanesia, in accord with differences in the histories of colonisation. But in most cases, unlike the egalitarian pattern described above, there are hierarchical differences of valuation as between the indigenous languages and the introduced ones, and in the way that speakers identify themselves socially by speaking the former versus the latter in given contexts. Those status distinctions and social identifications are themselves changing over time and subject to contestation across social fields. As a well-​documented example let us consider the Solomon Islands case described by Jourdan (2007, 2008). Approximately 65 indigenous languages are spoken in the Solomons, along with English, which is the official national language, and Pijin, which has far more speakers and is the main lingua franca. Since before colonisation, which began in 1893, the indigenous languages have largely been on an equal footing with one other, with high rates of multilingualism, especially in border areas between them (Jourdan 2008: 45), and ‘reciprocal’ codeswitching among them. That changed greatly with colonisation and the introduction of Pijin by returnees from the Queensland cane plantations as described above. Solomon Islanders ‘recognized the advantages derived from speaking the language of the white man [English] and Pijin’ and did so on that basis (Jourdan 2008: 47, italics removed). After independence in 1978, the advance of Pijin entered a new phase with the influx of Solomon Islanders to the capital city, Honiara. Many of them have made it their permanent home and have given birth to children who are even more strongly rooted there. Pijin has become their mother tongue. But almost everyone in Honiara retains ties to their rural homelands, and many, at least of the older generation, continue to speak their homeland languages to fellow speakers in town, and sometimes visit others back in their villages. At the same time, new urban varieties of Pijin have developed, which distinguish the speech of younger people from older, and of urbanites from their country cousins. English is also gaining ground, with extensive codeswitching between Pijin and English according to the social context. Jourdan reports that ‘[v]‌ernacular languages have not disappeared from the linguistic landscape of the town because the cultural contexts where they are primordial … are still strong’ (Jourdan 2008: 64), but that their use now fits within a wider framework of variation in which ‘the vernaculars are the language of kastom [customary practice]; Pijin is that of urban life; and English that of social advancement’ (Jourdan 2008: 64; see Gibson, this volume). As a contrasting case let us now return to the Korowai of West Papua. Unlike the Solomon Islanders, who were thrust into extensive, disruptive interaction with the outside world during the Second World War, the Korowai remained largely isolated from the outside world until the 1980s. By then the area where they live had become a part of Indonesia, after having been under Dutch rule until 1962. Unlike the English and French elsewhere in Melanesia, the Dutch colonists never attempted to introduce their language as a lingua franca. Nor did a pidginised form of Dutch develop as happened with English. Rather, the Dutch colonial regime encouraged the use of various forms of Malay that had already been spoken as lingua francas throughout much of the Indonesian archipelago including Dutch New Guinea. After Indonesia

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became independent in 1945, a particular variety of Malay called ‘Bahasa Indonesia’ or ‘Indonesian’ became the official national language. Stasch (2007: 100) estimates that ‘[a]‌s of 2002, about 5 percent of Korowai spoke Indonesian well enough that they would do so regularly in the presence of more than just one other person’. But all Korowai have a relation to Indonesian in that they know about it and many of them speak at least a few words of it, even if only as isolated ones mixed into their Korowai, for example platəli ‘plastic bag’, from Indonesian plastik. On that basis, they have developed surprisingly strong views about the language, which Stasch says are ‘closely intertwined with their evaluative judgements of the new spaces, people, and social norms that they have become involved with in the recent period’ (Stasch 2007: 101). Korowai people differ in their attitudes toward Indonesian, but a common feature of them is ambivalence: ‘On the one hand the language is strange and repulsive. On the other it is familiar and attractive’ (Stasch 2007: 101). To see why this should be so one has to take account of the inherent link that Korowai posit between land, language and human types as described above. In keeping with that understanding, Korowai initially assumed Indonesian speakers to be a unitary type that fell within the wider category of laleo ‘demons’, monstrous beings that humans turn into after death. While most Korowai no longer believe that the Indonesian-​ speaking outsiders literally come from the land of the dead, they do associate the language with what they take to be unitary form of life which is in some ways analogous to their own and in other ways a ‘deformed’ version of it. Overall, the situation is one of ‘deepening but still highly unstable linguistic contact in which bilingualism is understood as a matter of participating in two disjunct, parallel cultural orders’, neither of which is considered to be of higher or lower value or status than the other (Stasch 2007: 116).

WHAT LIES AHEAD? Of the two cases discussed immediately above, the Solomon Islands one is probably more indicative of the future of linguistic diversity and language ecology across Melanesia than is the Korowai.14 It is broadly similar to what has been happening in Vanuatu, a country with about half the population of the Solomons (c. 250,000 vs c. 500,000) and about 100 languages; and in much of PNG, which has a much bigger population (c. 7,300,000) and many more languages (c. 850). All three countries are similar in having an English-​based pidgin as a widely spoken lingua franca, which is becoming a first language for people who have grown up in the towns and cities (and in some other parts of those countries as well). Similar developments are taking place in the Torres Strait Islands and in some parts of West Papua, where there are approximately 200 indigenous languages, and where Indonesian and various varieties of Papuan Malay are more widely spoken as lingua francas than they are among the Korowai. The situation in New Caledonia is different insofar as its lingua franca is French, but similar to all the other countries I referred to above in that it has a large number of ‘small’ indigenous languages for its size (28 spoken by an indigenous population of c. 100,000). In all of these countries most of the indigenous languages are still being spoken, but some are being replaced by the lingua francas, especially

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in urban areas. This will inevitably reduce the total number of languages spoken in Melanesia, as is happening everywhere else in the world, but that reduction will be counterbalanced to some extent by the rise of new speech varieties within given languages as described above.

NOTES 1 Since the distribution of types of language in Melanesia does not respect national borders, it is often necessary to refer to geographic areas other than nation-​states. ‘New Guinea’ (occupied by much of PNG and West Papua) is a case in point. 2 Papuan languages are spoken on many of its other offshore islands, including the eastern Torres Strait Islands, which are part of Australia. 3 For examples of similar vocabulary as between Rapanui and Malagasy, and among various other Austronesian languages see https://​en.wiktionary.org/​wiki/​Appendix:Cognate_​sets_​ for_​Austronesian_​languages 4 Evidence of a similar kind is also found in the Torres Straits, for interaction between Papuan languages and Australian Aboriginal ones. The language spoken in the western Torres Straits, Kala Lagaw Ya, shows such a mix of elements from Papuan and Australian Aboriginal languages that linguists disagree about which it really is. 5 The language is sometimes also called ‘Hiri Motu’ in the belief that it was used on the annual long-​distance ‘Hiri’ trading expeditions the Motu made to areas along the Gulf of Papua some 200–​300 kilometres to the west-​north-​west. But this is probably not the case, for reasons cogently set out by Dutton (1985). 6 This contrasts with what happened in New Caledonia, where no pidgin/​creole became widely spoken. New Caledonia has a very different history in this respect, in that a sizeable portion of its population are European settlers, mainly from France. 7 The translation is called Nupela Testamen (‘The New Testament’), published in 1969 by The British and Foreign Bible Society in Australia. The English translation used here is from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. 8 This is evident from the fact that in lines 3–​5 i is used in addition to the pronoun em (‘he’/​ ‘she’/​‘it’). Another relevant fact is that unlike the pronoun em, which is singular, i also occurs with plural subjects, for example ol man i kam pinis ‘The men came’. 9 For further details concerning this speech and many others by Ku Waru orators, and their social and historical contexts, see Merlan and Rumsey (1991). 10 See Niles and Rumsey (2011: 16–​19) for a survey of these with references. See also Webb, this volume. 11 For examples from across that region with linked audio and video see Rumsey and Niles (2011). 12 For further discussion and audio samples see François and Stern (2013) and http://​alex. francois.online.fr/​AF-​Vanuatu-​cd_​e.htm 13 Evans specifically refers to the ‘Trans-​Fly’ region, which encompasses much of the Fly River basin, and extends westward into West Papua. 14 Based on fieldwork with the Korowai in 2011 Stasch (personal communication, April 2017) reports that the language situation there too is becoming more hierarchical. He says bilingualism in Indonesian has ‘become vastly more common’ and that ‘the relatively egalitarian model is somewhat losing ground to a more hierarchical one’, or that there are now ‘alternative hierarchies, with Korowai as hierarchically superior in a schema of focus on landownership and Korowai-​centric autarky, but Indonesian as hierarchically superior in a schema of economic wealth and city-​associated technological power’.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For their very helpful feedback on drafts of this chapter, many thanks to Nicholas Evans, Alexandre François, Eric Hirsch, Darja Hoenigman, Francesca Merlan, Andrew Pawley, Will Rollason and Rupert Stasch.

REFERENCES Dutton, T. 1985. Police Motu: Iena sivari (its story). Port Moresby: The University of Papua New Guinea Press. Evans, B. and Palmer, B. 2011. Contact-​induced change in southern Bougainville. Oceanic Linguistics 50: 489–​529. Evans, N. 2012. Even more diverse than we had thought: the multiplicity of Trans-​ Fly languages. In N. Evans and M. Klamer (eds), Melanesian Languages on the Edge of Asia: Challenges for the 21st Century, 109–​149. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. (Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 5). Available at: http://​ hdl.handle.net/​10125/​4562 François, A. 2012. The dynamics of linguistic diversity: egalitarian multilingualism and power imbalance among northern Vanuatu languages. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 214: 85–​110. François, A. and Stern, M. 2013. Music of Vanuatu: celebrations and mysteries. Electronic book released with the CD album Musiques du Vanuatu: Fêtes et Mystères  –​Music of Vanuatu: Celebrations and Mysteries. Label Inédit, W 260147. Paris: Maison des Cultures du Monde. Friedlaender, J.S., Friedlaender, F.R., Reed, F.A., Kidd, K.K., Kidd, J.R., Chambers, G.K., et al. 2008. The genetic structure of Pacific Islanders. PLoS Genetics 4(1): e19. doi:10.1371/​ journal.pgen.0040019 Jourdan, C. 2007. Linguistic paths to urban self in postcolonial Solomon Islands. In M. Makihara and B. Schieffelin (eds), Consequences of Contact: language ideologies and sociocultural transformations in Pacific societies, 30–​48. New York: Oxford University Press. —​ —​2008. Language repertoires and the middle class in urban Solomon Islands. In M. Meyerhoff and N. Nagy (eds), Social Lives in Language: sociolinguistics and multilingual speech communities: celebrating the work of Gillian Sankoff, 43–​67. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lindstrom, L. 1983. Metaphors of debate on Tanna. Naika 12: 6–​9. Keesing, R. 1988. Melanesian Pidgins and the Oceanic Substrate. Stanford: Stanford University Press. McKellin, W.H. 1984. Putting down roots: information in the language of Managalese exchange. In D. Brenneis and F. Myers (eds), Dangerous Words: language and politics in the Pacific, 108–​127. New York: New York University Press. Merlan, F. and Rumsey, A. 1991. Ku Waru: language and segmentary politics in the Nebilyer Valley, Papua New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Niles, D. and Rumsey, A. 2011. Introducing highlands sung tales. In Sung Tales from the Papua New Guinea Highlands: studies in form, meaning and social context, 1–​38. Canberra: ANU E Press. Available at: http://​press.anu.edu.au/​publications/​sung-​tales-​papua-​new​guinea-​highlands Ogan, E. 2005. An introduction to Bougainville cultures. In A. Regan and H. Griffin (eds), Bougainville Before the Conflict, 47–​56. Canberra: Panadanus Books. Pawley, A. 2010. Prehistoric migration and colonisation processes in Oceania: a view from historical linguistics and archaeology. In J. Lucassen, L. Lucassen and P. Manning (eds), Migration in World History: multidisciplinary approaches, 78–​112. London: Brill. 124

— ​ M e l a n e s i a a s a z o n e o f l a n g u a g e d i v e r s i t y —​ Reesink, G. 2005. Sulka of East New Britain: a mixture of Oceanic and Papuan traits. Oceanic Linguistics 44: 145–​193. Ross, M. 1994. Areal phonological features in north central New Ireland. In T. Dutton and D. Tryon (eds), Language Contact and Change in the Austronesian World, 523–​572. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. —​—​2008. A history of metatypy in the Bel languages. Journal of Language Contact 2: 149–​164. Rumsey, A. and Niles, D. 2011. Sung Tales from the Papua New Guinea Highlands: studies in form, meaning and social context. Canberra: ANU E Press. Available at: http://​press.anu. edu.au/​publications/​sung-​tales-​papua-​new-​guinea-​highlands Spriggs, M. 1992. Archaeological and linguistic prehistory in the north Solomons. In T. Dutton, M. Ross and D. Tryon (eds), The Language Game: papers in memory of Donald C. Laycock, 417–​426. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. —​—​ 1997. The Island Melanesians. Oxford: Blackwell. Stasch, R. 2007. Demon language: the otherness of Indonesian in a Papuan community. In M. Makihara and B. Schieffelin (eds), Consequences of Contact: language ideologies and sociocultural transformations in Pacific societies, 96–​124. New York: Oxford University Press. Strathern, A. 1975. Veiled speech in Mount Hagen. In M. Bloch (ed.), Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society, 185–​203. London: Academic Press. Tryon, D. and Charpentier, J.M. 2004. Pacific Pidgins and Creoles: origins, growth and development. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

REGIONAL OVERVIEW From diversity to multiple singularities Jaap Timmer

Drawing on a number of ethnographic case studies this overview first discusses classical anthropological sketches of exchange, economy, governance and politics in Melanesia. It concludes that, in general, Melanesian societies have been discussed in terms of their processes of reciprocity, kinship, personhood, knowledge transactions and cultural innovations. Following this brief overview, I argue that to account for recent social and cultural transformations in the region, scholarly focus should move more firmly beyond clan or language group characteristics and pay attention to emerging regional and island-based singularities. Because Christianity is often a source of inspiration for imagining such communities and nations, more attention needs to be paid to its political influence.

SOCIAL ORDER AND EXCHANGE In order to understand Melanesian social life, it is essential to grasp the central importance of exchange relations to those lives. For scholars seeking to understand Melanesia, these exchanges, which seem quite different from those that dominate capitalist economies, have been used as a means of characterising Melanesia as a distinctive culture area, and delineating the value systems proper to Melanesian social life. The entanglements of exchange systems with those introduced by colonialism and capitalist penetration of Melanesia have resulted in a reassessment of the meaning of exchange, both for scholars and, in some cases, people in Melanesia themselves. However, the significance of exchange relations in one form or another to the constitution of social life in Melanesia is not in doubt. Traditional sketches of societies in Melanesia habitually focus on exchange and the ways in which exchange systems have social, ceremonial and economic qualities. In the discipline’s early twentieth-​century study of the now iconic kula exchange cycle in Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), Malinowski (2014 [1922]: 187) wrote that this exchange illustrates the fundamental human impulse to display, to share, to bestow [as well as] the deep tendency to create social ties through exchange of gifts. Apart from any consideration as to whether the gifts are necessary or even useful, giving for the sake of giving is one of the most important features of Trobriand sociology. 126

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Influenced by Malinowski (who acted as his PhD supervisor), Hogbin reports in his monograph on the To’abaita of North Malaita, Solomon Islands, under the heading of ‘economics and leadership’, that possession of wealth in the Solomon Islands, as amongst ourselves, ensures prestige. But in a native community the same scale of comforts –​or lack of them –​is available for all; everyone has to spend several hours of the day at the same kind of work, all eat the same dishes prepared in the same type of utensils from similar raw food, and all sleep on the same kind of mats for beds. Wealth cannot be used therefore directly for the benefit of the possessor. The house of a wealthy man may be larger it is true and better built than that of one who is insignificant, and he may have several wives, but the difference otherwise is negligible. Reputation accordingly is enhanced not by accumulating possessions in order to use them for one’s self, but by giving them away. … The more feasts a man gives, and the more lavish he is in the provision of food, the greater is his prestige. (Hogbin 1939: 61) Hogbin’s research is one of the many works that focus on how value is constructed and contested through exchanges. For the Kapauku (or Mee) in the densely populated Kamu Valley of West Papua,1 Pospisil (1963) describes the local economy as ‘primitive capitalism’ characterised by the pursuit of wealth in the form of shell money, status and an ethic of individualism. Here, as among the To’abaita, leadership is based on prestige and building influence through the accumulation of wealth in shells and pigs. A Kapauku headman uses his wealth to induce the economic compliance of others and the primary form of inducement, also for effecting social control, is the extension of or withdrawal of credit. Similarly, among the Enga (Enga Province, PNG), ‘social relations have constantly to be publicly validated by material transactions or observable deeds. Such relationships provide a measure of order, social control and predictability’ (Gordon and Meggitt 1985: 148). Exchange systems in Melanesia generate competing claims and obligations, not just within groups but also between groups. One example from West Papua are the round or pyramid-​shaped karawari cult houses recorded in the Humboldt Bay (Yos Sudarso Bay) area by Europeans in the early twentieth century. The cult houses were used in initiation and other secret rituals over which a local leader called ondoafi presided (Hermkens 2006: 55). Building on early ethnographic observations by Wirz and Galis, Hermkens (2006) shows how, through exchange, the cult house, sacred flutes and ritual knowledge were gradually acquired by Humboldt Bay ondoafi from groups around Vanimo and Aitape, PNG. When in 1893 missionary Gerardus Bink visited the village of Ayafo, one of the few that had acquired the ritual houses, he did not see the sacred flutes that became so central to the karawari ritual activities (Hermkens 2006: 55). Almost three decades later the situation appeared to have changed, as Wirz, after his visit to the region in the 1920s, writes about the use of sacred flutes. Wirz’s interlocutors told him that Asareu, the ondoafi of Ayafo, acquired the knowledge and skills related to the sacred flutes in exchange for ancient beads from his friends in the village of Nafri. However, Asareu cheated them by 127

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reproducing the sacred flutes himself. This had severe consequences, since the villagers of Nafri considered this to be theft. (Hermkens 2006: 55) Relations were restored after compensation was paid, but the karawari houses continued to cause trouble. In another reconstruction of events, also in the 1920s, around karawari sacred knowledge, Van der Veur (1966: 82) writes that during the Queen’s birthday celebrations in Hollandia (Jayapura) a Dutch civil servant told Seko village leaders that he would visit their villages to inspect the karawari houses and to publicly expose core secrets. Brutalised by decades of fierce church and government action against ‘pagan’ rituals, people feared the consequence of this action and fled into the bush or crossed the border into PNG to hide among their relatives in Wutung. There they constructed new villages that were later destroyed by a Dutch patrol (Van der Veur 1966: 82). Despite punitive action and attempts at Christian conversion, karawari rituals continued. In his 1955 monograph on the region, Galis (1955: 204) reports that in smaller versions of the ritual houses, older men spent nights, ritual objects were still displayed and produced, old drums were still kept, and women and children were still forbidden to enter. Here, the importance of exchange with ancestors and spirits was maintained despite rapid changes in society. The primacy of exchange to Melanesian social life thus allows us to see it as central to processes of social and cultural change, following the advent of mission, government and modern economies. These transformations led Carrier and Carrier, among others, to study the juxtaposition of ‘old’ and ‘new’ in Melanesia. They saw that on Ponam Island (Manus Province, PNG), the old ways stood together with the new: complex kinship and exchange coexisted with wage employment and commodity relations; elaborate fishing techniques coexisted with tinned fish; traditional markets and trade partnerships coexisted with trade stores, bank loans, and cash transactions between market partners. (Carrier and Carrier 1989: 5) Carrier and Carrier conclude that colonisation, modern government and Christianity as well as more extensive connections with the outside world have affected exchange systems. But they also note that pre-​colonial exchange systems themselves did not evolve in isolation from external influences (Carrier and Carrier 1989: 8). Given the centrality of exchange to social life, Melanesians have historically appropriated outside influences through and as forms of exchange. A good example of such processes is how the introduced parliamentary system has been accommodated by Enga people as part of a broader political exchange system that Gordon and Meggitt (1985: 145–​189) term a ‘politics of spoils’. Enga people practise a large-​scale exchange system known as te (1985: 148). The te is a competitive system of prestige-​building exchanges of wealth, based on overlapping individual partnerships (ibid.). In recent times, political candidates keen to obtain access to government largesse use the te system as an effective way of obtaining votes. They are typically ‘big men’, men of great influence who control substantial networks 128

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of exchange (see Martin, this volume). They establish themselves as political brokers and merge their own self-​interest with obligations in the te. ‘Thus, ironically, political development contributed to strengthening traditional styles of action’ (Gordon and Meggitt 1985: 158; see Dalsgaard, this volume). These influential men are usually not keen to establish civil order through investing in the state as a regulatory system. Instead they use government resources and funding for the benefit of their group or themselves (Gordon and Meggitt 1985: 181). The tension that arises here has historically been portrayed by anthropologists as between ‘tradition’, in the form of the activities of big men, and ‘modernity’, seen in the apparatus of government. As Martin has pointed out, however, for the Tolai of East New Britain Province (PNG), kastom or ‘tradition’ does not have a singular meaning but tends to refer to an ethic of reciprocity about which there is no consensus. Many disputes and arguments are about when one should ‘cease to acknowledge the interlocking obligations of oneself or one’s group to others to whom one is socially related’ (Martin 2013: 136). Martin highlights contestations between reciprocal interdependence (the typical Melanesian way) and non-​reciprocal independence in business ventures (capitalism). While people ideologically prefer their own customary way (kastom) in contrast to ‘white people’s ways’, in daily life there is more ambiguity: ‘there are many contexts in which people can be criticised for an inappropriate extension of the value of reciprocal interdependence into situations where other values are felt to be more appropriate’ (Martin 2013: 234).

DIVERSE COSMOLOGIES OF EXCHANGE Social, economic and political roles of exchange cannot be separated from what Westerners would label ‘cosmology’, or people’s view of the nature of the universe. In pre-​colonial times, rituals intended directly to affect the cosmos typically took the form of exchange, and, as the Humboldt Bay case above shows, exchanges were often shaped by ritual. More recently, the introduction of Christianity has resulted in the remodelling of both indigenous concepts of the cosmos and patterns of exchange activity. This has a profound impact on social life most broadly. For the Huli of Hela Province, PNG, Ballard (2000) shows how a large-​scale regional ritual cycle called dindi gamu linked people and territories together to establish exchange with ‘the root of the earth’ (described as a python). The rituals were performed after famines and droughts, but they could never stop the longer cycle of decline which culminates in a time of darkness (mbingi), 14 generations after the previous mbingi. Ballard (2000: 214) points out that mbingi has been scientifically linked to the fall of volcanic ash from an eighteenth-​century eruption of Long Island in the Bismarck Sea (Blong 1982). For Huli it thus holds the status of a historical event, but in Huli traditions this cataclysm can take on a variety of forms. These share ‘the notion of a radical transformation of the land –​a sweeping regenerative event that restores full fertility to the land and complete mana to humans’ (Ballard 2000: 214). With the introduction of Christianity, Huli began to recognise common themes in the cosmologies of missionaries and their own, but at the same time they were required to reconcile their cultural order with Christian notions of the divine (Ballard 2000: 219; Jorgensen 2014). As Huli adopted Christianity, the cosmic cycles evident in ideas of mbingi were displaced by the linear teleology of biblical narratives. 129

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As a result, people began to abandon rituals and the sacred groves at ritual sites were logged for timber (Ballard 2000: 219; see also Robbins 2004: 180). On the island of Malaita (Solomon Islands) we likewise see significant transformations brought about by conversion to Christianity. Malaitans also abandoned their ritual sites in the mountains where they used to make offerings to ancestors (Burt 1982) and people no longer relate to land and the environment in moral terms. The Christian rearrangement of the spiritual landscape by clearing out the ancestors, and the idea that constant disputes around ownership make them sinful, stimulated people to reject their local conceptions of landscape. Land is now no longer held along lines of kinship and marriage; people rather claim personal possession of land in relation to mining, hydro energy projects, tourism ventures, and other ‘modern’ developments (Foukona and Timmer 2016). In addition, I have often heard people emphasise the ‘customary’ rule of birth-​right as being similar to that in the biblical story of Isaac and Esau. This highlights not just increasing individualisation of property ownership, but also the influence of Christianity on ethical evaluations around reciprocity, personal gain and engagement with capitalism.

EXCHANGE AND THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE Exchange and exchange items are also significant in relation to ideas about and politics around difference. A case in point is that of the imported cloths called kain timur that are used in a variety of exchanges in the Bird’s Head of West Papua. The Bird’s Head region is where ‘Southeast Asia’ and ‘Melanesia’ meet, but more fruitfully may be viewed as West Papua’s door to the other islands of Eastern Indonesia. ‘Cosmology, mythology, trade, and mobility linked Papuan leaders and their networks of trading communities to the Moluccas [Maluku Islands]’ (Timmer 2011: 385). Kain timur have played a role in these interconnections for at least four centuries (Goodman 2006). The local Malay term kain timur is used widely in the Bird’s Head and refers to a set of cultural and social practices involving the duties, rights, cloth names, and magic surrounding the exchange of cloths. Originating from eastern Indonesian islands, kain timur arrived with connotations of power and wealth located in foreign lands to the west where powers are assumed to be greater and the people wealthier. After arrival they became objects of exchange for bridewealth and compensation payments, and as offerings to ancestors and other spirits (Timmer 2011: 384). Centuries after kain timur’s introduction, missionary and government agents in the Bird’s Head became preoccupied by the so-​called ‘kain timur question’, that is the concern that the exchange of kain timur impeded development. Kain timur became classified alongside practices such as (cargo) cults and headhunting, as uncivilised and not belonging to a modern world (Van Baal 1960). Paradoxically, the increasing availability of European goods, such as rice, clothing and torches intensified the exchange of cloth. Men sought to control cloth exchange in order to dominate the social networks that regulated access to money and new goods (Timmer 2011: 394). Their interest was in proving themselves to be outstanding warriors as well as wealthy big men rather than providing for themselves (Barnett 1959). Dutch government officials perceived them to live in a state of distress and wanted them to settle peacefully with their families and relatives in villages; they discouraged their violent acts. Afraid of punitive measures by the police, the big men found themselves 130

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deprived of the violent means necessary to maintain their reputations. At the same time, due to the more peaceful situation, people were able to travel longer distances and enter exchange relations with people they did not formerly dare to approach (Massink 1996: 496). This laid the ground for a ‘rapacious pursuit’ (Barnett 1959: 1016) of cloth which increased bridewealth and compensation payments. One consequence of these developments was a decline in the marriage rate and an increase in domestic disputes (Massink 1996: 493). This was all of great concern to the administration and missionaries; local government officials suggested abolishing the exchange of cloths, but relented after they realised that cloths were also important to life cycles, fertility and favourable relations with the dead (Timmer 2011: 395–​396). After the transfer of West Papua to Indonesia, Indonesian officials also saw kain timur as a problem, yet no radical attempt at abolition has been undertaken (Timmer 2011: 397). Today, kain timur features as a central element in many of the cultures of the Bird’s Head. The impact of the stances taken by the colonial administration and later the Indonesian government toward cloth exchange was to motivate people to distinguish between the cloth and the modern economy. Whereas historically, kain timur represented linkage to powerful lands to the west, in the post-​colonial period, it has become an icon of local custom. People value kain timur as a symbol of their tradition and as a marker that distinguishes Bird’s Head people from belligerent, penis-​gourd-​ wearing highlanders (‘Dani’), shell-​eating and betelnut-​chewing Cenderawasih Bay people (‘Biak’, ‘Yapen’), and anthropophagous south New Guinea people (‘Asmat’). With reference to peoples from other parts of Indonesia, the people of the Bird’s Head see cloth as a symbol of their adat (Indonesian, ‘customary ways’) –​just as certain dances stand for Balinese adat and gamelan music and wayang kulit shadow plays stand for Javanese adat. These cultural forms have been reconstructed as vehicles for the expression of national sentiment, the local colour creating an illusion of difference between the locality and the outside world (Timmer 2011: 397). Both the centrality of kain timur to local exchange practices, social life and self-​representations and their intimate connection to influences outside the region through trade, colonialism and the imposition of state structures are typical of the complex relation between exchange, ideas of difference and cosmology across Melanesia.

OPEN CULTURES The societies highlighted above clearly do not represent bounded or closed units, as the example of kain timur makes abundantly clear. In fact, we can argue that it is exactly people’s willingness to adopt new ideas, objects or ways of doing things that is one distinctive feature of the region. This means that in a colonial and post-​colonial world, an openness to other cultural forms may be typically Melanesian (Harrison 2006: 75). Being culturally open means that people continue to be familiar with other people’s culture and engage in the production of their own culture through what Harrison calls ‘muted or denied resemblance’ (2003: 350). By this Harrison means that groups differentiate themselves against a background of commonalities shared with other groups. The identification with the other is muted because the role of mimicry that these identifications imply is hardly acknowledged and often not even recognised. 131

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Throughout Melanesia the construction of such groups appears to require a certain level of ‘keeping-​while-​giving’. This is a notion developed by Weiner (1992) as a way of understanding the importance of ‘inalienable possessions’, things that cannot be given away. Such items, which might include regalia, heirlooms or intangible things such as songs, names or myths are significant to many in Melanesia, even where exchange is a central feature of social life. Weiner suggests that the keeping of material objects in a Melanesian environment, in which exchange is central, is key to the maintenance of groups through time. While in classical studies of exchange by Mauss (1925) and Lévi-​Strauss (1969) exchange is seen as positively socially constructive, Weiner argues that, in essence, exchange evokes feelings of threat and chaos. Enemies may try to claim what is really valuable and thus take away those things that sustain a group’s distinctiveness. To limit the threat of such entropy, the ‘inalienable objects’ that constitute social distinctiveness ought to be safeguarded. Harrison extends Weiner’s argument to the means by which people represent their identities as members of groups and categories. He is mostly concerned with symbols that mediate group identities. In Melanesia, these include animal and plant emblems as well as names, knowledge and ritual practices owned by groups. In Weiner’s terms, for the sake of social distinctiveness, these things need to be kept ‘out of circulation’ which in practice, says Harrison, means they need to be shielded from unauthorised copying and reproduction. Openness and difference are thus two sides of the same coin. Groups are aware of and open to cultural forms from elsewhere, but to maintain their distinctiveness they must also keep certain cultural elements out of circulation. People in Melanesia thus generally have a keen sense of cultural differences. Even in pre-​contact times, groups in Melanesia objectified their cultures (Otto 1991). Such objectification has been discussed in studies on ‘traditional ways’ or kastom and ‘the invention of tradition’ (Keesing and Tonkinson 1982). Contributors to these debates (see Jolly 1992 and Sahlins 1993) see colonialism as the key factor inspiring a sense of ethnic and national identity. New elites invest in identity politics, in ways similar to Western forms of ethnicity and nationalism. Harrison notes that in both Melanesia and the West, self-​conscious cultural identities are in large part élite constructs. They represent cultural difference and identity as conceived by the dominant, or on their behalf, and therefore have to be seen as an aspect of power, and as serving power. (2006: 78)

FORMS OF INCORPORATION As noted above, people in Melanesia have incorporated a wide variety of influences, in particular state and church. These are ubiquitous for most people in the region. The incorporation of state and church into people’s lives commonly demonstrates the kind of mimicry Harrison highlights. Thus, Lattas (1998: 57) observes that mimicking the state is an ‘empowerment of a new sort of Melanesian man whose power comes not simply from tradition but from discovering the world of magic that is hidden in the cultural texts of Europeans now in Melanesian hands’. The ways in which people in Melanesia incorporate the state have a profound impact on how they imagine power relations. Clark (2000: 147) points out that Wiru 132

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people (Southern Highlands Province, PNG) thought that during the colonial period, Europeans held back the knowledge Wiru people needed to exchange equitably with them. In order to achieve an equitable relation with Europeans, Wiru people killed all their pigs, gave up their cults and embraced the Christian church, accepting the ‘gifts’ Europeans brought. This shows how Wiru people have long tried to affect their relation to the state through exchange. Hence, while highlanders like the Wiru see that the state’s resources are not distributed equitably they do not experience this as a purely political or economic problem. Rather ‘people often see the state as acting like a failed or destructive big man, not as a totalitarian or efficient regime of power that exists “above them” ’ (Clark 2000: 150). Because Wiru people approach the state on their own terms, through exchange, they conceptualise it as a partner, albeit a bad one, and not as a dominating force or entity. In other contexts, Melanesian openness toward outside sources of power took a different form. A  famous ‘protest movement’ in Melanesia that mimicked the colonial state so as to provide an alternative is Maasina Rule. Maasina Rule was a movement that started in South Malaita in 1944 and soon spread throughout the island establishing an island-​wide uprising against colonial rule. The general picture sketched by outside observers is that the movement’s ideology was grounded in kastom as the foundation for a new form of governance, with a strong emphasis on an indigenous legal system (see Demian and Rousseau, Allen this volume), in which Malaitans would determine their own future (Akin 2013). Following decades of resentment and protest against British rule, refusal to be dominated mounted with the retreat of the foreign state from the islands when confronted with Japanese forces during the Second World War. Moreover, thousands of Malaitans were recruited for war in an American military organisation called the Solomon Islands Labour Corps. For their work they not only received payments higher than the British afforded to their native labourers, but people also picked up political, often communist, ideas from Americans about self-​determination. On top of that, Laracy notes that ‘SSEM [South Seas Evangelical Mission] adherents were … encouraged by the fact that many of the Americans similarly professed evangelical beliefs’ (Laracy 1971: 107n37). In other words, in response to colonial rule, a new pan-​Malaitan ideology emerged that valorised kastom as a local way of doing things, seen as anti-​colonial and envisioning a post-​colonial world. Crucially, however, this was a kind of kastom that incorporated, or was influenced by, European or American forms of ‘political ideology’.

EMERGING SINGULARITIES The cultural openness of Melanesian societies has enabled the creation of new forms of organisation and identity in the contemporary era. These often seem to transcend the distinctiveness of Melanesian social life identified by earlier scholars if this distinctiveness is imagined in terms of the role of exchange in the constitution of persons and cosmos. Regional variations are now often expressed in terms of island, tribal or regional identities while ideas of nation have become ways of imagining oneself as different from others. Groups in Melanesia increasingly fix people in time and place, determining group affiliation on the basis of genealogies. Historically, Melanesian people were of the land, making and being made by their places (Ingold 2000; cf. Telban, this volume). Today it is increasingly possible to regard the land as something 133

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separate from people, who merely occupy and exploit it. This mostly happens in response to the commercialisation and commodification of land (Ballard 1997; Jorgensen 2014). These transformations are nevertheless shaped by the longstanding openness of Melanesian societies to outside influences. This openness means that national or regional identities in Melanesia, while they resemble ethnic identifications or nationalisms found elsewhere, often display great flexibility and can appear surprisingly provisional. Rutherford’s (2012) study of Biak, West Papua shows that sovereignty demands that foreigners recognise one’s autonomy, but this makes one dependent on others for this recognition. Sovereign autonomy can thus never be fully achieved –​it must constantly be performed for a variety of audiences. Similarly, Kirksey (2012) highlights the distinctive modality of West Papuan resistance. This is not articulated in terms of entrenched ‘tribal’ or corporate groups but temporary alliances and networks that are assembled in the context of particular conflicts and struggles. Clearly, the longevity and strategies of these networks and alliances are different according to the issues at stake and the social and cultural dynamics on the ground. For example, the Organisasi Papua Merdeka uses web 2.0 technology to publicise their cause, satirise the Indonesian authorities and claim association with a variety of influential figures from journalists to Indonesian soldiers (Kirksey 2012: 180–​181). Christianity is often a powerful source of inspiration that influences states, nations and their associated identities. This is not surprising in a region that is overwhelmingly Christian. Pentecostal figures such as Rev. Michael Maeliau of North Malaita, Solomon Islands, can mobilise local people to build an explicitly Christian nation or a ‘New Jerusalem’ (Timmer 2015). Similarly, in the case of Bougainville, an autonomous region of PNG since 2000, Catholicism inspired leaders of the interim government to build the Kingdom of Me’ekamui (Hermkens 2013; see Cox, this volume). In the process, President Dr John Momis signed a New Covenant with God on 28 October 2010. This was intended to create a prosperous nation following Genesis 12: 2: ‘And I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing’. These cases emphasise the importance of Christianised politics and politicised Christianity for understanding evolving forms of social order and ideas of sovereignty. The significance of religion in the development of social and political organisations and identities is most evident in New Caledonia. Here, the emergence in the 1970s and 1980s of the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak Socialiste (FLNKS) was strongly influenced by evangelical Christianity. Jean-​Marie Tjibaou, a Catholic, politician and leader of the multi-​ethnic Union Calédonienne (UC), was appointed president of the FLNKS in 1977. This was a source of conflict within the liberation movement. Many of his Kanak followers saw Catholicism as a foreign colonial ideology that was talking more about French than Melanesian values. The opposition against the French and their Catholicism came most fervently from the Protestant Kanaks and Tjibaou was ultimately killed by the radical Djubelly Wéa. Wéa was equally committed to the future well-​being of the Kanak people but inspired by Protestantism and teachings on politics and independence at the Pacific Theological College in Suva, which he attended in the 1970s. His radicalism was also fed by his people’s decades-​long marginalisation by the French and Catholics on the island of Ouvéa. They eventually settled in the northern interior of the island. This is how Wéa reflects on this new land:

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This name, Goosana, was given at the time of our ancestors’ return from exile. It is a name that can be found in the Bible, linked to the history of the people of Israel. It is like the Promised Land, it is the place where the children of Israel rested before continuing on to Canaan. It is a bit of that journey, the one of our ancestors, which we have adopted as an important reference in our modern history. Our ancestors were, then, already in that situation, always moving, attacked by the system in place at the same time as was their faith. (Wéa in Waddell 2008: 27) For many Melanesians, biblical narratives and prophecies are often key resources used to comprehend their own past in the light of colonial and then national modernity. They elaborate these narratives by claiming relationships with like-​minded Christians in the region and worldwide and with such geographical pivots as Rome and Jerusalem. In Melanesia the idea of nationhood is typically drawn from Christian sources. In some cases, such biblical imagery encourages people to retain the continuity of tradition (kastom) while being eager to effect change through establishing relationships with people and institutions beyond their borders. In other cases, this leads to iconoclasm against ‘pagan’ tribal artefacts, as in the recent case of PNG’s Parliament House which I will discuss below.

NEW JERUSALEM IN PNG Throughout Melanesia, new forms of ‘national’ culture or kastom are increasingly interpreted according to its alleged similarities with Mosaic law which inspires people to bring about radical change, typically imagined as the building of a New Jerusalem. In PNG, such a vision has recently moved people to engage in destroying material culture associated with kastom. In 2013, Speaker of Parliament Theodore Zurenuoc set out to remove ‘pagan’ carvings and statues from Parliament House in Port Moresby. Zurenuoc’s actions took place in a context of widespread support for radical reform of government, which many people see as incorrigibly corrupt. This will to reform was expressed in a desire for the introduction of explicitly Christian forms of governance, in particular but not exclusively among Evangelicals and Pentecostals (cf. Eriksen and MacCarthy, this volume). Zurenuoc was accused by some of his opponents of a sort of iconoclasm reminiscent of the Afghan Taliban’s 2001 demolition of the Bamiyan Buddha statues when he commanded the destruction of the carved posts in the Great Hall of the building and a row of 19 masks attached to the lintel at the base of the façade of Parliament House (see also Hermkens, this volume). Zurenuoc’s action was challenged in court by Andrew Moutu, Director of the National Museum and Art Gallery, together with Sir Michael Somare, PNG’s first post-​ independence prime minister (Eves et al. 2014). The key argument of the plaintiffs was that Zurenuoc’s action constituted the destruction of national cultural property which should be protected under the National Cultural Property (Preservation) Act. The court ruled that even though the objects in question were not registered as such, they were ‘significant works of culture and art’ and thus ‘national cultural property’ (PNG National Court of Justice 2015/​2016: 38). The court ordered Zurenuoc to replace the carvings he had ordered destroyed.

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Zurenuoc, however, maintained that his actions were intended to ‘promote the ideal to the Nation and give this Nation its true identity as a Christian Nation’ (PNG National Court of Justice 2015/​2016: 20). In the eyes of Zurenuoc, the traditional icons in the parliament building were already denounced as pagan –​they ‘carry offensive and inappropriate messages’ –​and ‘they also occupied prominent positions at the main entrance and in the Grand Hall, which are the most strategic places where we could put a symbol conveying the message of our national ideal, national identity and unity’ (PNG National Court of Justice 2015/​2016: 19). In other words, his was not an attack on cultural heritage per se but part of a bigger and more important process aimed at reforming and modernising parliament. Zurenuoc defended what he labelled as the ‘Restoration, Reformation and Modernisation of Parliament project’, stating that it was necessary to develop and achieve national unity and identity. While the plaintiffs argued in favour of the retention of ‘traditional culture’, Zurenuoc attempted to redirect attention to another image of PNG as a part of wider Christendom. In many ways the study of Melanesia now requires scholars and policy-​makers alike to recognise the multiple ways that people live out and experience biblically inspired ethical and imagined landscapes, horizons and theologies, both local and global. At present, many in Melanesia claim that they are a ‘Lost Tribe of Israel’, members of the group that God chose to be His people. As the Lost Tribe their status is no different from powerful colonial British, Dutch, Germans or French and contemporary Australians and New Zealanders, indeed from all other whites. But utopia in their life-​worlds is not just a revolutionary idea and people are not just haunted by the thought of a perfect society. While they interpret much of their past as a memory of a lost paradise, they also see and experience its materials for remaking the world. In many cases, these materials are theological and engage people in struggles against Western churches and in debates over the appropriateness of Australian, French or Indonesian government organisation.

CONCLUSION Emerging forms of identity and political organisation in Melanesia are taking on different shapes to the nationalisms described by Anderson (1991; see Robbins 1998) for Western countries. Groups in Melanesia respond in a variety of ways to the official state and religion plays a key role. Many are keen to establish equitable exchange relations with the formal state. Others develop forms of sovereignty that adopt state forms to seek legitimacy from the state. They write constitutions (Timmer 2013, and see Demian and Rousseau, this volume), design flags, develop state-​like regulations and copy other paraphernalia of the state in order to appropriate its power. As informal sovereignties, they most often feature as alternatives to a government that fails to deliver what people expect. Only in exceptional cases, such as during ethnic conflict, do such sovereignties assume the character of militias or vigilante groups (see Allen, this volume). In many ways, Melanesians borrow the language of the state to establish forms of autonomy and elicit the recognition of powerful others. On the other hand, their political strategies show significant continuity with principles of exchange that defined people’s relations to one another in the pre-​colonial past. 136

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Seen as nations in relation to Christianity, these emerging sovereignties provide forms of connection that cross ethnic boundaries and tend to unite people in a Christian public sphere. People say that they have found their origins and the foundational truth of their customary ways as versions of Judaic ways and Mosaic rules. This realisation motivates many to institute Christian forms of governance, to forge links with like-​minded Christians and to instigate political leaders to build covenants with God. Such elements become the foundation of an imagined nation that encompasses a worldwide community of believers. The apocalyptic rhetoric of this ‘New Jerusalem’ suggests a radical break with previous forms of Melanesian experience. Yet, these developments can equally be seen as another instance of the experimentation that Melanesians have always pursued with others’ ideas and practices, and thus of the cultural openness that characterises the region.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT My research in Solomon Islands is supported under Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (150102312).

NOTE 1 Throughout this chapter for clarity I use the contemporary designations of political entities in Melanesia in preference to the colonial names.

REFERENCES Akin, D.W. 2013. Colonialism, Maasina Rule, and the Origins of Malaitan Kastom. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Revised Edition. London and New York: Verso. Ballard, C. 1997. It’s the land stupid! The moral economy of resource ownership in Papua New Guinea.’ In Peter Larmour (ed.), The Governance of Common Property in the Pacific Region, 47–​65. Canberra: National Centre for Development Studies. —​—​2000. The fire next time: the conversion of the Huli apocalypse. Ethnohistory 47(1): 205–​240. Barnett, H.G. 1959. Peace and progress in New Guinea. American Anthropologist 61: 1013–​1019. Blong, R.J. 1982. The Time of Darkness: local legend and volcanic reality in Papua New Guinea. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Burt, B. 1982. Kastom, Christianity and the First Ancestor of the Kwara’ae of Malaita. Mankind 13(4): 374–​399. Carrier, J.G. and Carrier, A.H. 1989. Wage, Trade, and Exchange in Melanesia: a Manus society in the modern state. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clark, J. 2000. Steel to Stone: a chronicle of colonialism in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eves, R., Haley, N., May, R.J., Cox, J., Gibbs, P., Merlan, F. and Rumsey, A. 2014. ‘Purging Parliament: A New Christian Politics in Papua New Guinea?’ State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Project, Discussion Paper 2014/​1. Canberra: School of International, Political & Strategic Studies, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. 137

— ​ J a a p   T i m m e r —​ Foukona, J.D. and Timmer, J. 2016. The culture of agreement making in Solomon Islands. Oceania 86(2): 116–​131. Galis, K. 1955. Papua’s van de Humboldt-​baai: bijdrage tot een ethnografie. The Hague: J.N. Voorhoeve. Goodman, T. 2006. The Sosolot: an eighteenth century East Indonesian trade network. PhD Thesis, University of Hawai’i. Gordon, R.J. and Meggitt, M.J. 1985. Law and Order in the New Guinea Highlands: encounters with Enga. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for University of Vermont. Harrison, S. 2003. Cultural difference as denied resemblance: reconsidering nationalism and ethnicity. Society for Comparative Study of Society and History 45(2): 343–​361. —​—​ 2006. Fracturing Resemblances: identity and mimetic conflict in Melanesia and the West. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Hermkens, A.K. 2006. The Lake Sentani region. In P. Peltier and F. Morin (eds), Shadows of New Guinea: art from the Great Island of Oceania in the Barbier-​Mueller Collections, 50–​69. Paris and Geneva: Somogy éditions d’art and Musée Barbier-​Mueller. —​—​2013. Like Moses who led his people to the Promised Land: nation-​and state-​building in Bougainville. Oceania 83(3): 192–​207. Hogbin, I.H. 1939. Experiments in Civilization: the effects of European culture on a native community of the Solomon Islands. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Ingold, T. 2000. Ancestry, generation, substance, memory, land. In The Perception of the Environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill, 133–​151. London and New York: Routledge. Jolly, M. 1992. Specters of inauthenticity. The Contemporary Pacific 4(1): 49–​72. Jorgensen, D. 2014. Mining narratives and multiple geographies in Papua New Guinea: Ok Tedi, the emerald cave and Lost Tribes. Journal de la Société des Océanistes 138(1): 23–​36. Keesing, R.M. and Tonkinson, R. (eds) 1982. Special Issue: Reinventing traditional culture: the politics of kastom in Island Melanesia. Mankind 13(4). Kirksey, E. 2012. Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua and the architecture of global power. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Laracy, H. 1971. Marching rule and the missions. The Journal of Pacific History 6(1): 96–​114. Lattas, A. 1998. Cultures of Secrecy: reinventing race in Bush Kaliai cargo cults. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. Lévi-​Strauss, C. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Translated from the French by J.H. Bell, J.R. von Sturmer and R. Needham. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. Malinowski, B. 2014 [1922]. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: an account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. With a foreword by Adam Kuper. London and New York: Routledge Classics. Martin, K. 2013. The Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots: custom and conflict in East New Britain. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Massink, J. 1996. De kain-​ timur-​ revolutie in Ajamaru. In P. Schoorl (ed.), Besturen in Nederlands-​Nieuw-​Guinea 1945–​1962: ontwikkelingswerk in een periode van politieke onrust, 484–​505. Leiden: KITLV Press. Mauss, M. 1925. Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques (‘An essay on the gift: the form and reason of exchange in archaic societies’). L’Année Sociologique (n.s.) 1: 30–​186. Otto, T. 1991. The Politics of Tradition in Baluan: social change and the construction of the past in a Manus society. Nijmegen: Centre for Pacific Studies. PNG National Court of Justice 2015/​2016. OS (HR) No. 5 of 2014. Grand Chief Sir Michael T.  Somare MP, Governor of East Sepik and Dr Andrew Moutu, Director, National Museum & Art Gallery vs The Honourable Theo Zurenuoc MP, Speaker of the National Parliament. 138

— ​ F r o m d i v e r s i t y t o m u l t i p l e s i n g u l a r i t i e s —​ Pospisil, L. 1963. Kapauku Papuan Economy. Yale University Publications in Anthropology, no. 67. New Haven, Conn. Reprint. 1972. New Haven, Conn.: Human Relations Area Files. Robbins, J. 1998. On reading ‘World News’: apocalyptic narrative, negative nationalism and transnational Christianity in a Papua New Guinea society. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 42(2): 103–​130. —​—​ 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and moral torment in a Papua New Guinea society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rutherford, D. 2012. Laughing at Leviathan: sovereignty and audience in West Papua. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, M. 1993. Goodbye to Tristes Tropes: ethnography in the context of modern world history. Journal of Modern History 65: 1–​25. Timmer, J. 2011. Cloths of civilisation: Kain Timur in the Bird’s Head of West Papua. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 12(4): 383–​401. —​—​2013. The threefold logic of Papua-​Melanesia: constitution-​writing in the margins of the Indonesian nation-​state. Oceania 83(3): 158–​174. —​—​2015. Building Jerusalem in North Malaita, Solomon Islands. Oceania 85(3): 299–​314. Van Baal, J. 1960. Erring acculturation. American Anthropologist 62(1): 108–​121. Veur, P.W. van der 1966. Search for New Guinea’s Boundaries: from Torres Strait to the Pacific. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Waddell, E. 2008. Jean-​Marie Tjibaou, Kanak Witness to the World: an intellectual biography. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Weiner, A.B. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: the paradox of keeping-​while-​giving. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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PART III

ECONOMY AND LIVELIHOOD

CHAPTER EIGHT

SUBSISTENCE FOOD PRODUCTION IN MELANESIA R.M. Bourke

INTRODUCTION Subsistence food production continues to provide much of the food consumed in Papua New Guinea (PNG), West Papua, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. It is a moderately important source of food in New Caledonia and a very minor source in the Torres Strait Islands. I have spent my professional life working on food production and village agriculture in PNG and there is much more published information from PNG than the other Melanesian political units. Hence, this chapter has a greater focus on PNG. I have also studied food production in Solomon Islands and Vanuatu and conducted fieldwork on many islands there. So, I can write with some authority on these two nations. I have less experience in New Caledonia and even less in West Papua and Torres Strait Islands, and this is reflected in the chapter. There are many common elements in traditional food production in these six Melanesian political units. These include the dependence on taro, yam, sweet potato (over the past 300  years), banana, sago (on the island of New Guinea1 and adjacent islands), numerous green leafy and other vegetables, as well as fruits and edible nuts. The mix of species varies somewhat between islands and between environments within islands, particularly on New Guinea. Grain crops, particularly rice, sorghum and millets, were absent until the modern era. These remain unimportant, aside from maize, where the grain is consumed on the cob rather than removed and processed further. Three broad environments can be distinguished in this region. The first is islands and lowlands in PNG, West Papua, Solomon Islands, north and central Vanuatu and Torres Strait Islands, where seasonal temperature differences are small. Rainfall is high (1,500 to over 4,000 mm/​year) in most locations in this sub-​region, with a limited number of locations in PNG, West Papua and much of Vanuatu experiencing somewhat lower rainfall and some locations receiving over 8,000 mm/​year. The climate in these places is tropical equatorial. The second major sub-​region is the highlands on the island of New Guinea, that is, locations at over 1,000 m altitude in PNG and West Papua. This sub-​region is characterised by cooler temperatures, with the maximum and minimum temperatures being closely related to altitude. (Maximum, minimum and mean temperatures drop by 5.2 oC for every 1,000 m increase in altitude in New Guinea). Mean annual rainfall 143

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ranges from 1,800 to over 5,000 mm. The third sub-​region occurs in southern Vanuatu and in New Caledonia and is characterised by larger seasonal changes in temperature, that is, the climate is sub-​tropical. Mean annual rainfall in the third environment is 1000–​3000 mm. The southwest coast of New Caledonia receives 1,000–​1,500 mm/​ year and there is a long dry period. These environmental differences result in somewhat different crop bases, particularly in the highlands of New Guinea. Despite this, there was historically much commonality in the subsistence food production in the region. This is reflected in the pioneering regional studies done 50–​60  years ago, particularly by Barrau and Brookfield (Barrau 1958, 1965; Brookfield 1964; Brookfield with Hart, 1971). In the modern era, differences in political arrangements have resulted in changes to food consumption patterns, particularly in Torres Strait Islands and in New Caledonia, as well as in urban and peri-​urban locations in the other four political units.

A regional overview of food production Most Melanesians are rural villagers and their most important food is some combination of sweet potato, Colocasia taro (Asia-​Pacific taro), yam, Xanthosoma taro and banana. Starch from sago palms is an important food for a significant number of people in swampy locations in PNG, West Papua and some adjacent islands and sugar cane is used as a sweet snack food in most of the region. Many fruit and nut bearing trees provide food, the most important being coconut, breadfruit (fruit or nuts eaten), red pandanus (Pandanus conoideus) in the New Guinea lowlands, nut pandanus (P. julianettii and P. brosimos) in the New Guinea highlands and various edible nuts, including galip (Canarium indicum), sea almond (Terminalia catappa) and okari (T. kaernbachii). Pigs are important, particularly in the highlands of New Guinea and provide protein and fat. Chickens and some other domestic animals are eaten, particularly in lowland and island locations. Game meat and insects remain important food sources in some locations, particularly where population density is very low. Imported food, particularly rice, wheat-​based foods and vegetable oil, are also eaten. Consumption levels of imported food vary considerably, with the highest consumption in urban centres, peri-​urban areas and in the Torres Strait Islands, and lowest in more remote locations. Imported foods provide about a fifth of food energy in PNG, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. There is considerable variation in the intensity of land use in Melanesia. Most commonly, garden food production is based on swidden agriculture, where a relatively short cropping period is following by a longer period where fallow vegetation restores soil fertility and supresses weed growth. At one extreme, in some locations where soil fertility is poor and rainfall is high, a cropping period of about a year is followed by more than 20 years of fallow. At the other extreme, land use is permanent, and land is only fallowed occasionally for short periods of less than a year. This is the situation where soil fertility is maintained by the transfer of organic matter to large mounds (‘composting’) in parts of the PNG highlands. Land use is also permanent on many atolls, where swamp taro (Cyrotosperma chamissonis) and Colocasia taro are grown in pits and soil fertility is maintained by transfer of fresh organic material from elsewhere on the atoll. Between these two extremes, there is a wide range in land use intensity, which depends on pressure on land, inherent soil fertility and the crops 144

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being grown. In general, land use intensity is higher in the mountains of New Guinea than in the New Guinea lowlands or on other islands. The most common technique used to restore soil fertility after cropping is natural fallows, with fallow vegetation being burnt in the new garden area. Other techniques used to enhance or maintain soil fertility include the transfer of organic matter into the soil (‘composting’); planting nitrogen-​fixing trees in the fallow phase, particularly Casuarina oligodon in the New Guinea highlands; using a rotation of root crops and a leguminous food crop, particularly peanuts; transfer of nutrient-​rich mud from ditches to the soil surface; burning grass or other vegetation on the soil surface; the transfer of nutrient-​rich irrigation water to plots of taro, a technique now mainly used on some islands in Vanuatu, but a widespread practice in New Caledonia and parts of New Guinea in the recent and distant past; and fertilisation with chicken and other animal manure. There is negligible use of inorganic fertiliser, aside from in the production of some introduced vegetables. Similarly, there is minimal use of chemicals to control weeds, insect pests or diseases in Melanesian subsistence food production. There is a wide range of other agricultural techniques used to produce food, including: soil tillage; planting crops in mounds or beds; construction of drains, terraces, wooden soil retention barriers, fences and other enclosures to exclude or restrain domestic animals; growing some crops on stakes; planting certain food crops in specialised gardens, including household and mixed species gardens; and irrigation.2 Most rural villagers in Melanesia maintain multiple food crops, typically 30 to 60 species. As well, there are numerous cultivars of many food crops, including sweet potato, taro, yam, banana and aibika (Abelmoschus manihot). In locations where rainfall is distributed throughout the year, taro was the most important food in the past, although it has now been displaced by sweet potato, Xanthosoma taro and cassava in much of PNG, West Papua and Solomon Islands. Where there was a marked annual dry period, people usually planted a mix of species, including taro, yam and banana, at the start of the wetter period, to spread the supply of food throughout the year. The adoption of sweet potato, cassava, Xanthosoma taro and new hardy cultivars of banana has made food supply more reliable in many lowland and island locations. There has been a very long history of domestication of food crops and adoption of new species in Melanesia (Golson et  al. 2017). The rate of introduction and adoption of new crop species accelerated following global European exploration in the past 500 years, although the rate of introduction and adoption of new food crop species has slowed significantly in recent decades. The introduction and adoption of sweet potato in the New Guinea highlands about 300 years ago was the start of this trend. The process accelerated from about AD 1800 and particularly in the past 80 years. Food crops which have been adopted in many parts of Melanesia include sweet potato, Xanthosoma taro, cassava, maize, African yam (Disocorea rotundata), pumpkin and numerous vegetables and fruits. The period of adoption has varied considerably between locations. Cassava, for example, was widely adopted in New Caledonia in the early colonial period, but only in the past 20–​30 years in many other lowland locations in Melanesia. One could give numerous examples of different rates of adoption between locations, even where the crop’s introduction occurred at about the same time. 145

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The significance of some agricultural techniques has changed over time. Planting sweet potato in composted mounds in the western part of the PNG highlands was probably developed in Enga Province, perhaps about 200  years ago. From there, the technique spread to locations to the south and west (Bourke et  al., in press). The technique is still being adopted by villagers in some locations to the south of the composting zone as low as 500 m altitude.3 An example of a technique being discarded over time is the use of irrigation in PNG. It is likely that irrigation of taro was widespread in the highlands and highland fringe, at least in locations where rainfall was seasonally distributed. The use of irrigation has been recorded in several locations over the past 70 years, but it is now practised in one location only in PNG (Bourke 2012). Similarly, irrigation of taro has been discarded in New Caledonia, but the technique is still used in parts of Vanuatu. Before turning to individual countries in the region, I make one final observation on change in subsistence production techniques. Many of the changes in crop use and agricultural techniques that I have studied over the past 50 years have happened relatively abruptly. A novel crop or technique may be introduced to any area, but initially only adopted in a minor way by a limited number of people. Then, over a relatively short period, typically one to five years, it is widely adopted by most people and this proportion then changes only slowly again.4

PAPUA NEW GUINEA Data sources There is more accessible information on village agriculture in PNG than in the other political units (see especially Bourke, Allen and Salisbury 2001; Bourke and Harwood 2009; Hanson et  al. 2001). A  significant source of information is the Mapping Agricultural Systems of PNG (MASP) database and associated publications. In the early to mid-​1990s, a small team from the Australian National University (ANU) and their PNG colleagues described village agriculture and delineated 342 ‘agricultural systems’, based on type of fallow vegetation, fallow period, cropping period before fallow, most important food crops, soil fertility maintenance techniques and sources of cash income from agriculture. This research complemented comprehensive descriptions of the physical landscape and population by staff of the Water and Land Resources Division of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia and the PNG Department of Primary Industry (see Allen and Bourke 2009: Section 1.15). A monograph was produced for each of the then 19 provinces (there are now 22). There is an extensive literature on village agriculture in PNG and a brief review of literature relevant to each agricultural system is given in the MASP monographs. The PNG Agriculture Literature database, which was maintained by the Land Management Group at ANU, contains over 17,000 papers on PNG agriculture, land use and related topics.

Main sources of food The main sources of food in PNG are locally grown staples, such as sweet potato, taro, banana, yam, cassava and sago (Figure 8.1); and other crops, including sugar 146

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50

0

100

200

300

400

kilometres

Areas where the most important crop is: Sago Sweet potato Other crops (banana, cassava, chinese taro, coconut, taro, yam, mixed crops)

Figure 8.1  A simplified representation of the distribution of the most important staple food crops in Papua New Guinea. A more extensive, full-colour map is available at: www.routledge.com/9781138693715

— ​ R . M .   B o u r k e —​

cane, coconut, numerous vegetables and various fruits and nuts. Also eaten are imported rice; foods manufactured from imported wheat, such as bread, biscuits and noodles; meat and fish, both local and imported; and minor foods including refined sugar, animal fat, vegetable oil, dairy products and eggs. About three-​quarters of food energy is derived from the garden foods, while imported rice and wheat-​based foods contribute a further 14% (Figure 8.2; Table 8.1). The contribution of meat and fish to food energy is low, although meat and fish provide one-​quarter of food protein (Figure 8.2).

Food energy Wheat Sugar and products minor (5%) foods (4%)

Rice (imported) (9%) Fish (1%) Meat (5%)

Staple foods (68%)

Other garden foods (8%)

Food protein Sugar and Wheat minor foods products (1%) (8%)

Rice (imported) (9%)

Staple foods (42%)

Fish (12%)

Meat (13%) Other garden foods (15%)

Figure 8.2  Sources of energy and protein in Papua New Guinea by main food groups in 2006. Source. Bourke et al. (2009: Figure 2.1.2). 148

Table 8.1  Estimated food consumption in PNG by food type in 2016

Food

Estimated quantity tonnes/​year

kg/​person/​year

3,470,000

416

Banana

703,000

84

Yam (all species)

440,000

53

Cassava

438,000

52

Colocasia taro

377,000

45

Xanthosoma taro

364,000

44

Sago

134,000

16

30,000

4

Staple foods (PNG grown) Sweet potatoa

Irish potato Rice (PNG grown)

1,000

0.2

Other garden foods (PNG grown) Vegetables

683,000

81

Sugar cane

508,000

61

Coconut

164,000

20

Fruit

137,000

16

27,000

3

Rice

292,000

36

Flour

146,000

18

Pork (local)

40,000

5

Chicken (local)

35,000

4

Sheep meat (imported)

33,000

4

Bush meat (local)

28,000

3

Beef (local and imported)

10,000

1

Peanuts and other nuts Imported energy food

Meat

Tinned meat and offal (imported)

5,000

0.6

Fish and other seafood Fresh and smoked (local)

68,000

8

Industrial tuna (local)

20,000

2 (continued)

— ​ R . M .   B o u r k e —​ Table 8.1 (Cont.)

Food

Estimated quantity tonnes/​year

Other fish (imported)

kg/​person/​year

15,000

2

46,000

6

Animal fat (imported)

8,000

1

Fruit and vegetables (imported)

8,000

1

Vegetable oils (mostly imported)

8,000

1

Milk and other dairy products (imported)

7,000

1

Eggs (local)

4,000

0.5

Other food Sugar (local and imported)

a

Estimated sweet potato consumption excludes that fed to pigs in the highlands.

Source: Estimates based on those in Bourke et al. (2009: Table A2.1.1); updated for population growth between 2006 and 2016 (NSO 2002, 2013); no adjustment for minor changes in crop composition over past decade; estimates have been rounded to the nearest 1,000 tonnes.

Among the locally grown staple food crops, sweet potato is by far the most important, accounting for two-​thirds of locally grown staples. This is followed by taro, banana, cassava, yam and coconut (Table 8.2). Very minor quantities of locally grown rice are consumed in some locations and Irish potato is a minor food in some very high-​altitude places.

Import dependency It was estimated in 2006 that 83% of food energy was derived from foods produced in PNG, and 17% from imported items. Corresponding figures for food protein were 76% and 24% (Bourke et al. 2009: Figure 21.1). A study of consumption ten years earlier in 1996 gave similar results (Gibson 2001). In the earlier study, it was found that locally grown food provided 80% of food energy consumed in the nation. In 1996, rural villagers obtained 85% of their food energy from locally grown food and urban people obtained 50%. Hence the level of food import dependency is not high for most of the population. It is much higher for the one-​fifth of the population who are based in urban centres and in rural non-​village situations. There, people obtain about half their food energy needs from imported foods. The two most important imported food items are rice and wheat (Figure  8.2; Table 8.1). Rice imports were about 11 kg/​person/​year in the early 1960s and the quantity imported per person increased until the late 1970s. Over the past 40 years, consumption has been in the range of 25 to 35 kg/​person/​year. Consumption increased greatly in 1972 and in 1997–​98, following widespread food shortages caused by drought and frost. Aside from these exceptional events, the level of consumption is driven by the 150

— S u b s i s t e n c e f o o d p r o d u c t i o n i n M e l a n e s i a —​ Table 8.2  Estimated rural population growing staple food crops in Papua New Guinea in 2016

Crop

Most important food

An important food

Grown for food

Population

%

Population

%

Population

%

Sweet potato

4,456,008

66

1,014,066

15

6,628,051

98

Banana

617,197

9

2,147,075

32

6,456,613

96

Taro (Colocasia)

424,150

6

1,641,874

25

6,386,355

95

Greater yam (Dioscorea alata)

–​

–​

267,395

4

4,013,277

60

Cassava

68,555

1

824,224

12

3,709,645

55

Chinese taro (Xanthosoma)

206,498

3

1,247,653

19

3,590,677

54

Coconut

2,659