Many medicines in one: Curing in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea

The actual means by which the clinical successes of non-Western medical treatments are achieved has been little explored. More specifically, analyses have focused almost exclusively on their psychotherapeutic value, with some attention to the pharmacodynamics of plant remedies. The central argument of this paper is that such a perspective has been generated more by the selective psychiatric orientation of cross-cultural field workers than by the diverse realities of the curing systems themselves. The paper describes medical care among the Nekematigi, Benabena-speaking horticulturalists of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Presented within an ecological framework, these materials demonstrate dependence upon a wide range of physical manipulations such as bleeding and flagellation with nettles, dietary alterations including increased protein consumption, social rearrangements, verbal spells, and plant medicinals of both specific and general application. The potential effects of each contribution to the medical regime are examined and a twofold conclusion is reached: (1) that it is precisely the mix of physical and psychological elements that accounts for Nekematigi success in treating the chronic infectious diseases which predominate in their environment, and (2) that this is likely to be true of many previously reported medical systems hitherto interpreted primarily in psychological, social, or symbolic terms.     

Genetic structure and heterozygosity in the kuru region,Eastern Highlands of New Guinea

Genetic structure of 20 of the 37 linguistic groups in the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea including the kuru region is analyzed using information on blood groups and serum protein polymorphisms. The average individual is heterozygous at 28.6% of loci and the average number of alleles per locus is 1.234. Coefficients of kinship for linguistic groups range from 0.005 for the sweet potato cultivating North Fore to 0.075 for the isolated Pawaians whose dietary staple is sago and who depend more on hunting and gathering. As one selects linguistic groups with smaller and smaller population size and increasing isolation, one finds that kinship coefficients rise as much as tenfold, but there is no concomitant loss of heterozygosity or trend toward fixation of alleles. Genetic relationships established by genetic distance trees and by principal components analysis are comparable and are consistent with other anthropological observations.     

Hunting for Conservation in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

The animals of the Papua New Guinea highlands are relatively defenceless. People not only value their meat, hunters sharing catch with kin, but also formally transact several creatures in the all-important socio-political exchanges that characterise their social life. The local sedentary population is dense, yet it has not hunted species to extinction regardless of their value and vulnerability to predation. This paper seeks an answer in the context of socio-political exchange values that inform social status. It uses data from a survey of animal skull trophies displayed in a sample of houses in the Was valley of the Southern Highlands Province to investigate connections between hunting and social standing - exchange status, kin group affiliation and age - with a view to elucidating tacit conservation behaviour which agencies concerned to protect biodiversity might profitably consider given current participatory rhetoric.     

Prefigured Features: A view from the New Guinea Highlands

Stimulated by a conference on Portraiture and the Problematics of Representation, which aimed to address portraiture as a set of cultural practices under the rubric of ‘any body-representation that stands for an individual’, in this paper I ask some questions raised by materials from Papua New Guinea. I begin with an investigation of the notion of individuation in relation to the heads which are taken in Asmat and Marind-Anim headhunting. I argue that if anyone's individuality is represented by a captured head it is that of the new owner, not his deceased victim. I then turn to Hagen feather plaques and suggest that they are best understood as assemblages of material resulting from mobilising relations, and hence not as portraits embodying notions of likeness.     

Forest and Demons in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

The Wola people of the Southern Highland Province of Papua New Guinea believe that two kinds of demon spirit inhabit the montane forests of their region. They call them saem and iybtit. When people are attacked by these frightening creatures, they are injured or fall sick, and may die; their relatives perform rituals to drive the demons away and promote their recovery. The attitude of the Wola towards demon spirits expresses something of their ambivalent and enigmatic attitudes towards the forest that covers large areas of their region. They are neither innate conservationists nor reckless destroyers of forest, but something more equivocal, an antipathetic combination of both.     

Mipela Makim Gavman: Unofficial Village Courts and Local Perceptions of Order in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT

In remote villages of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, where official village courts and other state institutions are absent, local leaders routinely hold unofficial village courts to maintain law and order. They base their decisions on local perceptions of order and justice, all the while emulating elements of state justice and constantly referring to the state as the source of their legitimacy. As these unofficial judicial institutions historically emerged as a convergence of local patterns of leadership with colonial concepts of order, they neither form a completely new nor completely autochthonous method of conflict settlement, but are an example of para-statehood, in which local leaders take on state functions in the absence of the state.     

Creating Difference: A Contemporary Affiliation Drama in the Highlands of New Guinea

Issues of affiliation to groups, important in Papua New Guinea Highlands ethnography during the 1960s and 1970s, have since been overshadowed by other analytical concerns. But the issues have never gone away and they resound clearly in the life of people there, who are dealing with situations of rapid change that make the crafting of affiliations problematic and strategically important. We examine a case in which an affiliation event was staged in order to mediate between inter-ethnic claims on a child and to refurbish practices of securing these claims in the absence of brideprice payments or virilocal residence. The analysis points out how transactions that the actors engaged in fell ambiguously between the categories of gift and commodity, and how ties of nurturance and food-giving continue to play a crucial part in representations and negotiations. At the core of the event was the extent to which the parties involved shared in the understandings of the event at hand. This underlines the fact that transactions and meanings are always inextricably liinked together. Strategies ar made meaningfully and meanings are made strategically.     

Contested Knowledge, Contingent Classification: Animals in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

New Guinea highlanders appear to conceive of animal taxonomy in a way that is simultaneously familiar to a scientist, yet different. This is often attributed to interaction between natural ecology, which constrains content, and cultural context, which conditions the structure of any taxonomy. The evidence presented here confirms this view, although the considerable, and initially disconcerting, disagreements between persons over taxonomic issues raise the question: To what extent is Wola classification of natural phenomena analogous to Western hierarchical classification? The stateless political environment conditions the Wola constantly to challenge hierarchy, obfuscate boundaries, and think in terms of "fuzzy sets," confounding the assumption of agreed classes and threatening intellectual anarchy. However, their taxonomic regime offsets this, facilitating discourse in the absence of authorities to adjudicate in disputes. No formal classificatory scheme devised so far can adequately represent such an oral tradition's ever negotiated ordering of animals; whatever framework we adopt will somewhat distort it. [Keywords: Papua New Guinea, ethnozoology, taxonomy]     

A Place against Time: Land and Environment in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

Place against Time: Land and Environment in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Paul Sillitoe. London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996. 438 pp.     

Fluid Ontologies: Myth, Ritual and Philosophy in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

Fluid Ontologies: Myth, Ritual and Philosophy in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. L. R. Goldman and C. Ballard. eds. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1998. 172 pp.     

A Social Anthropologist's View of Papua New Guinea Highlands Prehistory

The Highlands of Papua New Guinea have usually been regarded as relatively homogeneous, socially, culturally, and ecologically. In this article I begin with the view that the ethnography of the Eastern and Western Highlands shows great diversity. I argue that this diversity is also evident in the prehistory of the Highlands and that the Eastern and Western Highlands have followed markedly different paths in the development of agriculture and pig husbandry and in their rates of change and transformation. Intensive agriculture and linked pig exchange are very old in the Western Highlands, nascent in the Eastern Highlands. This difference is clear in the ethnographic present, but I argue that it is upon the very different prehistories of the Eastern and Western Highlands that a synchronic comparison of Highlands societies should be mounted.