A continuation of warfare by sportive means: settling conflicts through football in the Eastern Highlands of colonial New Guinea

ABSTRACT

This ethnohistorical study of football games from the mid-1940s to the 1970s in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea explores the potentials and limits of using sport as a conflict-settlement measure. Football was introduced by Australian colonial officers as a peacebuilding exercise, and local communities quickly adapted it to settle conflicts that otherwise could have escalated to war. It was a new mechanism to redress perceived violations and injustices but culturally shaped by pre-existing experiences and understandings. The game, similar to warfare, only came to a conclusion when both sides were exhausted, and the scores considered even. Football thus served a useful purpose to settle conflicts peacefully and efficiently – within limits. Tensions and emotions ran high on the football pitch, resulting in instances where games led to the renewed outbreak of inter-village wars, especially when the underlying ethos of equivalence was breached, and one side dominated the match.

Acknowledgments

The fieldwork for this research was generously supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under Grant No. PBZH11-110322 and the Wenner-Gren Foundation under Grant No. 7352. I want to thank Jim Roscoe, Roger Lohman, Don Gardner, and Juerg Helbling for comments on earlier versions of this paper, which was prepared for and presented at the Annual Conference of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO), Honolulu, HI, USA in 2011. I also thank Doris Bacalzo for assisting me in my fieldwork. I owe the highest debt to the people of the Eastern Highlands with whom I have lived and worked between 2004 and 2007.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Bar-On, “Three Soccer Discourses”; and Hough, “Make Goals Not War.”

2. Beck, “‘War Minus the Shooting’.”

3. Lombardo, “On the Evolution of Sport.”

4. Curry, “Up’Ards, Down’Ards and Derbies,” 646.

5. Mills, “‘It All Ended in an Unsporting Way’.”

6. Anderson, War of the Dispossessed.

7. Hough, “Make Goals Not War.”

8. Elias, “Fussballsport im Prozess der Zivilisation”; and Giulianotti, “Civilizing Games,” 149–52.

9. Spaaij, “Olympic Rings of Peace?”

10. de Coubertin, “Olympic Games,” 53.

11. Adams, “A Game for Christmas?”

12. Giulianotti, “Sport, Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution,” 208–11.

13. Schulenkorf, “Sport Events and Ethnic Reconciliation.”

14. Sugden, “Critical Left-Realism.”

15. Dyck, “Football and Post-War Reintegration”; Krasniqi and Krasniqi, “Sport and Peacebuilding”; and Sobotová, Šafaříková, and González Martínez, “Sport as a Tool.”

16. Donnelly, “War Without Weapons.”

17. Rookwood and Palmer, “Invasion Games,” 190–93.

18. Berndt, “Political Structure,” 392–395.

19. Schwoerer, “Red Flag of Peace.”

20. Schwoerer, “Ending War”.

21. Schwoerer, “Mipela Makim Gavman”; and Schwoerer, “Ending War.”

22. Schulenkorf, “Sport Events and Ethnic Reconciliation.”

23. Young and Clark, Anthropologist in Papua, 29.

24. Ibid., 9.

25. Robbins, Auyana, 193–213.

26. Berndt, “Socio-Cultural Change,” 119.

27. But see Sipes, “War, Sports and Aggression,” for a critical discussion of what he calls ‘drive discharge model’, the idea that combative sport can act as a safety valve for aggressive tendencies.

28. Skinner, “Kainantu Patrol Report,” 10.

29. Anglin, “Okapa Patrol Report,” 7.

30. Read, The High Valley.

31. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 30–31.

32. Robbins, Cultural Anthropology, 26.

33. Schelly, “Interpretation in Law.”

34. Read,The High Valley, 190.

35. Interview with Ori Ilaku, 21 August 2004, Okasa.

36. Anglin, “Okapa Patrol Report,” 6–7.

37. Berndt, “Socio-Cultural Change,” 119.

38. Interview with Ori Ilaku, 21 August 2004, Okasa.

39. Berndt, “Political Structure,” 393; and Watson, “Tairora,” 238.

40. Glasse and Lindenbaum, “South Fore Politics,” 367; and Hayano, “Marriage, Alliance and Warfare,” 62–64.

41. Harrison, Mask of War; and Harrison, “Transformations of Identity,” 90.

42. Wilde, “From Racing to Rugby.”

43. Kildea and Leach, Trobriand Cricket.

44. Foster, “From Trobriand Cricket to Rugby Nation”; and Weiner, “Review of ‘Trobriand Cricket’.”

45. Read, “Leadership and Consensus,” 429.

46. Interview with No’e E’ito, 23 May 2006, Bibeori.

47. Haywood, “Kainantu Patrol Report,” 10.

48. Interview with Ofa Nana, 4 April 2006, Amaira.

49. Wiltshire, “Kainantu Patrol Report.”

50. Read, “Leadership and Consensus,” 427–30.

51. Robbins, Auyana, 186–87.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung [PBZH11-110322]; Wenner-Gren Foundation [7352].