The Death of the Big Men: Depreciation of Elites in New Guinea

Abstract

Recently, Tolai people of Papua New Guinea have adopted the term ‘Big Shot’ to describe an emerging post-colonial political elite. The emergence of the term is a negative moral evaluation of new social possibilities that have arisen as a consequence of the Big Shots’ privileged position within a global political economy. Grassroots Tolai pass judgment on the Big Shots’ through rhetorical contrast with idealised Big Men of the past, in a particular local version of a global trend for the emergence of new words to illustrate changing perceptions of local elites. As such the ‘Big Shot’ acts as an example of a global process in which key lexical categories that contest, trace and shape how global historical change is experienced are constituted through linguistic categories.

Keywords:

• Elites
• social change
• morality
• language
• Papua New Guinea

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank members of the FRAO seminar group at L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Pacific Interest Group at the University of Manchester, and the Staff Seminar at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aarhus for their comments on earlier presentations of the material in this paper. I would like to acknowledge assistance from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC Research Studentship R42200134324), the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Grant Number 6860), and the Royal Anthropological Institute for a Sutasoma Award towards the writing up of field materials.

I would also like to thank Hannah Brown, Tom Yarrow and the editors and anonymous reviewers at Ethnos for their helpful comments.

Notes

See also Strathern (1988:81).

Most previous ethnographic accounts refer to tabu as ‘tambu’. However Simet (1991:xx), a Tolai anthropologist from Matupit village, insists that the correct term is ‘tabu’ and this is how I always heard the term pronounced at Matupit and Sikut.

Literally ‘big man’ in the Tolai vernacular language Kuanua, although often shortened to ‘ngala’ in everyday talk (literally ‘big’).

See Errington and Gewertz (1995:49–76) for another discussion of the relationship between tabu and state currency circulation in East New Britain.

Kastom is the widely used Tok Pisin term for ‘custom’, which refers to a large number of practices, in particular the kind of large scale ceremonial practices described here. See Martin (2006, 2008c).

See Martin (2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c) for different examples of this trend.

This quip is itself a reference back to a previous celebrated occasion when a political opponent in the PNG parliament referred to Kaputin as the ‘Honourable Member for Cairns’; a reference to Kaputin's alleged preference for spending his time in the North Australian tourist resort rather than in parliament or in his constituency.

JK is the commonly used nick-name for Sir John Kaputin around the Rabaul area.

This person also appears under this pseudonym in Errington and Gewertz (1995:51) and Martin (2008b).

See Robbins (2004:198–200) for a discussion of ambiguous responses to the Big Men's anger amongst Urapmin of PNG's West Sepik Province, and Epstein (1999:155–7) for a similar discussion at Matupit.

See Hogbin (1951:151–63) for an example from Busama village in New Guinea's Huon Gulf, and Bashkow (2006:38) for an example from Orakaiva. See Epstein 1969:187) for an example from Matupit.

See also Thompson (1991:23–4).