Who Sees What in Pororan Marriage Exchange?

Abstract

Over time, anthropologists working in Melanesia have provided increasingly nuanced analyses of exchange and, specifically, of the transformation of ‘objects’ and ‘images’ that people perceive in the course of particular revelatory sequences. One aspect of the complexity of exchange in Melanesia appears to have become sidelined, however, by a predominant interest in the temporal transformation of objects and images. This is the multiplicity of objects, images and sequences of their transformation that different participants perceive in the same sequence of events. The primary aim of this paper is to demonstrate this aspect of exchange ethnographically, and to discuss some of its implications on Pororan Island in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea.

Keywords:

• Exchange
• Melanesia
• Perception
• Kastom

Notes

[1] I thank the participants of the London “Melanesia Research Seminar” for many valuable comments, as well as three anonymous reviewers for many helpful suggestions.

[2] The work of Strathern and Wagner has often been considered as forming the core of a single theoretical approach. This is justified in many respects. With regard to our understanding of Melanesian strategies of perception, however, Strathern's (1990) attention to objects and Wagner's (1986a, 1986b) focus on images as objects of a particular kind have yielded different insights (see also Schneider, forthcoming).

[3] See especially Blackwood (1935); Rimoldi and Rimoldi (1992); Sagir (2003); and Sarei (1974).

[4] Differences possibly existed with regard to marriage rules. The question of exogamous or endogamous matrilineal groups at the most inclusive level remains unresolved in Buka and in the literature, and some of my Buka informants attributed this to local differences.

[5] Because it is not necessary to my argument, I ignore here another connection between looks and heaviness. When people look at things, especially valuable things such as a bride at sinahan, they may feel envy and jealousy, and they may be moved to extreme actions, including the use of sorcery and of love magic. Both have physical immobility or ‘heaviness’ as their symptom.

[6] On Buka Island, but not on Pororan, other and manifold connections between women and bananas were made explicit.

[7] See also Malinowski (1929, 207) and Weiner (1976, 125) on the case of Trobriand fathers, which has become prominent in anthropological debates about kinship (see esp. Leach 1961).

[8] In addition, there are differences between the role and power of the tsunon and hahini on the Buka mainland and on Pororan that are bound up with different degrees of interest in, and knowledge of, kastom.

[9] I would like to thank Melissa Demian for pointing this out.