Places and Spirits in a Sepik Society

Abstract

Over the past decade, under the influence of the Catholic charismatic movement, the Ambonwari people of East Sepik Province in Papua New Guinea have radically altered their relationships with bush spirits and, simultaneously, their attitudes towards their landscape. During the current process of abolishing prohibitions pertaining to taboo places, the Ambonwari have also abolished a set of cultural activities that were characteristic of ancestral placemaking and have weakened the effect these places and their spirits have on the Ambonwari's contemporary life world. By abandoning their relationships with bush spirits and embracing God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit and by moving their eyes, thoughts and feelings from earth to heaven, the Ambonwari want to transcend their familiar landscape and the life world that it sustains.

Keywords:

• Bush Spirits
• Charismatic Movement
• Landscape
• Papua New Guinea, Taboo Places

Acknowledgements

This joint research in Ambonwari village, where Telban has conducted extensive studies since 1990, took place in 2005, 2007 and 2008 over a period of 5 months in total. The authors express their gratitude to the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, for their affiliation, which enabled them to prepare for and reflect upon their fieldwork and to draft papers while still in Canberra. The authors are also grateful to the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which not only provided the most necessary equipment, but also enabled DV to edit her ethnographic audiovisual material and complete her Mag. Phil. thesis at the University of Vienna (Vávrová 2008). This article forms a part of a collaborative work for which DV obtained a grant for foreign researchers from the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Finally, the authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

1. A small number of anthropologists (e.g. Van Heekeren (2004) in her existential analysis of Melanesian myth and Weiner (1991, 2001) in his scrutiny of Foi songs and their role in the recreation of Foi landscape) have found Heideggerian notions useful to think with in their search for ontological and phenomenological modes of existence in Papua New Guinea. Keith Basso, following Heidegger, writes that:

the concept of dwelling assigns importance to the forms of consciousness with which individuals perceive and comprehend geographical space. More precisely, dwelling is said to consist in the multiple “lived relationships” that people maintain with places, for it is solely by virtue of these relationships that space acquires meaning. (Basso 1996, p. 106)

2. In Karawari vernacular, a phoneme [i] is heard as [a] in ‘about’ or as vowel in ‘sir’.

3. There are many examples of New Guineans seeking a hidden knowledge or invisible truth that lies behind the apparent success of the Whites. Frederick Errington (1974, p. 261), for example, was asked by the Karavar people of the Duke of York Islands to reveal the business secrets that were, in their view, somehow hidden from them. The ‘cargo’ movement called Kaun received its name after Karavarans went to Rabaul to open their savings account for their trade store. Errington writes:

They were asked what name they wanted on their bankbook—that is, they were asked what kind of an enterprise they were engaged in … the name Kaun arose as a corruption of the word ‘account’ … [The name] was appealing because it had then, as it has now, the same powerful associations as other English words connected with business. (1974, p. 259)

Michael Young writes about the millenarian ambience in 1976:

Goodenough Islanders were as bewildered by the disappearance of the wealthy whites as they had been by their first appearance. What was there to show for their coming and their going? Why were people still impoverished and wealth as elusive as ever? What was the secret of Goodenough's name? … [I]t was a name that signified to many people of the Massim a place of hidden wealth good enough for any who might learn the secret of retrieving it. (1983, p. 252, all italics, except good enough, are added)

4. In 1999, Eric Hirsch was asked by the Fuyage people in the upper Udabe Valley whether he had seen their dead walking around London. ‘The implication of the question was that spirits of the dead become white people and eventually travel where white people reside’ (2008, p. 148). The Fuyage were not sure where their dead went: to the tops of surrounding mountains, to heaven, or to the land of white people. What the people were seeking was a kind of a hidden truth (Hirsch 2008).

5. Such a practice can easily escalate into a kind of movement known under the unfortunate name of ‘cargo cult’ (for a critique of this concept, see the chapters by Lamont Lindstrom, Elfriede Hermann and Martha Kaplan in Jebens 2004). In the present article, we want to avoid any comparison with such an overenthusiastic collective enterprise, which has not yet taken place in Ambonwari. Regarding the place names in particular, Andrew Lattas’ discussion of the relationship between power, knowledge of secret names and the right to bestow them upon objects of power is also important for understanding the current situation in Ambonwari: ‘New names reposition people in relationship to each other, so we should not be surprised to find cargo cults using renaming as a form of empowerment, as a way of repositioning race relations’ (Lattas 1998, p. 10).

6. Although presenting the importance of mountains—seeing them as objectifying and articulating the hidden aspect of existence—and after explaining the primacy of women in the activity of mapping the new sense of space and creating the new geographies in the Kaliai ‘cargo cults’, Andrew Lattas aptly argues that ‘spatial images of alterity and outsideness become ways of conceiving alternative worlds full of hidden unknown powers belonging to Europeans’ (1998, p. 122).

7. Ambonwari have simultaneously abandoned the practices of three ‘mothers of the village’, whose impeccable sitting—pressing down the spirit of the village—has until recently held together the people, lineages and clans, as well as secured the stability of the place (see Telban 1998a; Vávrová 2008, pp. 49–59). Other ‘traditional’ practices related to spirits, such as initiation rituals, post-mortem divination, healing practices etc., started being questioned 50 years ago and were slowly abandoned at the beginning of the new millennium under the influence of the Catholic charismatic movement (Telban 2008, 2009). At the same time, Ambonwari men's houses, the carved spirit crocodiles and other previously secret and sacred spirit things were left to decay.

8. Many Melanesian societies welcomed the demise of spatial taboos that limited movement, although the spirits of the land continue to exist and harm people. For example, see Robbins (2004, p. 135, pp. 209–11, 2007, 2009, pp. 113–19) for the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, Toren (1995, 2004, p. 225, 2006) for Fiji and McDougall (2009, p. 10) and Guo (2009) for the Solomon Islands. Debra McDougall writes:

In Melanesian contexts, where relationships to place are embedded in kin relationships, Christianity opens the possibility of dramatically new relationships to place. Adherents of millenarian, fundamentalist forms of Christianity seem particularly eager to embrace visions of a radical transformation of the land. (2009, p. 14)

9. Over the past 15 years a large number of Ambonwari people (mostly men) moved to towns seeking work and education (Vávrová 2008, pp. 123–31). In the town of Lae, they formed a large settlement called Ambonwari-2. When some of these young men returned to the village, they died suddenly of either snakebite or of falciparum malaria. Their deaths were attributed to the ‘spirit of the place’ and to those ‘traditionalists’ who, as the mourning relatives complained, re-evoked his power and allowed him to perform his malevolent sorcery. The spirit crocodile was apparently cross with the villagers because they did not follow the customary ways and the men did not think of organising initiation rituals. When we spent a few days with the Ambonwari people in Lae in 2008, they said that these deaths alerted them and they are now scared to return to the village.

10. However, this does not mean that tensions and fights between the two villages have stopped. In 2007, the Imanmeri men burnt some Ambonwari gardens and cut down several hundred trees and palms, as well as crops. The dispute escalated in 2008 when two Ambonwari men were attacked by the Imanmeri and seriously wounded. Consequently, the hand of one of the injured men had to be removed surgically in the Boram Hospital in Wewak. Later that year, two Ambonwari men ambushed one of the Imanmeri attackers and killed him. These men are now in Wewak jail awaiting trial.

11. Strathern and Stewart have written for the Duna that their ‘landscape was seen as alive with cosmological and spiritual significance’ (2008, p. xxviii). The Duna's female spirit figure, the Payame Ima, inhabiting the great Strickland River, was central for their understanding of their environment. After new Christian religious practices and mining companies started to dominate the region, the landscape became Christianised, although ‘the basic attitude to the environment has not been obliterated, and new narratives have emerged linking old and new issues together’ (Strathern & Stewart 2008).

12. Godelier argues that separation between the political and religious spheres ‘is a recent development, and remains altogether unthinkable or unacceptable in many societies’ (2009, p. 146). The fusion of political and religious domains continues to be the rule in Ambonwari and is nowadays exemplified by the political aspirations of the young Catholic charismatic movement leaders. However, myths of origin continue to provide the Ambonwari with a cosmic explanation and justification of their social and spatial order.