A.H. Carrier - Structure and Process in a Melanesian Society

OTHER VOLUMES IN PREPARATION

Achsah H. Carrier

James G. Carrier

Structure and Process in a Melanesian Society

Ponams progress in the Twentieth Century

COPYRIGHT 1991 BY

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Preface

W e began fieldwork on Ponam Island, in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, in 1978, our expectations shaped by recent research on the Highlands, where the clear defeat of old-fashioned structural-functionalism had been explained in all that we had read. Societies were shaped by politics and contingency, not by logic and structure. They were led by big men who created kinship and the appearance of social order through the management of exchange and the manipulation of their followers and dependents. And what we had read about Manus led us to expect the same things there.

Margaret Meads monograph on kinship in the south coast village of Pere, published in 1934, was an attack on structural lineage theory, written even before that theory was fully formed. She argued that Pere had a system of kinship and ranking of the sort that could provide the structure for political and other forms of organisation, but that Pere society did not actually operate in terms of this system. Instead, it was a big man system (though she called them entrepreneurs or financiers) in which the wealthy and powerful constructed kinship and social relations through exchange in order to serve economic ends.

It was obvious from our own experiences and from Theodore Schwartzs 1963 survey, Systems of areal integration, that all the different groups in Manus were part of a single social and cultural system, as one would expect of this isolated region with its population of only 25,000 (and that twice the size it had been at the time of Meads research). So Ponam should have fit Meads argument and the picture that was emerging from the Highlands.

But Ponam seemed quite unlike the Pere that Mead had described.

We would sit in our thatched house under the palm trees, lulled by the constant roar of the breakers on the reef and the romance of fieldwork on a true tropical island, and read and reread Meads work looking for clues to understanding as well as enjoying this alien paradise. And such is the romance of fieldwork that we, like many others before us we are sure, became convinced that our predecessor had got it wrong.

Ponam had no financiers, no entrepreneurs manipulating and managing dependents. They did not even seem to have any big men. People asserted that all positions of clan leadership were hereditary, and in fact just about all the recognised leaders seemed to be eldest sons of eldest sons; not that they ever seemed to lead anything. The elective offices of modern government were widely dispersed, not concentrated in the hands of the few. In 1979 the 31 possible hereditary and elective offices on the island were held by 28 of the islands 64 adult men, and the elected officers changed with every election. People claimed that all relations of exchange were conducted in terms of kinship, not patronage and dependence, and as we began to investigate exchange this seemed indeed to be true. People described their lives and relationships in terms of the structured relations of clans and lineages, the links between descendants of brothers and the descendants of sisters, the logic of the rules of inheritance and the ritual obligations between various categories of kin.

The word that came up again and again as people described how things were done was right, as in She has the right to do this, or Tie doesnt have the right to be here now. Power, another popular Pidgin word that appears in so many anthropological accounts of the region, especially those from the north coast of the New Guinea mainland, was almost never used. And when it was, it was used only to refer to the ritual power that some categories of kin had over others, not to the political or supernatural power that some men and women might have over others. We toyed with the idea of writing something called African models in the New Guinea islands. (Sadly, we missed our chance. Roger Keesing wrote African models in the Malaita highlands.)

This contrast between the apparently highly logical, tightly structured, descent-and lineage-based system that we saw, and the more fluid political system of evanescent process that we had expected, eventually came to be an important focus of our study of Ponam Island. But having lived with Ponam for many years now, and no longer feeling the romantic impulse to do combat with Margaret Mead, we do not try to choose between these two perspectives, or to argue that one provides a better description of Ponam than the other. Instead, we look at Ponam from both of these perspectives, look at it as a structure and a process, a reflection of logic and contingency.