REMEMBERING
PAPUA NEW GUINEA

SPOKEN SPEECH and the INVENTION OF WRITING

Sixty-three color photographs, mostly from 1964-65, taken in the Simbai and Jimi Valleys of the "Highland Fringe" of Paupa New Guinea. The subjects are Maring speakers of the Bomagai-Angoiang people. Each picture is accompanied by a page of comments by the author / photographer.

During the year that Dr. Clarke spent in this region the people there were only six years away from their initial contact with Europeans. The people shown here were quite remote from the nearest patrol station. While most of the families then had at least one steel ax they had few other metal tools or implements.

There had been so little contact with the "outside" world that no one in the immediate area yet spoke Melesian pigin.

An axe is an idea

Wtit displays his steel axe

A woman in her garden with her baby

'A tree has roots, but men do not; we must plant or we would die.'

Nature, culture and cassowaries

You are what you don't eat

It depends what you mean by 'security'

Pigs

Lands rich in thought

Inventing underdevelopment

Take any sport

Tell the truth but tell it slant

Mere did we begin to go wrong?

Walking on the moon and managing tbe garden

Orchards

Engaging with the world

Is she to be so greatly feared?

Now

'I’ll tell them how good it tasted'

Traces on the Rhodian Shore

Temporary madness as theatre

Things aren't simple anymore

It's time for a Papua New Guinean poet to speak

Cherishing beauty

Agriculture has more than one story

How to grow more food on the same amount of land

Kunda, or magical spells

Whose biodiversity is it anyway?

Being there

Epilogue

Now

... "Now" is a cross-roads where all maps prove blank, And no one knows which way the cat will jump.'
- A. D. Hope,Parabola

In his book From 'Primitive' to 'Postcolonial' in Melanesia and Anthropology, Bruce Knauft wrote:

Melanesia has often been perceived 'particularly by those who are not specialists' as a 'stone age land' or a 'land that time forgot.' - - - In contrast to such images, Melanesia today is confronted with the challenges and tensions experienced by many if not most third world areas: ethnically diverse peoples aggregated uneasily into postcolonial nations or neocolonial provinces; expropriation of resources by multinational corporations; the promises and many problems of development projects; difficulties associated with urbanization, class stratification, corruption, and unemployment; and the threat of social disruption.

As I write, Papua New Guinea is carrying out another of its turbulent national elections marked by violence, delays, theft of ballot boxes, perverted voter rolls and a proliferation of political parties (some 43). Corruption pervades, at times to the highest levels of government. Forests are violated through manipulative arrangements worked out among self- appointed local spokes-people, foreign logging companies, politicians and government officials. Raskols are seen to prevail over forces of law and order. Marijuana is a major crop with its profits tied up with an abundance of high- powered weapons.

Clinics, hospitals and schools lack supplies and staff. Financial returns from tuna fishing by foreign ships in PNG waters are too small, and some inshore marine resources - notably beches-de-mer - are badly over-exploited. Inequality of women persists despite the national goal of 'Equal participation by women citizens in all political, economic, social and religious activities'. And, yes, class stratification, rapidly growing towns, ‘militant landowners', young people searching for jobs, social turmoil ...

These challenges facing the state and its people are much analyzed and lamented. Looking back at the orderly, peaceful (and colonial) era I once knew, I lament them, too. But, what is it we lament? Certainly the distress that individual Papua New Guineans may suffer but also, at least in part, that post-colonial Papua New Guinea is not moving easily toward becoming a well-organized, equitable, modern liberal democracy - a chimerical goal we have set for ourselves and for all the world's people.

Looking through an anthropological lens, we can say, for instance, that a very limited scale of cooperation has always been characteristic of Melanesian society, a characteristic that 'Papua New Guineans nowadays refer to with the one word "politics"'. Or, the evolution of raskolism (the operations of criminal gangs) can be interpreted as the evolution of an urban gift economy fed by theft and burglary involving social relations which are typical of pre-capitalist Melanesian societies in general.

'WIVES DO ALL THE HARD WORK,
THEY ARE THE HANDS OF MEN'

To Bomagai-Angoiang Wives

As I look at the photograph of you three wives setting off in the morning like commuters, I remember how often I came upon you working in your gardens. Before you married, you had a fairly easy life. You helped your mothers and other older women with their gardening and learned gardening techniques but were not responsible for making the garden fruitful. Then, after you went as a wife to the land of your husband's clan and some brideprice had been paid, heavier burdens fell upon you.

It is not wholly true that you wives do all the hard work. The men contribute to gardening intermittently and work hard for short periods clearing forest for gardens and building pig-proof fences. What you women do is the steady work of maintaining the life of the community day by day. The photograph shows you walking lightly with empty string bags on your journey to work. Before you return you will spend several hours planting, weeding and harvesting so that you can continue to provide a daily supply of vegetable food for your family and the domestic pigs. And, on your return, the food-filled string bags hanging down your backs may weigh more than 30 kilograms and must be toted on rough and slippery tracks up and down steep slopes.

Once back at your hamlets, it will be time to start preparing the food for your families and to feed your husbands' pigs, which come back from their daytime foraging to their pens in your houses expecting an evening meal.

Although I heard husbands and wives accuse each other of laziness, I seldom sensed that any of you women felt resentment over the distribution of work. Nor did I sense among any Maring groups the extremes of dark sexual politics or the ambiguous mix of fear and dependence with which New Guinean men are widely reported to view women and their dangerous sexuality.

Perhaps I was naive or else so focused on agricultural and ecological matters that I gave slight thought to more social matters. Certainly, the sexes sleep apart in separate houses, and women must not enter men's houses - a common situation in New Guinea.

Because you are not tied by blood to your husbands' clans, men may be uncertain of your loyalties and see you as dangerous, unreliable and liable to practice witchcraft. Nonetheless, I saw expressions of gentle affection among several couples. It was also clear to me that you wives were seen as a resource: you bear children, you maintain gardens and care for the pigs. You also serve as a valuable link between your husband's clan and your kins people by blood - although, as Highland people often say, 'We marry our enemies'. That is, given the shifting political alliances traditional in Papua New Guinea, it happens easily that a wife finds herself attached to a clan at war with her blood kin.

Remembering Papua New Guinea:An Eccentric Ethnography
takes the reader back to how people lived in one small community in the highland fringe of Papua New Guinea almost forty years ago. Based on photographs he took while living in the Simbai Valley in the mid-1960s only a few years after Australian administrative control was established, William C. Clarke recalls a world now largely lost amid the many turbulent changes Papua New Guinea has undergone as it passed from a colony to an independent country beset by predicaments of many kinds. His tone is sometimes poetic, evocative of how the people looked, how they lived from day to day, the appearance of their gardens and landscape, their tiny hamlets grown with useful and decorative plants and filled with cooking smells from the earth ovens.

Without romanticizing the people’s past as a paradise, Clarke also contemplates, with some misgivings transformations such small communities face as they are encompassed by today’s wider world. Moving from his memories of the place and its people as they then were to considerations of today’s world provides him with a viewpoint that allows an evaluation of both worlds.

This book is available in North America from the Univ. of Hawaii Press. It is in the Hawai'i and Pacific 2005 catalog. The price is $40.00.

http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/