Kamula Accounts of Rambo and The State of Papua New Guinea

Oceania Publications, University of Sydney
Kamula Accounts of Rambo and the State of Papua New Guinea

Author(s): Michael Wood
Source: Oceania, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Mar., 2006), pp. 61-82
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Oceania Publications, University of Sydney
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Kamula Accounts of Rambo and the State of
Papua New Guinea
Michael Wood
James Cook University
ABSTRACT
This paper contributes to the ethnography of masculinity and the media in PNG. I outline
some changes in Kamula men's understandings of masculinity as they are registered in
accounts of conflicts between state security services, the Kamula, Rambo and other actors.
Outlining this history shows how Kamula men are increasingly entangled in forms of state
power and violence that are partially defined by new myths of masculinity expressed in
Melanesian readings of Rambo. The paper describes how some of the power effects linked
to Rambo are transferred to Kamula men. I argue that in their accounts of Rambo the
Kamula are also exploring different models of sovereignty and state power.
Papua New Guinea was likened to Hollywood yesterday by national Dress Commit
chairwoman Kila Amini. Mrs. Amini said Papua New Guinea did not have any identity a
had been acting like Hollywood movie actors
(Post-Courier, 8 October 2003).
INTRODUCTION
Critical evaluations of the figure of Rambo, metropolitan and non-metropolitan alike, as

his crucial place in the changing understanding of violence and masculinity (Jeffords 19
Jourdan 1995, Pfeil 1995, Richards 1996, Dyer 1997). In this essay I extend the scope o
that critical understanding by considering his influence among Kamula men, living in
Western Province of Papua New Guinea (PNG).1 It complements work by Wardlow (199
and Kulick and Willson (1994) on the relationship between televisual media and gender
PNG. These works dealt with gender issues as they relate to the viewing and interpretat
of specific videos. By contrast in this paper I analyse Kamula talk of Rambo where ther
virtually no direct reference to the content of any of his films and videos.
In the mid to late 90s Rambo videos were not commonly watched by the Kamula at
Wawoi Falls largely because video watching was limited by the intermittent suppl
screens, video players and generators by teachers. A number of viewings of Rambo vi
took place during visits to geophysical survey teams working in the region and others t
place in nearby logging camps. Despite such limited opportunities for viewing some yo
men living at Wawoi Falls could narrate the content of Rambo's videos in consider
detail. However this knowledge was somewhat restricted and Rambo was never a focus
conversation in the same way as talk of recent hunting trips or 'landowner' politics. I h
recorded only two Rambo stories (outlined below) that dealt with Rambo in reference
PNG, the Bougainville war and global political issues. Other Kamula talk about Ram
involved more fragmentary passing comments that in my experience were often concer
to assert and assess his hidden and marginal status.2 It is also true that over the years Ra
has become old and I was once told that the original John Rambo had died and b
Oceania 76, 2006 61
Rambo in Papua New Guinea
replaced by his son also called John. And certainly by 2005 Rambo was no longer quite as
interesting as he was to Kamula men in the late 90s when I first learnt of his links to gun
running and drug dealing (Wood 1998). He was never the only person thought to be
involved in this trade and now the Western Province is full of other dangerous characters -
'Malaysian terrorists' are said to have moved in to the province with Osama bin Laden
recently visiting the Wawoi Guavi concession while trying to escape the Americans.
As I explain below men's interest in acquiring guns was in part a response to this
changing geography of danger. I emphasize how this interest was linked to accounts of the
imminent violent end of the world (in 2000) and by dangers highlighted in Kamula
accounts of the state of PNG during the time of the Bougainville war. It was this political
context, as defined by the Kamula that has enabled accounts of secret transactions concern-
ing drugs, guns, Rambo (and other figures) to become one of the key narrative structures of
contemporary male life.3 These stories of men's empowerment now rival and supplement
more highly institutionalised Christian narratives about moral men and the future. They do
so by incorporating the aspirations and experiences of men who have chosen to involve
themselves in the politics of logging, drug dealing and other non-Christian sources of
power. Here I highlight source of power associated with the state and various kinds of sov-
ereigns that are largely independent of, and sometimes violently opposed to, God.
So in this paper I seek to incorporate into an analysis of the relationship between mas-
culinity and global media Clark's (1997) call for anthropologists to develop an ethnography
of the PNG state. My interest is in showing how, for some Kamula, by the late 1990s when
most of the data was collected, Rambo had became a source of masculine power and
authority. In Kamula men's accounts he emerged as a figure they could identify with and
thereby explore new definitions of masculinity.4 1 argue Rambo came to stand for forms of
masculine and sovereign power that he could transfer into the social body of Kamula men.5
These various processes involved Rambo appearing as a transactable or partible person, as
someone embodying relational capacities.6 By outlining various transactions between
Rambo and the Kamula, Kamula men were able to explore how they might embody new
forms of power. Rambo came to reflect how Kamula men imagined they might participate
in the politics of the PNG nation state. By looking at such issues I describe some of the
ways the Kamula men have produced self-definitions that are mediated by discourses about
Rambo, the state and sovereign power. I show how Rambo contested the power of certain
kinds of sovereigns seen to be illegitimate while supplementing the power of PNG's found-
ing ruler Michael Somare.
The Kamula Rambo is just one of a number of sites where Rambo has circulated in
PNG. In this paper I provide only glimpses of the history of Rambo's involvement in PNG
emphasizing his key role as a site of alterity to the state. Reviewing data on the
Bougainville conflict, I describe how Rambo entered into a mirroring dynamic whereby
some state agents responding to the perceived power of Rambo reproduced that power as
they took steps to appropriate and even eradicate it (Aretxaga 2003: 402). I then outline
Kamula accounts of Rambo's role as a source of power external to the state and contextu-
alise this alien Rambo in accounts of the relations between the Kamula, the police and
army. In the process, I outline some elements of Kamula understandings of nation-state dis-
integration in the 1990s.
The paper then describes how some Kamula men responded to this situation by seeking
to enhance their power by accessing some of Rambo's power. These accounts present
Rambo as having a capacity for the transactable proliferation of himself and his power via
his images (posters, videos, t-shirts etc) and gifts of guns and uniforms. Rambo exemplified
desirable masculine properties (strength, knowledge of weapons, sex appeal) in enhanced
form and could possibly transfer these enhancing properties to men. In this context he
helped define new forms of masculine agency, new political projects (including militarised
violence) and a more relational form of sovereign power. This Rambo contained the
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promise that Kamula men, once transformed from hunters into soldiers, could violently if
need be, redefine the power of the state, and more global forces, that threatened to dominate
the Kamula. I conclude the essay by also showing how Rambo was rumoured by some
Kamula to also exhibit sovereign effects as a stranger (Agamben 1998, Fernadez- Annesto
2000, Henley 2004, Simmel 1950, Trouillot 2002:224) with partible properties. Through
such capacities Rambo helped create peace in PNG by resolving the Bougainville dispute.7
By reviewing these various accounts of Rambo I outline how some Kamula men's under-
standings of their masculinity was complexly entangled in a new political economy that was
partially defined by Rambo and his powers.
RAMBO IN PNG
The Kamula's attempts to incorporate certain powers associated with Rambo were part of
more widely distributed series of exchanges and transformations involving Rambo in PNG.
The most important of these related to the Bougainville war where Rambo emerged as an
important figure in relations between the state defence forces and the insurgents (Filer
1990:74). Initial BRA demands were "signed by groups with names such as "Rambo 1" and
"Rambo 2"'(Spriggs 1992:174). By January 1989, rebel bands were:
called "Rambos" because they all acted in "Rambo" style against the security
forces, and were inspired by movies of the same name. All their activities were
commanded and controlled by the local "Rambo" leader. . . A typical Rambo mem-
ber had a red headband identifying him as a member of the BRA, a shotgun, a .22,
or a homemade gun, a pair of sports trousers or jeans and a pair of BCL
(Bougainville Copper Limited) safety boots with socks (Liria 1993: 75, 78).
What the state confronted was not just its citizens or Bougainvilleans, but people who
deliberately took on the appearance of Rambo.8 'Rambo' in Bougainville indexed those
forces that would subvert the PNG nation- state. Such a role was evident in Rambo movies,
especially in First Blood (1982), where Rambo was - like the Bougainvillean Rambo rebels
- positioned as outside, and opposed to, the state and its leadership (Pfeil 1995, Richards
1996). Rambo actively repudiated any state's jurisdiction and control of its territory. This
oppositional stance to his own, and other, nation-states made him an appropriate hero of
anti-state thinking evident in Bougainville and other places in PNG.
There is some evidence that police, in certain contexts, defined themselves as con-
fronting 'Rambo' in a manner similar to the security forces in Bougainville. They discov-
ered and produced a kind of Rambo that signified what was dangerously external, or for-
eign, to the state:
In 1995 when Wakon [at the time of the interview the Commissioner of the Royal
PNG Constabulary] was a police commander in the Central Highlands, he hunted
down a police officer who had walked out of his post with his weapon to join his
tribe in a fight. Wakon says the renegade officer, later dubbed "Rambo", led an
ambush on a police convoy to capture more rifles. Leaning back on his chair,
Wakon says the man was eventually shot dead. "We terminated his services"
(Time Magazine April 9, 2001:27. My addition).
As in Bougainville 'Rambo' defined a certain non-conforming, rebellious citizen that

the state can kill, here understood not as a signifier of rebellious insurgents, but as a 'triba
fighter'. Rambo here operates as a state controlled signifier of a form of alterity against
which state power is violently reproduced and displayed.9 Such accounts imply a certain
'natural' propensity for any policeman to ally himself with his 'tribe' when it engages in a
63
fight.10 That is the police were subject to anti-state forces (of primordial, traditional custom
and kinship) that made them become more like Rambo.11 This narrative structure is also evi-
dent in Rambo movies where Rambo is the offspring of an Indian mother and an Italian
father. Rambo embodies a primordial identity and authenticity that the state must struggle
against.12
TRYING TO LINK VIOLENCE AND THE MODERN STATE
In the 1990s people throughout Melanesia (e.g. Stasch 2001) were profoundly interested
defining and emulating modern police power through the repetition of narratives abo
police abuses and violence. Narratives of police violence, by their very popularity, invol
normalising this kind of power by circulating knowledge of its effects. Moreover, insof
village police imposed their own punishments, they replicated police power - albeit in w
that more adequately reflected local political conditions. The local masculine violence i
ated and authorised by such village police operated within transactional circuits
attempted 'a restoration of a balanced positive situation' (Stasch 2001:46). This masculin
violence, in some accounts (Schieffelinl976), helped shift the community toward
restored sociality defined by notions of balanced exchange.
This notion of the redemptive, ordering possibilities of violence was probably com
monly experienced by many people in reference to alleged witches and sorcerers. Am
the Kamula the emergence of European rule in the 1950s and 1960s led to the cessation
war raids and the execution of alleged witches. But the problem of attacks by witches p
sisted. A troubling post-pacification persistence of witchcraft and sorcery into the 19
combined with the inability of men to violently remove the problem. This tension crea
contexts where the police were seen as agents that could productively intervene in su
matters. The following is part of a draft letter, written in 2002 by a village law and or
official who sent it to the police based at Kamusi - the regional headquarters of the log
company Rimbunan Hijau:
Magic Man This man is a king of or the head of destroying peoples lives. This
man lives in the same house as John. . .John's family - on behalf of the community
-would like to sue him to court and be threatened and give warning not to continue
on threatening people's lives with all sorts of bad sickness as well as destroying
many lives. If continued on the habit I on behalf of the community, state to the
Royal Constabulary of Kamusi that his life would be finished... Therefore I
strongly ask you for the kind support.
Such formal requests were based on the assumption that the police were able to autho
executions. In one account the police were said to provide identity cards that were valid for
nominated day of the suspect's execution. If these procedures were followed then those invo
in the killing would not go to prison for murder. These attempts to convert state authority
local projects highlighted the extent to which violence directed at witches was still under
by Kamula as a moral project - one that the state could and should support.
While the Kamula tried to deploy police authority over violence in ways that migh
have resolved some of the tensions generated by Kamula concerns with witches, there
also some interest in the 1990s to deploy Kamula traditions concerning witchcraft to
plement state power over violence. This can be understood as an attempt to transform
irredeemable evil power of Kamula witchcraft into a wider social good produced by th
modern state. But the primary interest of this example is to highlight the way transfe
powerful effects are typically understood by the Kamula to involve the body. In this
they involve supplementing one's existing body with another body - that of an 'evil spi
(se) associated with witchcraft.13 A se is like a person. But se live in the body, especially
64
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heart, of their host and they attack ordinary Kamula and, by consuming their flesh, se can
kill Kamula.
The following account of how one might redeploy the power of a se was offered while
discussing the war in Bougainville and the fate of some Gogodala men who had fought and
died there. In arguing that these deaths were unnecessary Enopowe Maiala told me that
a man should get training in the ways of the evil spirit (se) before he joins the
army. Then he will not die. The army are trained. They learn skills but they don't
know about se. So they can't kill Francis Ona [then one of the leaders of the
Bougainville Revolutionary Army]. A se trained man, a man with se, he could kill
him. If I had se then I would kill Francis Ona. That is why I want to be a se
man... with se you can protect yourself and your family. If they bomb a city you
can run away -you can save your family.
In this argument the power of evil could be productively accessed so that these new
kinds of men could become se men who did not kill other Kamula. They could then produc-
tively deploy this traditional capacity for violence as members of the army working on
behalf of the nation - thereby converting this form of violence into a wider social good (by
killing Francis Ona or by being able to defend one's family against an unspecified inva-
sion). This could happen only if the older Kamula would appropriately instruct the younger
generation in such matters. Such inter-generational instructors are common in Rambo and
in kick-boxing videos.14 But these kinds of transfers are thought not to have occurred among
the Kamula so that certain traditional forms of power and violence, such as those associated
with witchcraft, are dissociated from any relevance to modern forms of violence.15 A new
form of the state is being envisaged in these stories - a state that could harness and redeploy
the power of evil spirits for its own ends.
Some of this kind of thinking was linked by Enopowe to a kick-boxing video that
involved Eric (a European) challenging the master kick boxer Tom Po who, in an earlier
fight, had viciously broken the back of Eric's elder brother:
Eric was trained by an old Chinese man who could change himself into many
things. I was thinking that this was like se. He could change into a woman and
lead the enemy to where your squad was. He could change into an old man or old
woman. I was thinking the old people should do this. But their thinking is differ-
ent. They are not educated. The younger ones are educated and have got an idea.
The old people should stop using se power to eat people's flesh. They should use
that power to help train young men just like Eric's trainer did. They would have
power in boxing. One punch and they would break his skull open. Not three or
four rounds but quickly in the first round - just with one punch. That se is really
powerful. If I were to be a boxer I would be a se man.
Through restructuring their bodies ('training') modern educated men could have pro-
ductively augmented their bodies with the body of a se and deployed such violent power to
produce socially valued death. They could have potentially successfully reworked tradition
into modernity. These accounts assert that the younger generation has the capacity to use
such powers for national benefit in contrast to the older generation that used the same pow-
ers in cannibalistic selfish ways. But such possibilities were dependent on the senior genera-
tion releasing their knowledge and power to the younger generation. So far they have
blocked the transfer of a se's body and power to the junior generation. The se tradition,
decoupled from any relationship with modernity, still persisted as an un-reformable repeti-
tion of the Kamula's own 'uneducated' capacity for self-destruction and as a metaphor of
the younger educated men's incapacity to productively link 'custom' in general to modernity.
65
POLICE, GUNS AND WAR
Problems concerning the adequacy of current masculine power have intensified with the
development of industrial logging in the region. In the 1990s the Kamula increasingly con-
fronted coercive forms of power that were defined and controlled by external state and cor-
porate agents. The 90s saw in PNG new uses of violence as a means of conducting politics
(Dinnen 1999, Dinnen and Ley 2000, Strathern 1993). At the regional level one result of
industrial logging was the emergence of a partially privatised police force that merged state
and company power into a quasi-legal apparatus. It was through company-sponsored forms
of police domination that many Kamula have had their most intense experiences of state
power. The police deployed violence and domination in ways that the Kamula could not
easily integrate with the production of their forms of autonomy and sociality (Stasch 2001).
Police violence might be rationalised via abstract entities such as 'law and order' or 'securi-
ty', but for the Kamula this violence was mainly about highly theatrical, often grotesque,
enactments of new forms of humiliation and domination that had little capacity to enhance
social relationships. Official policing, as represented by the vivid Kamula narrators that I
rely on, seemingly delighted in the invention and deployment of extreme techniques of vio-
lence and power. Police stationed at the government station of Balimo were understood to
rape women accused of adultery and force men on similar charges to walk naked through
the station. Or alternatively the couple charged were forced to strip and carry each other
through town.16 Those charged with offences concerning marijuana had their hair shaved
and then were required to eat it. At Kamusi police were said to peg out such drug users on
the ground and beat them with rifle barrels sometimes fracturing their limbs.17 Some offend-
ers were reported to have been bound and then locked up in a container for a day or until
family members could pay bail. These kind of stories help create a culture of fear associated
with the police and their violence.
Some of the policing techniques directed at the Kamula may have been influenced by
events associated with the Bougainville war. Dinnen has argued the Bougainville conflict
increased the militarisation of the state's struggle with 'law and order' problems:
the on-going conflict on Bougainville has . . . reinforced the militarisation of state

responses. Police mobile squads are returning from service on Bougainville and
applying techniques evolved in the context of civil war to mainland policing. The
working culture of the mobile squads, particularly in the Highlands, revolves
around an unbridled machismo and preference for "Rambo-like" solutions. Intimi-
dation and violence (including a high level of violence against women) provide
most frequent response to problems of order in this situation (1998:261).
A further link between the Bougainville War and the policing of the Kamula was pro-
vided by one of the commanders of the police operating in the Wawoi-Guavi timber conces-
sion. Known as 'One Eye' he had apparently lost his eye while posted at Bougainville. For
a time, before being subject to internal investigation and removed out of Kamusi, One Eye
had a great freedom to employ violence as the following story from Sisiyo Koiyali reveals:
One-Eye arrived at Kesopi (a place where Kamula camped on their way to and
from Kamusi). He arrived just as some young people had got off a truck carrying
timber for the construction of a school building. One Eye thought they might be
thieves and asked them to stop while he fired warning shots over their heads.
Sisiyo's elder brother's son aged about 14, kept running down to the river and
jumped into a dinghy. While he paddled away One Eye kept firing after him - one
of the bullets burning, but not hitting, his arm. One Eye then gathered the people
together for an awareness campaign. He told them that the Europeans from Ameri-
66
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ca and Australia were just like rats that stole your food. They and the NGO's
would not develop the land. By way of contrast he stressed how the owners of the
logging company were good people and would bring development (from my
notes).
One-Eye's style of policing was influenced by his specific relationship with the logging
company. In Kamula accounts this relationship can take on quite unusual dimensions.
One Eye, his fellow police and the Operations Manager of the logging concession,
arrived in the Rimbunan Hijau plane to conduct an awareness campaign on mari-
juana. The pilot, an employee of the logging company, alighted from the plane
dressed in a police uniform, with a gun. The well-armed police then lined the vil-
lage people up and One Eye lectured them on how they would destroy houses (and
chickens) in the village if members continued to engage in trading marijuana. To
link this threat with an appropriate degree of fear, One Eye told them that he was
in Bougainville at the start of the war. He and his police then fired off several
rounds of their guns in front of the assembled village (from my notes).
The police routinely used such 'warning shots' when they visit suspect villages in the log-
ging concession. Police reinforce their capacity to intimidate by smoking marijuana - the
effect being to prevent them from having any 'compassion' for the people subject to their
authority and 'evil' practices. The police, especially under One-Eye, located themselves as
partly outside the discipline of the state.18 This position of being partly outside the state bet-
ter enabled the police to realise the state's (and company's) goals.
One response to logging and the new outsider's destablising power and authority has
been an intense interest by men in acquiring guns. Acquisition of guns occurs legally, quasi
legally - through corruption of licensing officials - and illegally - by manufacturing them
('home-made') or by acquiring a gun through a cash purchase or by bartering marijuana for
it. Logging has facilitated the acquisition of these guns. Men now receive royalty payments
sufficient to pay the high prices asked and there has also been an increasingly developed
transport system that facilitates the movement of marijuana and guns between the High-
lands and overseas. It certainly enhances a man's reputation to be rumoured as someone
who has a high-powered one such as a machine gun. Rumoured possession indicates a
man's capacity to successfully negotiate his way through a new somewhat dangerous mar-
ket since a gun owner has to possibly acquire and sell marijuana, find the gun dealer, make
the transaction and then secretly maintain possession of the gun without being reported to
the police. The most commonly given reason for acquiring such guns was not hunting but
its usefulness in a coming World War (discussed below). Some men say owning a gun will
help them deal with their fear of raskols and others claimed a need to be able to defend one-
self against the police.19 An increasingly cited use of such guns was their use against the
logging companies when their practices were not acceptable. As one man explained 'if their
ways are no good we will kill one of them and then we will kill another and then another.
They will run away. They will not destroy our land'. But in a lot of Kamula talk about com-
pany management there is a less extreme, but pervasive, emphasis on frustrations derived
from the company's refusal to meet requests for royalty advances, loans, lifts and food.
Kamula men typically then attempt to create fear in management in order to exert some
influence and make the official co-operate. Since many managers themselves routinely car-
ried pistols some of the Kamula's talk of their gun ownership was a way of claiming equiv-
alence to the gun bearing managers and police. Several stories now circulate among Kamula
celebrating the successful use of guns in opposition to state and company officials.
The acquisition of guns in the region has been intensifying since the mid nineties and
can reach an impressive scale by the typically pacific standards of the Western Province
67
lowlands. One small village neighbouring Wawoi Falls, raided by police in January 2003,
succeeded in quasi-legally acquiring about 20 guns by registering them in the names of peo-
ple living in other villages. In a front page story in The National, owned by Rimbunan
Hijau, One Eye claimed 'in all my 23 years of experience in every province in the country I
have never seen so many licensed guns in the hands of so few. It is like stockpiling to start a
small war' (The National 2003, 20 January). A spokesman for the logging company
claimed vthe guns posed a grave threat to the people of the area' (The National 2003, 20
January) and the local Member of Parliament, a strong supporter of Rimbunan Hijau,
argued that to release the guns back to the villages 'would be like starting a war'.20 Defining
the threat posed by these guns as like a state of war both mirrored and amplified the Kamu-
la's own continuously narrated sense of a need to deploy anger, violence and, if possible,
arms, in key relationships that defined contemporary regional politics.21
STATE DISINTEGRATION, ARMIES AND ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT
Kamula stories also conveyed a strong sense that violence also crucially defined national
political relationships. What I highlight here are some Kamula's understanding of recent recur-
ring low-level violent conflicts between police and the defence force. These accounts when
combined with talk of the Bougainville conflict, the violence of the police and apocalyptic con-
flict associated with the possibility of the return of Christ tend to define the current era as one
more akin to a state of war. They also positioned the defence forces as morally superior to the
police - it was the defence force and their capacity to create secure conditions that defined a
popular masculinity. In working through the opposition between the police and the defence
forces the Kamula typically positioned the police as agents of an inadequate government in
opposition to the defence forces who are more likely to support the grassroots than are the
police. In one account of a conflict between Moresby raskols and police, the army supported the
raskols. This particular alliance between raskols and army was due to the fact that Sir Julius
Chan had prevented his 'clan' from going to Bougainville because he did not want his brothers
being shot there. And so the 'defence people' were angry with him. They wanted to kill him as a
form of payback for his protection of his 'brothers'.22 Hence they supported the raskols in their
successful strike against the government and the police. The story positioned the army, in con-
trast to the police, as having some capacity to enter into appropriate relationships with the peo-
ple. They also supported the raskols because they were compassionate raskols - the raskols
wanted the government to look after the orphans who were the product of the governing male
elite's illicit sexual relationships with women in Moresby. The raskols showed their compassion
for these orphans by raiding well known stores in Moresby and giving the children free access to
the store goods and food.
The story, recorded in February 1997, but about events that were apparently observed
in 1995, rather accurately prefigured the split between the police and the army that occurred
in the Sandline affair during March 1997 (May, Regan and Dinnen 1997). Sandline Interna-
tional was a group of mercenaries that the Chan government hired to put an end to the
BRA.23 The arrival of the mercenaries in PNG resulted in a limited, but popular, mutiny of
sections of the army that in turn lead to the collapse of the Chan government and the forma-
tion of the Skate government after elections in July 1997 (Dorney 1998; May, Reagan and
Dinnen 1997). In March 2001 there was a further limited disturbance by the army in protest
at government proposals to cut the size of the army. Prior to this there had been a number of
clashes between the army and police. These skirmishes between the police and the army
became a routine part of the Kamula's understanding of PNG as a place where raskols and
the defence force were substitutable:
In Moresby these things happened. The defence people were guarding the World
Bank. The police people thought the defence people were raskols. With a rifle they
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shot one man. They called on the radio for people to come. The policemen came
and saw what was there. 'Oh we shot by mistake'. They sent a message. And the
defence men came and saw their man lying dead. Blood covered him. They took
him to a police station saying to the police. This is your pig, you butcher it and eat
it. You do not care about people's lives. PNG suffers because of you. Our PNG
people - fathers, mothers, brothers - they have good water for bathing. They have
good food. They have no other problems. They lived without hearing guns. Why?
Because the defence people were doing all the work' (Amula Agiyale recorded
1 2/2/2001 ).24
The possibilities of some kind of effective social relationship between the people and
the army was also being thought about in reference to Rambo who was, according to some
Kamula, creating an army of the people. The need for this secret militarisation of the people
was explained to me mainly by reference to millennial narratives and rumours. Kamula ver-
sions of the apocalypse of Year 2000 outlined a final cataclysmic war between God and the
demonical forces that run One World Government culminating hopefully in divine victory.25
Prior to this victory it was expected One World government would come into power. A key
feature of One World Government was to be a total transformation in property relationships
and resource control. According to Bakadiye, the new government would prohibit people
from taking things from the garden of their friends or kin. If your brother took your
coconuts he was to be beheaded. They would make his clan watch. If any one got angry
they would kill that person. State power ('government') was to be exemplified in a theatre
of death and acts of dispossession and theft. All the property of the Kamula was to have
been the property of the new government. In Bakadiye's view of life under One World Gov-
ernment was one where he would have nothing:
They will eat what is mine. This is what a One World Government man said. Is
this true? They will set a day and a time. After that time it will be prohibited for
anyone to go hunt, to get things from the bush, to make sago, to get fruits. The
children will not have anything to eat. They will die. Coconuts, sago these will
belong to One World Government. Garden things - there will be no sweet potato,
sugar cane, manioc... You will just stay without food. Our children will be hungry
and will die. This time will last three years. Happy Times will follow (Bakadie
Apaie).
This anxiety over a complete dispossession of resources was also entangled with the
current state's attempts to gain further control of timber rights in the area. One man in 1999
signed a letter of complaint about the government's decision to award the Kamula-Doso
timber concession of some 780,000 hectares to the Malaysian logging company Rimbunan
Hijau as an 'extension' of its adjacent Wawoi-Guavi concession (Filer 2000: 80-85;
Ombudsman Commission of Papua New Guinea 2002; PNG Forestry Review Team 2001).
In the letter he explained how, in 1997, 'forestry men' came to help the Kamula sign a for-
est management agreement that gave the state effective control of all the Kamula's timber.
He claimed the 'forestry men' told the Kamula that if they did not sign immediately then,
when the One World Government emerged in the Year 2000, it would own the trees and
land.26 It was as if the property conversion effected by the agreement did not really make
sense except when situated in apocalyptic times associated with year 2000. Also at issue
here was a broader underlying concern among some Kamula that modern store goods and
other commodities such as money did not really belong to them - these things were really
the property of the Europeans or God.
Such uncertainties were further amplified by some Kamula thinking that the time of the
One World Government would be followed by a Third World War and a violent Rapture
69
involving Christ's triumphant return to the world. According to Bakadiye, during the time
of One World Government anyone who went to Church or read the Bible would be killed.
But this era was to end in the year 2000, after the war, when the true believers were to be
taken to Heaven. Those who steal, who were not believers, were expected to be rounded up
and shot. Within this annihilatory logic the power of the Christian realm and the demonic
One World government are ultimately similar - both in their different ways, want to destroy
the current form of government and create a new social order. This is not simply a critique
of the current state of PNG or of wider destructive global forces, but is a new universal
totalisation of violence and power over the Kamula. This is not the 'national death' (Siegel
1998) that the state seeks to authorise and monopolise, but something beyond that - more
like Wyschogrod's (1985) universal mass-death - the event that incorporates every possible
death into its capacity to negate all life.27 It represented the annihilation of the future:
When a big sister argues with her younger brother all the time the mother will say
'hey don't do this, he will have to go to war. You will just stay in the house so
don't argue with him all the time'. When he is killed they will come for his elder
brother. They will come for him. When he is dead they will come for his father
and when the men are dead they will come for the women (Enopowe Maiala).
FROM HUNTERS TO SOLDIERS
Given the wide range of modern social contexts that the Kamula define as entailing an
extra-ordinary degree of violence, I now want to further detail how and why Rambo an
agents were secretly distributing guns in preparation for the forthcoming World War.2
following account describes such a distribution.29
Here at Sutuma they did this. The men have they got rifles from inside the water?
They said 'yes' they had seen this. Our man John Smith he said he got a gun. Did
he really get it? We don't know. We did not see the gun. ..the submarine that
appears in the water does this. It comes up from inside the water into the open...
And you will think this is a water spirit. From the dark of the water the submarine
will emerge. It opens up and inside there are really good things. They will give
you something and this will end your... fear... And then they will get a gun. They
take the name [of the recipient]. Those that get a gun are given a date [when they
will be picked up] for fighting. They will see them on this date. And they will give
them army uniforms.30 They will put them on - boots, socks, shirt, trousers - things
like this they will get them. That is all. Rambo will come for those people. They
will wait for Rambo. Later when the year 2000 is ending, in that year, I don't
know what will come up. At that time in the year 2000 those men will go to anoth-
er place.. .The helicopter will come and land. They will call the names. 'My boy is
going to the war. Will he come back?' Oh your friend's boy is going in the heli-
copter and you will cry. He will have no way to come back. It is the end. Rambo's
helicopter will take him to the war.. .They will have no way to come back... They
are fighting men ke! Be careful! He will not see his sons, his daughters, his
younger brothers, his elder brothers (Bakadiye Apaie 1998).
In this account Rambo converts men into an army he commands. He tries to dra
Kamula into a new form of violent power that he embodies and that may be sufficie
overcome One World Government or its equivalent. He transforms the existing state's
tial monopoly of the means of violence by allowing the people access to guns. Redefi
and betraying the existing state he democratises access to the means of violence and in
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process creates an army of citizens who do not relate to the existing state as loyal subjects.
This story also indicates one way Kamula are using the interrelationship between the
visible and invisible to formulate understandings of their relationship to Rambo and new
forms of masculine power. Rambo is here positioned as a hidden source of power in a way
that is similar to the way bush spirits provide additional capacities to men enabling them to
be extra-ordinarily good hunters (Wood 1998). Rambo appears like a bush spirit in that he
moves from the invisible realm to the visible only when the recipient of the attention is
alone. This kind of individuation of the person is commonly associated in PNG with secret
transfers of powers from the invisible realm (Weiner 2001:153). In the case of hunting, the
emergence of a singular individuated person is a precondition to the accumulation of power
from bush spirits that in turn leads to a greater capacity to exhibit a relational self involved
in the creation of sociality through gifts of meat. In the case of Rambo's soldiers, their
power is enhanced on the condition they will serve Rambo and possibly die for their family
and community, perhaps even the nation, in the future war. Rambo's power, like other forms
of power familiar to the Kamula, initially appears both as external to the social (Sahlins
1981:100) - it is initially transmitted to the solitary autonomous individual - and as a secret
realm, external to the ordinary visibility of everyday social interaction. Yet insofar as these
soldiers may protect the village they and their accumulated capacity for violence are expect-
ed to function in defence of a wider sociality.
As in other parts of PNG (Weiner 1991:193-4) the accumulation of power can threaten
the recipient. In the case of Kamula hunters, transfers of power from distant and strange
bush spirits could, and sometimes did, entail the death of the recipient (Wood 1998). The
requirement that Rambo's new soldiers be prepared to sacrifice themselves in a future war
resonates with these understandings. I take this to be a re-iteration of the Kamula's basic
assumptions that any increment in the overall cosmology will be balanced by an equivalent
or reciprocal loss, that any loss, especially death, is transformable into a gain or increment
and that all gains (and losses) ultimately have the value of a person (or involve self-sacri-
fice). But the Kamula's vivid accounts of modern violence and the activities of the agents of
the new world order (such as Rambo and One World Government, and, to a lesser extent,
the current PNG state and Rimbunan Hijau) profoundly intensify the possibilities of mascu-
line enhancement and loss into a new scale.
Rambo's gift of guns and uniforms is transformative of the recipients especially their
bodies. The gifts are said to 'intensify' or 'enhance' recipients and the gifts themselves,
being unusual and exciting, exemplify this state, as does Rambo himself. This intensified
body state is typically associated with an expansion of a person's power, strength
(itiyamale) and an increase in liveliness or animation (nesama). Such effects are also rou-
tinely manifested when people enter into appropriate relationships with their kin and land
and in ceremonial performances (Wood 2004). It is also manifested when people come
across or own new things associated with Moresby life, Europeans and modernity. Rambo's
huge guns can be understood as more intense versions of the typical shot-guns or home
made guns most men are familiar with. Rambo embodies qualities not found in ordinary
men such as his muscular body, strength and skills in enacting violence. Those men receiv-
ing his guns and uniforms are 'enhanced' in their appearance and capacity for violence
beyond an ordinary man and become more like Rambo.
SUPPLANTING THE SOVEREIGN, KILLING RAMBO AND HOW PNG SAVES

RAMBO
Kamula typically link the enhancement of an entity with its alignment with another entity
that is understood to be similar. Thus the experience of 'intensification' with reference to
relationships with land and ancestors is conventionally associated with relations of
increased 'similarity', 'likeness' and other forms of identity (Wood 2004). Such ideas also
71
inform Kamula accounts of Rambo's identification with the people and places in PNG. The
creation of a widespread, perhaps national, similarity with Rambo is explored in some detail
in a Kamula story about Rambo that I now wish to consider. The story provides a reason as
to why Rambo is giving guns to people in PNG. The story is concerned with the extent of
Rambo's popularity in PNG and the vast distribution of Rambo's posters, T-shirts portray-
ing his image, pictures and videos. Involved here are the possibilities of a person's effective
display on a unparalleled scale and the potential of Rambo's things to create a popular
topography of collective memory around which notions of shared identity and enhancing
effects might be generated.
The story is about processes that would generate a collectivity based on similarity with
Rambo. The story implies that Rambo's things are equivalent to his life (they help save
him). The story explains why he has entered into potentially enhancing exchanges involving
life and death, guns and uniforms, not just with the Kamula, but also with PNG as a whole.
These transactions involve the possibility of a male collectivity made similar by a common
relationship to Rambo:
She was living in her country. The Queen's daughter [a married woman] was
watching Rambo's nesama (video). She should have been doing her schoolwork.
She got bad thoughts. She was watching the Rambo video and she lost her heart to
him. 'Rambo is my boyfriend'. She wanted him. His video was a beautiful "act"
[English term used]. So she rang him. She gave Rambo a date to come to her. 'You
come here and see me' she said. Rambo came in a plane. It landed and he went to
where the Queen's daughter lived. He went into her palace. The Queen's daughter
she had seen Rambo and lost her heart. He went inside and sat down. And the
Queen's daughter said 'Watching your 'video' made me lose my heart'. And
Rambo said 'What do you want to do?' Rambo said 'What will we do? You think
about what you will do' And the woman said 'Oh my heart is no good. I really
want you'. And they had sex together. After her husband came and saw them on a
security camera. And he said to his wife 'Who has come?' His wife said 'Rambo
has come'. And he was really angry. Her husband went to the police and said to
them 'Rambo did bad things to me'. And then the police went and got Rambo.
They came and put in him goal. They hung him up by chains tied to his arms. His
two arms were tied up with chains and they hung him up. All the lawyers - Aus-
tralian lawyers, American and England lawyers came and gathered. They said'
You can kill Rambo.' And then another man thought 'Ah the PNG lawyer is not
here'. They called the PNG lawyer. They called him and the PNG lawyer came
and said 'you will here kill Rambo'. 'But one thing' he said. 'All of you give me
five minutes to get a plane'. 'I will go to Moresby' he said. 'I will go down to the
places - to the bush and what else? In the ground, in the water where his pictures
are' he said. 'All his photos, his singlets will be collected and brought back here
and they will be burnt and then kill him.' And then the men thought a lot about
what PNG had said. Five minutes to do this was not enough time. And then they
said 'PNG has won the court case. Rambo has won the court case'. They untied his
chains. When they untied his chain Rambo came and lifted up the PNG lawyer
[placed between both arms stretched up above his head]. As he lifted up the lawyer
he said 'when the Third World War is happening I will come back. With my
actions I will help PNG in the Third World War' (Akabu Emesiye. My additions).
Here the Queen's daughter (or in another account Prince Charles' daughter) should
have been engaged in the moral project of educating herself, but instead was overcome by
desire as a result of Rambo's appearance in a video. By sleeping with another man's wife,
Rambo, an apparently single man, was enacting a potentially very dangerous act. Some
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Kamula see this kind of sex as leading to the single man's death. A single man is thought to
be especially vulnerable to the 'blood' of the married couple that derives from their prior
sexual activity. The 'blood' may kill him. Such illicit sex may also result in either the man
or woman gaining an evil spirit (se) that might burrow into their hearts. Rambo's sexual
exploits were transgressive not just of state boundaries and the sexual boundaries of the
elite, they threatened his own well-being and shifted him into the domain of witchcraft and
its deathly power. Rambo was also enacting unregulated masculine excess.31 He dissipated
his body substance in casual sex rather than productively converting such loss of substance
into legitimate reproduction organised by marriage. Or into meat derived from hunting,
since the Kamula believe that sex is antithetical to successful hunting.32 Instead of trans-
forming desire into productive outcomes, Rambo, icon of modern masculinity, shifted him-
self towards dissipation, confinement and death.
Rambo's affair was with the Queen's daughter - and the Queen of England is the cur-
rent Head of State in PNG.33 It is not that clear to me that many Kamula know this connec-
tion, but I think most Kamula would recognise the reference to the Queen as a reference to
someone important either in PNG or overseas. Rambo successfully usurped the power of
the state elite to control its reproduction by his ability to create sexual desire though the cir-
culation of his images. His power was that he made himself equivalent to the male elite and
sexually possessed one of their women. He thus subverted their power and law and weak-
ened their capacity to exclusively and legitimately reproduce themselves. He was challeng-
ing the existing rulers via sexual consumption of their women. But at another level his chal-
lenge failed - he was unable to destroy society, state or the ruling hierarchy by his trans-
gressive power and, as a failed would-be-sovereign (Sahlins 1981) close to death, became
totally dependent on others for his survival.
Rambo is to be put to death by a judicial arm of global government. But once the
lawyer from PNG, previously overlooked, is able to become an articulate member of this
global legal order Rambo is released. PNG, unlike other nations, has some capacity to move
Rambo from the space of death to life. Specifically the 'PNG lawyer' has a capacity to
deliver arguments and ideas that ensure justice by getting Rambo in perspective. The lawyer
does this by pointing to Rambo's capacity for popular distribution. When explaining the
story to me Enopowe Maiala and Akabu Emesiye both made the point that the gathering of
Rambo's things was to have taken place throughout PNG. It would involve not just his
images that were thrown away in the ground and rivers, but also the images of Rambo
found in all the houses of PNG. Rambo's things - his posters, T-shirts and videos - are
understood to be his 'appearance' or 'presence' (mila:pi - literally 'face'). There is a sense
in which the landscape of the whole country has taken on Rambo's appearance. The prolif-
eration of Rambo's things throughout the land has involved an increasing identification
between Rambo, places and people just as Rambo, in the text, is increasingly related to
PNG' via the lawyer. This I take as a reiteration of the assumption, discussed above, that
forms of productive enhancement (such as flows of power) are often correlated with the
parties to the transaction taking on an intensified similarity.
The PNG lawyer -through what the Kamula regard as his 'hard' and 'powerful' talk -
also offers the World Court, and ultimately the state which Rambo has challenged, the pos-
sibility of eradicating all the images and material traces of Rambo's past effects on the peo-
ple. If it were possible to destroy Rambo's images and memory traces in the form of his
things then, in terms of the PNG lawyer's argument, it would be possible for the World
Court to kill Rambo. But the proposed gathering and burning of Rambo's things would have
converted traces of his past effects on the people into an astounding sacrificial re-creation of
these impacts. The lawyer's talk of the destruction of Rambo's representations is an effec-
tive counter to the proposed juridical murder of Rambo because it involves the substitution
of the sacrifice of things for the sacrifice of a person. A counter-sacrifice of representations
of Rambo is opposed to the global court's wish to sacrifice Rambo's life for his defilement
73
of state order. In the logic of the PNG lawyer's argument Rambo's images are metonymic
extensions of, and are equivalent to, Rambo and his life. At issue are the nature of Rambo's
'things' and 'images' (nesama) and their relationship of substitution to what they represent.
The Kamula and, by extension, PNG people are unwilling to see such entities as purely
arbitrary signifiers (contra Anderson 1991). The story suggests that these entities, when bet-
ter understood, contain relational potential that could allow Rambo (appearing, for a time,
like Sahlins' [1981] defeated Stranger King) to become more productively aligned with the
political projects of the people and the state. Before he can become so productive he has to
be redeemed by entering into a sacrificial logic of substitution and similarity evident in
PNG's collective memory of his person in the form of his things. The PNG lawyer trans-
forms the juridical state's desire for violent retaliation by offering a non-arbitrary theory of
the sign that allows destruction of things (images) to be equivalent to the destruction of the
person (Rambo). It is by arguing for an intensified identity between image and the real enti-
ty that an apparently new, but distinctly Kamula (perhaps even national), kind of politics of
representation can be realised in the world court in a manner that enhances Rambo's life.
The other major component of the lawyer's argument is that Rambo's 'things' could
not be destroyed in terms of the five minutes asked for by the lawyer. The reference to clock
time implies a certain incompatibility of this kind of linear time to the physical distribution
of Rambo's things. Rambo's images and things are not the arbitrary signifiers that in Ander-
son's (1991) view are the correlate of national temporality measured by clock and calendar.
They are also signs of messianic possibilities, prefiguring something beyond the limits of
modern clock time (Anderson 1991:24). Evoking his memory, absence and loss, the images
of Rambo simultaneously prefigure his presence.34 The story ends with an image of the
dominance of messianic time as marked by Rambo's talk of the Third World War and a
promise of assistance and return. This pledge is combined with 'prophetic visibility' (Bhab-
ha 1994:158) in the form of a famous Rambo gesture of triumph - PNG, represented by the
lifted-up lawyer, substitutes for Rambo's gun.
The PNG lawyer's victory in the court sets up the basis of an alternative popular sover-
eignty involving Rambo, the people and the law. In exchange for PNG's intervention based,
in part, on the popular distribution of his images that enabled Rambo to avoid death, he rec-
iprocates with guns, uniforms and a promise of support to prevent the people's destruction
by violent forms of the state exemplified in One World Government (and the World Court
that threatened Rambo). The PNG lawyer succeeds in transforming one kind of modern
masculinity, represented by Rambo, away from death inducing promiscuity into the produc-
tive flow of guns that will enhance men's capacities to deal with the future violence of the
modern state in its various forms. Through these transactions emerge traces of a new male
collectivity - a populist analogue of a 'national space' (unified by sharing Rambo's things
and images) that implies a people's army that could function as a counter to the state forces
(such as those associated with One World Government or the police). The possibility of this
collectivity is manifested and mediated by a relationship with Rambo, his things and their
intensifying effects on men.
SPECULATIONS - RAMBO DEFINES A UNIFIED, PEACEFUL NATION-STATE OF

PNG?
Rambo was also rumoured to have a capacity to make the current PNG state less violent.
The evening before I left Wawoi Falls in 1998 Pastor Bauwe came to visit me and asked if
it was true that Rambo had come to Moresby?
Had I heard that Rambo had come from the United States? That Parliament House
had been decorated with Rambo's posters and t-shirts? These things had been put
up all over Parliament house. While there Rambo spoke to Michael Somare who
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asked him to help with the fighting in Bougainville. So Rambo went in a plane and
flew over Bougainville and from these heights he made up a map of Bougainville.
He told Somare it was a very small place - like a matchbox. It was not a big prob-
lem. And then he went back to the US.
Rambo's images proliferate in the Parliament intensifying his relationship of similarity with
the apex of state power. This display of his images is correlated with his real presence in the
political centre - reiterating the relationship outlined in the story of Rambo's imprisonment
between a sufficiently intense production of images and the transformation of the similar
into the real entity (ensuring Rambo's literal survival). Moreover, if as Tsing (1993) has
argued neither the 'nation' nor the 'state' can be conceived of without the Other, I want to
speculate that Rambo emerges here as the Stranger who could perhaps manifest, and even
synthesize, the state (in the form of Parliament now decorated with Rambo's effects) and
the nation (the people who possess his things) in intensified forms of similarity associated
with his presence. He could give the nation-state the visible form of his own person.35
The rumour, in its reference to Somare, the first leader of the independent state of
PNG, evokes the continuity of a past, but possibly still present, origin of the nation-state. In
Kamula terms Somare is the 'base' or 'origin' (sitani) of PNG. He is said to be the Kamu-
la's 'grandfather' and the fifty kina note that displays his face can also be referred to as
'grandfather'. His initial government is thought to have been a good one unlike those that
have followed. Following Clark (1997) this talk of Somare could be taken to involve a
return to a time when the future of the PNG state was open, and still to be defined, in con-
trast to the radical sense of corrupt failure that pervaded Kamula's understandings of the
state in the late 90's.36 This Somare expresses the possibility of productive conjunction of a
popular leader and a political structure that would allow itself to be open to redefinition by
others, such as Rambo, who are usually external to its self-definition. The conjunction of
Rambo and Somare also hints at a temporary synthesis of white and black leadership over-
coming the colonial and post-colonial experience of leadership divided by race.37
Rambo must augment the founder of the nation-state, Michael Somare. This implies
that the PNG state lacks an adequately embodied centre. As his images are being added to
Parliament Rambo adds his body and its unique perspective to that of the state (and
Somare). He improves their ability to observe the national territory. Rambo is able to map
the space of the nation and its internal problems more accurately than can the PNG govern-
ment. He reveals what was always there, but not apparently previously accessible to other
bodies, like Somare, who run the government of PNG. Rambo is able to define
Bougainville as 'like a matchbox' and thereby de-escalate the conflict from what might
have been understood as a total war. He re-orientates PNG away from total war towards
peace:
Bougainville and PNG had been fighting and they were what? ...one... one... one
country. Rambo said they were one country that's all. He made them finish fight-
ing. He made things better. He made it better and the government of PNG gave all
of us something like independence - self-government. And now there is no fight-
ing in Bougainville (Nodiya Imali, January 1999).
Here Rambo functions as the stranger-as-arbitrator (Fernandez-Armesto 2000: 87).38

Rambo, as an external observer in a helicopter, provides the government's leader Somare,
with the required objectivity while simultaneously, having seemingly taken on some of
attributes of the sovereign, devolves political power to create peace. In these rumors Rambo
- more typically presented as a gun-giving war machine - exhibits a conjectured, hence
limited, redemptive capacity to create sociality.
75
TOWARDS AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE PNG STATE (VIA RAMBO)?
This paper owes much to Jeffrey Clark's (1997) argument that analysis of the PNG state
needs to move beyond a focus on government and national institutions defined as 'weak'.
He argued for an ethnography of what we might now call the production of state effects
(Abrams 1988; Taussig 1992; Trouillot 2001:126) . He was interested in the way state
power effects were defined and embodied by Huli people. Here I have elaborated on this
theme by emphasising forms of sovereignty and power.39 For the Kamula this involves
sources of power and rule that claim, sometimes violently, degrees of political supremacy.
At issue were agents such as Somare, Rambo, One World Government and the World Court
whose political projects involved different claims to sovereignty. Rambo tried to substitute
himself into the position of the King (and the Absolute Rule of One World Government),
but his autonomous action had to be transformed into a reciprocal relationship of gift
exchange that was based on TNG' values. This Kamula understanding of Rambo meant
that their preferred form of relationship between body politic (the transformed bodies of
men) and the body of one kind of power source (Rambo) was that it took the form of a
transactable gift that allowed Rambo to encompass and unify the body politic (men) in the
form of his own partible body (following Strathern 1999). In the process power relations
were invested in both Rambo and the men who received his gifts. While the ephemeral
nature of the data warrants caution,40 1 have sought to elaborate a speculative ethnography
of the state by describing how Kamula men understood components of state power, largely
defined and mediated by Rambo, as part of their own politics and self-definition.
To understand these processes I have relied on the assumption - made by Clark and
others such as Lattas (1998) - that the content of imaginative narratives of the political his-
tory of the PNG nation-state in 1990s formed a crucial part of PNG politics. The stories,
rumours and talk that make up such histories can be understood as a political practice that
creates new kinds of subjects (Grant 2001: 340), and defines new forms of power, political
legitimacy and popular sovereignty (Aretxaga 2003; Mbembe 1991). Like Clark and Lattas,
I have assumed that modern state power and popular sovereignty required corporeal exem-
plification in the social body of the people rather than in the body of the King (Foucault
1977; Kantorowicz 1957). I grafted on to this guiding meta-narrative certain more specifi-
cally Kamula assumptions that were current in strands of their political thinking. As evident
in the material presented above, there was an assumption that all forms of power, new or
old, come from sources external to the social and the visible - that is real power takes the
form of the alien or stranger often located in the unseen realm. Power is fundamentally
strange. It is a property of the margin made more explicit, accessible and central to the
everyday via, in this case, a mediating stranger who moves towards the centre without
merging himself into that centre.41 Secondly, changes in person and identity typically derive
from changes in the body that flow from relationships with powers in this external realm.42
Thirdly, these flows and relationships, in order to be effective, require the creation of
degrees of similarity between the parties.
I used these assumptions to outline how the Kamula talk about Rambo and the prob-
lems of the PNG state. This talk involved claims about men's potential transformation via
the enhancement of their power and embodied capacities. Some of these processes derived,
in part, from the transformation of an 'older' masculinity concerned with witchcraft, hunt-
ing and sharing into one associated with the enhancing effects of participation in a secret
army. The Kamula Rambo was linked to this militarisation through a complex series of
transactions embedded in understandings of a sacrificial gift economy based on substitution
and similarity. Yet this was only one of a diverse array of projects through which Kamula
men tried to transform their bodies in ways that imitated or incorporated, not just Rambo's
power, but any new sources of power. Crucial here were transactions in political values that
were equivalent to a new body (such as army uniforms), the acquisition of an additional
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body (such as an evil spirit or se) or that involved transfers of embodied attributes (such as
strength) and new technologies of violence (high powered guns and pistols) and punish-
ment. Many of these projects rested on the further assumption that certain forms of legiti-
mate violence contained some, often rather weakly specified, capacity to create a better,
more peaceful state. And so Rambo - at times understood by Kamula (and other Melane-
sians) as something like an external war-machine - was speculatively understood to exem-
plify the peaceful capacities of the stranger who could arbitrate on the definition of the
nation-state in Bougainville and help end the war there.
CAVEAT
Despite optimistically concluding this paper with accounts of Rambo's peacemaking I thi
that ultimately the Kamula's Rambo conveyed and enhanced the dangerous capacity of
ongoing national expansion of the people's access to the means of violence. This expans
of privatised power was combined with popular demands for individual (and collective
autonomy from various kinds of violence and political domination enacted by agents of
state and logging companies. In this context Rambo's fundamental achievement among
Kamula in the 1990s was to help Kamula men militarise their understanding of t
embodied identity, the state and the political elite. Rambo helped move the Kamula (an
many others in PNG) towards a more complete merging of politics and violence.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am especially grateful to people who were subject to earlier versions of this paper -
notably those at a 2001 Anthropology Seminar at James Cook University and at the
tralian Anthropology Society meeting in Perth in the same year. Kingsley Arndt, S
Creighton, Rosita Henry, Mathew Spriggs and Peter Stewart helped check various b
the paper. I also want express my appreciation to the members of the AS AO network
collective generosity provided me with many additional examples of Rambo in the P
PNG and even Australia. I have not used these sightings of Rambo mainly becau
essay turned out more Kamula-centric and longer than I had intended. I also thank En
Maiala, Hakoli Kade, Bakadie Apaie, Amula Agiyale, Akabu Emesie, Nathan Deko
Nodiya Imali, Sisiyo Koiyali and his brother Miya for the data and ideas that make up
this paper. Hawo Kulu provided me with a Kamula commentary on an earlier draft. R
ers and editorial assistance from Andrew Lattas also helped improve the paper.
NOTES
1. People who are typically identified as Kamula now number around 1100. Kamula speakers mainly live at
Wawoi Falls and Somokopa. These two villages are some thirty to forty kilometres south of Mt. Bosavi.
Other Kamula live in villages, such as Makapa, Kamiyame and Aba, located north of the Aramia river. See
Kelly (1993:27-51) for an overview of the Kamula as part of Bosavi-Strickland regional culture. For material
directly relevant to this paper see Wood (1998).
2. One example of this kind of talk was when Sisiyo reported to us that a number people had heard the noise ot
an engine. Sisiyo claimed it was the sound of a helicopter that flies around at night bringing guns to
exchange for marijuana. He also politely agreed to my leading suggestion that the helicopter might have been
sent by Rambo, but immediately went on to outline how difficult it was to confirm Rambo's presence any-
where in PNG. He noted how people say that Rambo was in PNG, however, when you go to a place like the
Southern Highlands province people there say he is not there, but in the East Sepik province. And then if you
went there those people would say he was somewhere else. In this account Rambo is presented as always
marginal, as always invisible possibly to the point of being unreal which may well have been Sisiyo's point.
But despite Sisiyo's scepticism other Kamula like to think Rambo is perhaps still hiding in the vast forests of
the Western Province or is busy monitoring local developments via computers in the helicopter.
3. This point derives from a very late reading of Robbins (2004: 158).
4. Masculinity in Melanesia has recently become a popular suDject; see tmson (iwjj, uianc u*ov;, jony
(2001), Knauft (1999, 2002), Tuzin (1997) and Wilde (2003:9, 23-27; 2004).
77
5. This derives from insights found in Marks and Fisher (2002:384).

6. This and later accounts of Rambo as partible derive from Strathern (1988, 1999:229-261) whose 'Melane-
sian' person is partible and composed of transactable entities that take the form of the gift. Mosko (1992)
has sharply contrasted Strathern's approach to Sahlins' (1981,1985) Polynesian model of the divine, some-
times alien, king who encompasses and expansively internalizes all the members of the society in his own
heroic person. In response to Mosko's contrastive approach, Rumsey (2000) has, on the basis of linguistic
evidence, offered more of a synthesis. In this paper I emphasize that the Kamula's Rambo is both heroic
stranger and relational partible person.
7. Fernandez- Annesto (2000) argues talk of what he calls stranger effects involve claims to rule, claims to
impose life and death and assertions about the nature of the ruler-such as the extent to which the ruler is an
'atomized individuated entity' (Trouillot 2001:126), a heroic stranger or is a more relational person. This talk
about different kinds of rulers is an important site for developing new models of personhood and collective
relationships. My view is that the Kamula are creating and debating a number of understandings of power
and sovereignty; some of which - the wild sovereignty of the external war machine (Kapferer 2004:6-1 1), the
Stranger King and the relational, partible sovereign - are evident in their accounts of Rambo.
8. Others in the far more peaceful PNG mainland seem to have done the same. Ben Bohane reported that in
Simbu province a criminal gang's favourite videos were 'Rambo, American Ninja, Point Break, and Mad
Max. 'Most of us don't get past Grade 6 at school so this is our Hollywood education', laughs Thomas, the
Nightfox gang's 'operations commander'. Mainly the films give them stylistic clues - their clothes, the ritual
smoke before hold-ups, the way they sling their weapons and their English, peppered with gangster lingo'
(The Bulletin June 27 1995). For further examples of this kind of copying in the Pacific see Mitchell
(2000:203) and Jourdan (1995:142-3). In Sierra Leone, Richards (1996:58-59) has noted how groups
opposed to the state elite identified with Rambo by adopting his name and style of dress. Rambo was seen as
providing knowledge about the tricks you needed to survive in a war against the state.
9. Such an understanding of Rambo was also evident in a series of photos taken by soldiers in Bougainville in
December 1989 (Spriggs 1992). The photos show members of the PNG Defence Force (PNGDF) displaying
a beaten man who later died. In one image he wears a placard around his neck stating 'Rambo'. Confronted
by a proliferation of 'Rambos' the soldiers enact their own power by objectifying this man's body into a sign
of a defeated Rambo. The photographs record a unique event - the point where the post-colonial PNG state
started to kill its citizens after forcing them to appear as Rambo (while simultaneously recording the
process). But while the soldiers attempted to contain and eradicate Rambo's dangerous powers of anti-state
insurgency by rendering him visible to derision and mockery as he dies, they necessarily had to imitate, reify
and proliferate both Rambo and the forces he represented. By offering only a sign of Rambo the photograph
implied that the Real Rambo was beyond this particular death, as potentially inherent in other bodies the sol-
diers had not yet killed - Rambo 2, Rambo 3 etc. I take this to be an example of the way state agents produce
state power not only through practices of violence, but also through 'arresting images and desires articulated
in phantasy scenes' (Aretxaga cited in Grant 2001:337) that here involved Rambo. The soldiers enacted a
form of 'wild sovereignty' - the soldiers were external to the state's formal rules of engagement and were
able to assert themselves without constraint against another externality- a citizen redefined as Rambo
(Kapferer 2004: 6-7).
10. While not directly linked to Rambo a Kamula account of the first high-powered gun to arrive in the Gogo-
dala area reflects this tension in police responsibilities. A Pastor received the first gun from people in a sub-
marine. But the Pastor took it to the Gogodala police. The police beat him and put him in a cell. They were
angry with him because by bringing the strange gun to their attention and into the public domain the Pastor
had destroyed the effectiveness of what should have been a secret transaction between the Gogodala and the
gun-givers. The police appear as very sympathetic to the possible empowerment of the Gogodala even
though these transactions will destabilise state (and Christian) notions of order and visibility. Their primary
loyalty, unlike the Pastor's, is not to the state or church, but to their people.
11. It also appears there is a certain admiration by police for village-based warriors with Rambo-like properties.
In what could well be a fictional account Jeff Tyler, a travel writer, talked to 'a local policeman' in the Mt.
Hagen region: 'We talk about movies. They adore Sylvester Stallone. We talk about economics. My host
makes more money showing videos at night than he earns on the police force, but he loves being a cop. And
we talk about tribal warfare. At this point the cop really comes to life. Just goes off about these super war-
riors from his village who can dodge bullets. Cop: 'They call him Rambo in this country. Rambo ...and they
know how to use AK-47, M-16, M-60's...If you have time, we can go up to the village and meet the Rambos
that kill people' (See http://savytraveler.com/show/features/2000/20001201/papau.shtml).
12. I am indebted to Andrew Lattas for this point on Rambo's parents.
13. I recognize this is a far too brief introduction to the concept of se. But here I only really want to convey the sense
that it is a body, that it is transactable and can now apparently be created in any body who is a citizen of PNG.
14. In his movies once Rambo is linked to his trainer (according to some Kamula this is his 'foster-father' or
'father') he is prepared to acknowledge state power and even work for state goals. He is not simply an
embodiment of cathartic anti-state violence (Richards 1996: 58). He is prepared to use his power to supple-
ment that of the state - a possibility that, as outlined below, interests the Kamula in reference to
Bougainville. Simultaneously the state appropriates his capacities (or as we have seen tries to appropriate
such properties) and, in Rambo (Part 2), subordinates him to its political aims. This Rambo can be made (by
the state) to fight other states or other forces that might destroy it.
15. Some people say they fear the younger generation's use of such capacities would result in more Kamula
78
Wood
death. In his commentary on this part of the paper Hawo Kulu thought the old people did not want to transfer
knowledge of se to the new generation because it was about death and evil. The old people thought it was not
good for young people to know about se.
16. The shaming here focuses on obliterating gender conventions in such a way that men and women are inter-
changeable and equivalent. Here I would argue that the police occupy the male position so that from a male
prisoner's perspective police power crucially involves demasculinization and making the prisoner part of a
feminised abject within their law (Taussig 1997:120).
17. For surprisingly similar accounts of police punishments in West Papua see Stasch (2001: 48-49). Wilde
(2003:180-181) provides an account of policing among the Gogodala and outlines some forms of village
based punishment.
1 8. This sense of One-Eye being able to transcend, while being external to, representative government was neat-
ly conveyed in a Kamula story that outlines how One-Eye was being driven around by the Operations Man-
ager in the company car. One-Eye pulled up a truck that was carrying the local councilor from Wawoi Falls
and carried out a search for marijuana. As he threw the Councilor's bags onto the ground One-Eye told the
Councilor, 'At Wawoi Falls vou are the government, but here at Kamusi I am the government'.
19. Raskol refers to various types of criminals found in PNG (see Goddard 1995; Kulick 1993; Roscoe 1999;
Sykes 1999) and their rise to prominence in the 90s has been taken to indicate state and police dysfunction
(Dauverene 1998: Dinnen 200 R
20. It may be co-incidence that the village raided was the home of the current Member's main rival in the last
national elections and that the area was increasingly opposed to the logging company. Another explanation is
that the logging company was responding to a stand-down of operations ordered by the Chairman of a
landowner company. He was angry that company officials had seized some alcohol he had brought into the
concession. They retaliated by seizing the guns most of which came from the Chairman's village.
21. This amplification of the threat of warfare could also help maintain a strong police presence in the Wawoi-
Gauvi concession. But according to one landowner company Chairman, a police presence is now apparently
required by the Timber Permit that was amended in 2004. According to the Chairman any 'disturbance' to
the company's operation in the Wawoi-Guavi concession will trigger the deployment of the police. While
obviously the permit does not explicitly authorize such policing the Chairman may have been reflecting on
more informal understandings that help define local politics.
22. This 'alliance' between the army and the raskols was also replicated in often close relationships between
defence force personnel and raskol gangs. A raid by raskols on the PNG Banking Corporation's Tabubil
branch reportedly involved two serving members of the PNG Defence Force and one former soldier (Post-
Courier August 12 1998:4). Four of the gang were later shot dead by the police.
23. These mercenaries were commonly referred to as Rambos in the international press. 1 take the reference to
Rambo as positioning the mercenaries as 'beyond' the legitimate state.
24. Soon after this was recorded police attacked and killed a number of students protesting the structural adjust-
ment policies of the World Bank.
25. See also Eves (2UUU), Knautt (ZUUZ;14U-1 15) ana KODDins (iw/, i^8j.
26. See Brunois (1999:122) for Kasua accounts ot a very similar use or apocalyptic themes by logging company
personnel in Port Moresby.
27. What the Kamula are perhaps creating here are '"spaces of death"(Taussig 1986) without borders, nightmar-
ish realities in which the habitual references that organize reality have been systematically broken, giving rise
to powerful phantasmatic states or state like organisation' (Aretxaga 2003: 401). These spaces are linked to a
specific form of government biopower that demonstrates an endless capacity to sort people into categories of
exclusion and then kill them (Agamben 1998; Das 2004). Foucault graphically captures something of this
modern notion of warfare when he writes 'wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be
defended: they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the
purposes of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity' (cited in Marks and Fischer 2002:382).
28. Rambo is just one ot a large number or people (Indonesians, university aiuaenis, Australians, /\iro-/\men-
cans) who the Kamula think may have been operating the submarines.
29. According to some Kamula the submarine no longer comes because u was so cioseiy monuorea oy me
police. It has been replaced by a helicopter. In Hawo Kulu's recent (2005) account the organiser of the heli-
copter is the ex-policeman who informed on One-Eye and appeared on a recent SBS television program (for
transcript see http://www.rimbunan-hijau-watch.org/docs/dateline.htm). Since his life was at risk the police-
man and his family fled to Australia. The policeman is from the Gogodala village of Kaniya, but his father
was really a Kamula man who was abducted as a child during a Gogodala raid on a Kamula settlement. The
exiled policeman now sends guns to the Kamula as a way of acknowledging his real origins. He is helping
the Kamula defend their land and interests in timber, oil and gas against people who would claim these
resources as theirs. This ex-policeman, taken as a transformation of Rambo, effects a resolution of Rambo's
racial and national ambiguities that are part of his, and the Kamula's, colonial legacy. Hawo's story of the ex-
policeman redefines the gun-giving form of masculine empowerment as a purely Kamula process.
30. Following Vivieros de Castro (1995:482) 1 would argue seir-decorations involved in niuai display and me
army uniforms derived from Rambo are understood by Kamula as equivalent to the activation of another
body state (the presence of which is manifested by the decorations or clothes).
31. Sophie Creighton suggested to me Kambo can also be understood to represent Modern Man s tnreatening
desirability to women especially married women. Such modern men could have the power to disrupt any
man's marriage.
79
32. But dreaming of sex with a woman especially a white woman, signals the likelihood of a successful hunt.
33. The neighbouring Gogodala have important accounts of how Sosola, after opening a path to allow the first
Europeans to enter Gogodala territory, was taken to England where his wife gave birth to the Queen of Eng-
land. The Queen gave birth to Prince Charles who is now equated with Jesus (Dundon 1998:45; Wilde
1997:50-4, 66). I think the Kamula Rambo narrative is, in part, a reworking of the Gogodala stories concern-
ing Sosola and the Gogodala's relationship to new forms of sovereignty.
34. The nhrasine here derives from M. Strathern cited in Clark (\ 997:79V
35. Treating the Rambo stories as a unified set might be justified in terms of conventions applying to Kamu
narrative about creator heroes where segments of the total narrative can be told on the assumption that th
listener will know the overall sequence of events. But it seems to me that the instability of Rambo stories wi
prevent an agreed sequence from emerging.
36. And the current Somare government is regarded as corrupt and bad, especially by those Kamula who do n
suDDOrt Rimbunan Hiiau.
37. Dyer (1997) has argued Rambo is a figure who tries to reconcile and redeem colonial and post-colonial vio-
lence and associated racial structures. Rambo does this in his films by returning to his Native American her-
itage (evident in his use of knife, cross-bow and headband). He bypasses the historical reality of white USA
by returning to what can be conceptualised as 'coming before' the USA (Dyer 1997:161). While set in a
colonial relationship to the state the Rambo movies show that as a white Native American (thereby embody-
ing the reconciliation of America with its colonial other), Rambo is built to do 'the job of colonial world
improvement' (Dyer 1997:161). His return to PNG's founding father Somare and his creation of peace in
Bougainville can perhaps be understood as an attempt to redeem and transform PNG's descent into post-
colonial violence through a synthesis of Rambo's white foreign capacities and the native ruler. Insofar as
Rambo here functions as a return to colonial rule, then here it is worth stressing such external rulers - virtual
Stranger-Kings according to Henley (2004) - were closely associated with pacification throughout PNG.
38. According to Simmel the stranger can take on such a role 'because he is not bound by roots to the particular
constituents and partisan dispositions of the group, he confronts all of these with a distinctly "objective" atti-
tude, an attitude that does not signify mere detachment and non-participation, but is a distinct structure com-
posed of remoteness and nearness, indifference and involvement' (cited in Fernandez- Armetso 2000: 87).
39. Clark was also interested in other topics. While aware that the PNG state has exhibited only a limited ability
and interest in disseminating images and rituals that might incorporate the people or citizens in to a power
that simultaneously produces, and transcends, violence and death (Kapferer 1988; Taussig 1997), Clark
argued that a concern with such a topic might be productive of insights into state power. The PNG state does
clearly demonstrate a power in reference to death by celebrating itself through newspaper advertisements of
official condolences following the death of elite bureaucrats. Here the PNG state demonstrates a capacity to
contain the power of negation (death) within its own expressive forms and is able to represent and reproduce
itself through representations of its members at the point of their death (following Townsend-Gault cited in
Strathern 1999:37). Another area of research opened up by a concern with state ritual is the treatment of sol-
diers killed during the Bouganville war - where I work some Gogodala soldiers were buried in the govern-
ment station at Balimo.
40. After all the data I have dealt with consist largely of rumors, gossip and only a few reasonably stable narra-
tives. But such data do reflect how ideas about recent political events circulate in communities with little reg-
ular access to television, or newsnaners.
1 X
41 . This derives from a point made by Andrew Latt

42. See Vilaca (2002:351).
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Kamula Accounts of Rambo and The State of Papua New Guinea

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Oceania Publications, University of Sydney

Kamula Accounts of Rambo and the State of Papua New Guinea

Oceania Publications, University of Sydney, Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to

Critical evaluations of the figure of Rambo, metropolitan and non-metropolitan alike, as

Oceania 76, 2006 61

As in Bougainville 'Rambo' defined a certain non-conforming, rebellious citizen that

TRYING TO LINK VIOLENCE AND THE MODERN STATE

POLICE, GUNS AND WAR

the on-going conflict on Bougainville has . . . reinforced the militarisation of state

STATE DISINTEGRATION, ARMIES AND ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT

FROM HUNTERS TO SOLDIERS

SUPPLANTING THE SOVEREIGN, KILLING RAMBO AND HOW PNG SAVES

SPECULATIONS - RAMBO DEFINES A UNIFIED, PEACEFUL NATION-STATE OF

Here Rambo functions as the stranger-as-arbitrator (Fernandez-Armesto 2000: 87).38

TOWARDS AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE PNG STATE (VIA RAMBO)?

5. This derives from insights found in Marks and Fisher (2002:384).

41 . This derives from a point made by Andrew Latt

DYER, R. 1997 White. Routledge: London.

LIRIA, Y. 1993 Bougainville Campaign Diary. Melbourne: Indra Publishing.

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