Mosko - Totem and Transaction: The Objectification of 'Tradition' Among North Mekeo

Oceania Publications, University of Sydney
Totem and Transaction: The Objectification of 'Tradition' among North Mekeo

Author(s): Mark S. Mosko
Source: Oceania, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Dec., 2002), pp. 89-109
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Oceania Publications, University of Sydney
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OCEANIA
Vol. 73 No. 2 December 2002
Totem and Transactio

of 'Tradition' Among
MarkS.Mosko
Australian National University
ABSTRACT
Most recent treatments of Melanesian post-contact change have presumed that objectifica-
tions of 'culture' and 'tradition' have intensified and proliferated in response to the forces
of colonialism and the penetration of the nation-state. Harrison (2000) has recently argued,
however, that in pre-colonial times too Melanesians characteristically objectified their cul-
tural practices and identities as 'possessions' that could be readily exchanged or transacted.
Supposedly, the key difference between the two eras has accorded with different formula-
tions of 'property': 'private property' and the logic of 'possessive individualism' in the
post-contact era; and 'trading and gift-exchange systems' or 'prestige economies' in pre-
contact times. In this article I examine Harrison's portrayal of Melanesian cultural practices
as 'possessions' and the notions of 'property' that he sees as key to the cultural objectifica-
tion in both pre- and post-colonial settings with reference to ethnographic and historica
information regarding the North Mekeo peoples of Papua New Guinea. I argue from the
perspective of the New Melanesian Ethnography that Harrison's view of pre-contact pres
tige economies and trade and gift exchange systems retains several misleading a priori
assumptions about 'commodity exchange'; and, illustrating the potential of the New
Melanesian Ethnography for historical applications, that he overemphasizes the extent to
which post-contact changes in cultural objectification have involved individualised and
commodified forms of property. Consequently, in the case of North Mekeo, both the conti
nuities and the changes between pre- and post-contact cultural objectifications may have
proceeded differently from the ways Harrison has outlined for Melanesia generally.
Much of the recent discussion over post-contact change in Melanesia and the Pacific
focussed on the processes by which cultural practices considered to be 'traditional' h
been historically objectified (e.g. Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Linnekin and Poyer 19
Linnekin 1992; Hanson 1989; Thomas 1991; Jolly and Thomas 1992; Norton 1993;
1992, 1995; LiPuma 2000). The preponderance of these analyses contend that such ob
fications have intensified and proliferated in response to the forces of colonialism and
Oceania 73, 2002 89
Totem and Transaction
penetration of the nation-state. Harrison (2000), however, has recently argued that these
objectifications of culture are neither new nor necessarily the effects of colonialism. Pre-
colonial no less than post-colonial Melanesians, he suggests, characteristically construed
their cultural practices and identities as objectified 'possessions' which in many ethno-
graphic instances could be readily exchanged or transacted. Harrison posits, moreover, that
the processes by which cultures were objectified in the two historical eras differed in accor-
dance with 'changing conceptualisations of the nature of property' (2000:663); namely, in
pre-colonial times Melanesians conceived of their cultural property with reference to
'the prestige economies, and in the trading and gift-exchange systems typical of
this ethnographic region', whereas post-colonial cultures and identities have been
objectified in accordance with concepts of 'private property' and the logic of 'pos-
sessive individualism' (Harrison 2000:676).
My purpose in this article is to examine Harrison's portrayal of Melanesian cultural

practices as 'possessions', particularly those 'conceptualisations of the nature of property'
which he sees as key to the objectification of cultures in both pre- and post-colonial set-
tings.1 While I applaud Harrison and other analysts he cites (Otto 1991; Linnekin 1990:170,
1992:253; Jolly and Thomas 1992:241; Jolly 1992:58-9; Keesing 1993:592) for recognis-
ing that pre-contact Melanesians were self-conscious of cultural differences across a wide
range of societal scales (persons, clans, tribes, societies, etc.) and that colonialism offered
new possibilities for conceptualising and contesting cultural objectifications, I consider here
whether Melanesians' understandings about and practices constitutive of their cultural sym-
bols may have involved notions of 'property' quite different from those postulated by Harri-
son here and in a series of other recent writings (Harrison 1992, 1993, 1995, 2002). I argue,
first, that Harrison's depiction of pre-contact cultural objectification elides the distinction
between gift and commodity forms of exchange (Mauss 1967; Gregory 1982) as these have
been developed in much classic and contemporary ethnography of the region; consequently,
his portrayal of pre-contact notions of 'property' and cultural objectification tend to incor-
porate exogenous elements of Western ideology regarding private property, commodities,
and market exchange. Pre-contact Melanesian notions of 'property', I suggest, conformed
instead with indigenous modes of gift exchange, sociality and agency in which the Western
distinction between persons and things, or subjects and objects, were not salient and, hence,
where 'possessions' of the sort indicated by Harrison were conceived as detachable parts of
the persons who transacted them. I draw here upon the so-called New Melanesian Ethnogra-
phy (Josephides 1991; cf. Foster 1995) of sociality, gift exchange, personhood and agency
represented in the works of Marilyn Strathern (1988, 1991, 1999, 2000), and Roy Wagner
(1986, 1991) among numerous others.2
The significance of this clarification goes beyond setting the record straight for pre-con-
tact cultural objectification. If Harrison's portrayal of pre-contact cultural objectification in
terms of 'possessions' and 'property' is inappropriate, then both the continuities and the
changes between pre- and post-contact cultural objectifications may have proceeded different-
ly from the ways he has perceived them. While I concede Melanesians have been introduced
to Western notions of private property and individualised personhood through numerous post-
contact engagements with exogenous forces, I argue, secondly, that some important aspects of
post-contact cultural objectification and change which have been taken as direct effects of
colonialism may indicate instead the continuation into post-contact times of pre-existing
endogenous understandings about persons, transactions, relationships and agency. The trans-
formation of pre-contact to post-contact forms of cultural objectification, in other words, may
in certain circumstances have been largely experienced as continuous with pre-contact forms
rather than as the sort of change perceived by Harrison or others. In this regard, I argue that
the New Melanesian Ethnography contains a capacity for comprehending contemporary
90
Mosko
processes of change even in contemporary settings which has till now remained for the most
part unexploited (cf. Foster 1995; Strathern 1990).
In the first section below, therefore, I juxtapose Harrison's view of pre-contact cultural
objectification with that of the New Melanesian Ethnography to highlight the significantly
distinct implications of gift and commodity exchange for processes of cultural identifica-
tion and differentiation. In the second section, I develop these issues empirically through
an ethnographic and historical investigation of the conceptualisations of cultural identity
and difference in both pre- and post-contact circumstances for a single Melanesian case,
the North Mekeo of Papua New Guinea. I begin with Seligmann's classic account of
Mekeo cultural practice and totemic symbolism in the earliest phase of European contact,
focussing upon indigenous notions of 'custom' (kangakanga) and 'praise' or 'fame'
(auafangai) . Seligmann's account of these notions is interesting not the least because it
incorporates many of the same presuppositions regarding 'property' and 'possession'
which appear in Harrison's framework. Certain features of Seligmann's and others'
accounts of kangakanga 'custom' and auafangai 'fame', however, suggest that North
Mekeo pre-contact objectifications of cultural difference and identity conformed very
closely with the dynamics of gift-exchange and personal partibility that I have analysed in
other contexts of both the 'traditional' and changing culture (Mosko 1985, 1992, 1999,
2000, 2001). In the article's third section, with reference to ethnographic data I have been
gathering since the mid 1970s, I seek to demonstrate the continuity of Mekeo cultural
objectifications in terms of kangakanga and auafangai between Seligmann's time and the
late- and post-colonial eras. In the fourth section, I discuss how villagers have adopted var-
ious exogenous European cultural practices to become part of their 'culture' (kangakanga)
for which they enjoy a certain contemporary 'fame' or 'renown' (auafangai) consistent
with long-standing understandings of those notions. Here I illustrate Harrison's most basic
point - that objectifications of North Mekeo culture have been relatively continuous from
pre- to post-contact eras - emphasising, however, that the nature of that continuity is dif-
ferent from what he has imagined.
CULTURAL OBJECTIFICATION AND GIFT EXCHANGE THEORY
Harrison's view of Melanesian cultural practices as objectified 'possessions' is oriented for

the most part to the categories and logic of commodities whereby social interaction consists
in individualised persons or agents who transact with respect to things, whether immaterial
or material, in accordance with principles of ownership, market exchange and 'possessive
individualism' (2000:674; Macpherson 1962; Handler 1988; cf. Gregory 1982). Particularly
important for my purposes here is the unambiguous differentiation of persons, whether indi-
vidual or collective, from things or objects that they 'own' or 'possess'. In the context of
pre-contact Melanesia, Harrison cites numerous examples of cultural objectification and
reification that are replete with just these notions. Referring to Schwartz's (1975) account of
Admiralty Islands 'cultural totemism' , for example:
An ethnic group owned its culture as a kind of patented possession, the group's
patent consisting fundamentally in the right to control the diffusion of its cul-
ture.... There were cases in which the infringement of a group's proprietary
rights - its right, for instance, to ornament the prows of canoes in a particular
way _ resulted in warfare . . . there were well-established procedures for the sale
or transmission of these entitlements across cultural boundaries ... (Harrison
2000:664; emphases added).
Illustrating the 'commoditisation of ritual forms' for pre-contact Siuai as reported by Oliver
(1955), Harrison notes:
91
Apart from certain forms of magic owned by descent groups, all property rights
in magic were held by individuals. These rights were bought and sold as valuable
commodities. In keeping with the competitive and individualistic tenor of much of
Siuai life, the world of Siuai magic seems to have been essentially a market, its
driving force being a constant quest for new market niches. . . . Their attitudes
towards magic and ritual were essentially pragmatic and instrumental
(2000:665-6; emphases added).
In Vanuatu, groups such as the Mewun described by Larcom (1982),
... seem to have quite literally produced culture for export, as a commodity
intended from the very start for trafficking with outsiders. ...Until the 1980s, the
Mewun used [the term 'kastom'] to refer to a complex of ideas, dating back to the
pre-colonial period, having to do with the treatment of cultural forms as trans-
actable commodities. ... Social groups among the Mewun were, above all, entities
that continually 'produced' culture, held proprietary rights in these cultural prod-
ucts, and conducted their relations with each other through the sale and purchase
of these rights. (Harrison 2000:666; emphases added, original emphases deleted)
Citing further examples - Tanna (Lindstrom 1990), Balua (Otto 1991), Orokaiva
(Williams 1928), Baktaman (Barth 1973), and Omie (Rohatynskyi 1997) - Harrison posits
that even knowledge was considered a 'sort of entity or object: after it 'came', or 'arrived,'
people could 'give,' 'send,' 'take,' 'keep,' 'have' it, and so forth as though it were a mater-
ial thing. ... In other words, it was not simply the artefacts, but also the practices of making
and using the artefacts, that could be 'owned' and transacted as cultural property'
(2000:667-668; emphases added).
Interestingly, it is in the context of summarising Melanesians' post-contact adoptions of
European cultural practices that there is a discernible shift in Harrison's descriptive termi-
nology consisting in a blending of commodity and gift exchange:
Often, mission Christianity was initially treated in precisely this way, as a power-
ful new cultic ritual or system of magic that had to be acquired in the proper man-
ner; and in some cases this involved payments of wealth.... To be legitimate, the
expansion of the Methodist mission from one [Tolai] community to the next had to
be accompanied by transactions of wealth.... The Tolai initially treated the
Catholic lotu, likewise, as a powerful new system of magic; and, as with any magi-
cal complex, legitimate possession of it could only be acquired in exchange for
wealth (2000:670; emphases added).
Elsewhere, Harrison (1995) has elaborated on indigenous Melanesian transactions involving

property rights over ritual or symbolic as well as material goods in such a way as to col-
lapse similarly the differentiation between commodity and gift exchange. Following Kopy-
toff (1986; see also Appadurai 1986; Thomas 1991), he argues that antinomies such as
inalienable versus alienable possessions, or gifts versus commodities, are 'primarily fea-
tures of commodity economies, and of the particular distinction they create between persons
and things' (1995:142). Since gift economies do not elaborate these same distinctions, it is
apparently as legitimate to describe the transactions constitutive of gift economies in the
language of commodities as it is in the language of gifts:
[I]n gift economies, all goods stand for human relationships, for persons or for
aspects of persons, and create by being transacted a commonality of identity
between their givers and receivers. These economies can treat rights in ritual, or in
92
Mosko
other symbols of cultural or religious affiliation, as goods [i.e. commodities]

because all their goods have in common with ritual the property of symbolising
human identities and relationships in the first place. (Harrison 1995:142).
Transactions between persons of two different exchange economies, for example,
approximated to commodity exchange, and in my discussion of them I shall there-

fore sometimes use terms such as sale, purchase and exchange value. But, in gen-
eral, even these transactions were constructed as personalised, as taking place
under conventions of sociability similar to those governing exchanges closer to
home. (1995:142).
The alternative framework on gift economies being adopted here in terms of the New
Melanesian Ethnography has been most cogently summarised by Marilyn Strathern in The
Gender of the Gift (1988). Seeming 'objects' of gift exchange in much of Melanesia are
understood to be or to embody tokens or parts of persons and/or relations.3 In Strathern's
(1988) terms, Melanesian persons are viewed as dividuals, composite beings of numerous
parts contributed by other persons in prior exchanges or transactions. Consistent with
Mauss's (1967) original formulation, for much of Melanesia there is thus no rigid distinc-
tion between persons and things, or subjects and objects, and in terms of 'property' it is dis-
torting to presume that persons 'own' things or 'possess rights' to them in any simple or
straightforward way. Social relationship and interaction are understood instead to consist in
the detachment of a part of one person - which Western observers might take to be a
'thing' or 'object' - and its attachment as part of another person. Incorporation of the part
of another person typically should elicit a reciprocal detachment, transfer and attachment to
the first person [Figure 1].
1 LJ3 - -I 1
AGENTI J3_J ¡ 3 i AGENT II
i 4 i P*i
Figure
In thi
only s
ally el
sition
tinctiv
cally d
respon
runs p
direct
Bourd
those
and ef
93
detect in Harrison's account of the differences between pre- and post-contact forms of cultur-
al objectification this dimension of interpersonal agency and thus the capacity to address the
transformation between pre-and post-contact forms of cultural objectification.
I can now turn to my empirical case of pre- and post-contact North Mekeo cultural
objectification to illustrate these notions.
PRE- AND EARLY POST-CONTACT CULTURAL OBJECTIFICATION:

AUAFANGAI AND KANGAKANGA AS REPORTED BY SELIGMANN
The Austronesian-speaking Mekeo peoples reside on the coastal plain at the extreme north-
western edge of Central Province approximately 150 km up the Hiritano Highway from the
national capital, Port Moresby. Their first direct encounters with Europeans apparently
occurred in 1890, but from about 1875 Protestant and Catholic missionaries had been active
in several of the neighbouring Roro villages sprinkled along the adjoining coast (Monsell-
Davis 1981:40-61). The North Mekeo live in nucleated villages along the upper reaches of
the Biaru River, surrounded by swamp and forest, to the northwest of the Central Mekeo,
with whom they share many features of culture, social organisation, post-contact history
and language.4 Nowadays, the eight main North Mekeo villages range in size from about
250 to 1100 persons.
To a significant degree, pre- and post-contact cultural objectifications among North
Mekeo have centred on the two tightly intertwined categories, auafangai 'fame' or
'renown', and kangakanga 'custom' or 'tradition', initially reported by C.G. Seligmann
(1910), the first anthropologist to describe the social institutions of Mekeo on the basis of
data he gathered while on the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Strait in 1898 and the
Daniels Expedition to New Guinea in 1904. Consistent with the evolutionary theorising that
dominated social anthropological thought in England at the time, Seligmann portrayed
Mekeo auafangai as 'signs of a former totemic condition, or at least of a stage in which ani-
mals were of importance in the beliefs of the people' (1910:16). The basic auafangai prac-
tice consisted of attaching specific animal or plant names and designs to particular patrilin-
eal descent groups, whether lineages, clans or moieties. Kangakanga 'clan-badges' or 'clan
insignia', on the other hand, were the named animal or plant species, or parts of them, that
were physically incorporated in the ritual ornaments worn by clan members in their dance
costumes or, in some cases, represented in the carvings on chiefly clan clubhouses (Selig-
mann 1910:320).
It is important to note that Seligmann's accounts of Mekeo and other 'Western Papuo-
Melanesians' were dominated by the tabulation of these auafangai- and kangakanga-like
totemic affiliations. As a crude measure, more than one-third of Seligmann's 69 pages on
Mekeo were devoted to the detailed description of the specific auafangai and kangakanga
of particular clans. Undoubtedly, the interest that totemism held in Seligmann's time has
been superseded in subsequent anthropological theorising, and with good reasons. But it
remains curious that, given all the research that has been conducted among Mekeo and Roro
since Seligmann's time (e.g. Guis 1936; Egidi 1912; Dupeyrat 1935; Belshaw 1951; Hau'o-
fa 1971, 1981; Stephen 1974, 1995; Monsell-Davis 1981; Jones 1998; Mosko 1985;
Bergendorff 1996), no subsequent investigator as far as I know has yet addressed the cate-
gories auafangai and kangakanga except by way of the briefest passing allusion.
This oversight can be explained partly, perhaps, by the imperfect fit between the
Mekeo categories and conventional anthropological understandings of totemic thought (e.g.
Frazer 1910; Durkheim 1912; Stanner 1965; Lévi-Strauss 1962, 1963, 1964, 1969; Tonkin-
son 1974; Hiatt 1969). Seligmann noted that every patrilineal clan among Mekeo had a dis-
tinct animal or plant which was regarded as its auafangai, that clans which shared patrilin-
eal descent could be expected to possess the same species as auafangai, and that in some
instances a particular clan might claim more than one species as auafangai (1910:320).
94
Mosko
Beyond this, however, Seligmann was sufficiently perplexed over the precise relationship
between a clan and its auafangai that he was lead to seek further clarification on the point
through written correspondence with the local missionary, Fr. Egidi (1910:320-22). Egidi's
report did little to clarify the situation however, stressing how villagers 'very often con-
fused' auafangai with other categories of clan designation: kangakanga 'clan badges' and
the names of ufu clan clubhouses (1910:321-22). Seligmann thus concluded that this confu-
sion, while not easy to explain,
...is very typical of the condition of things throughout the whole of Mekeo at the
present day, and is probably not due to white influence to any large extent. Cer-
tainly there are men still active and energetic, who were important members of
their communities before the early nineties when white influence first began to be
exerted in the district, who confuse iauafangai and kangakanga and the names of
these with those of clubhouses. In fact it must be assumed that Mekeo had, apart
from white influence, reached a state at which iauafangai (perhaps representing
the earliest clan-badges) had become degraded and were confused with kangakan-
ga which in their turn were thus subjected to an influence making for degenera-
tion. (1910:321).
This 'degeneration' had supposedly ensued from the postulated 'former totemic condition'
(1910:16) mentioned above. But whether degenerated or otherwise, nowhere else in Selig-
mann's text are Mekeo auafangai or kangakanga affiliations referred to explicitly as
'totems' or 'totemic'; indeed, for auafangai he refrains from using any English language
gloss at all. This contrasts sharply with Seligmann's practice with the Massim - the other
major cultural region described in The Melanesians - where 'the most characteristic cul-
tural feature ... is the existence of a peculiar form of totemism with matrilineal descent'
(1910:9; see 1910:376-746 and passim).
There are additional reasons, I suggest, why Seligmann might have refrained from
glossing Mekeo auafangai or kangakanga as 'totems' and why subsequent investigators
have tended to avoid the topic almost entirely. Here it will be necessary to consider the two
concepts separately. It seems that members of a clan in Seligmann's time and subsequently
did not regard their auafangai species as in any way ancestral to themselves, and there were
no legends at all concerning their origin (1910:323). Members of a clan and their spouses
were not obliged to ritually avoid their auafangai species either for killing or eating
(1910:320). Members of different clans which happened to possess the same auafangai
were not prohibited from marrying as long as in doing so they did not violate other rules of
marriage prohibition (Seligmann 1910:351-2, 363-5, 366). Also, Seligmann makes no
mention of any spiritual affiliation or shared essence between members of a clan and their
auafangai species.
There are similar conceptual difficulties with kangakanga 'clan-badges' or 'emblems'.
For Seligmann, where an animal or plant category was properly a clan's auafangai, the
paraphernalia of dance costumes obtained from those species or the clubhouse designs rep-
resenting them were correspondingly the clan's kangakanga (1910:320). Thus men and
women of the clan which regarded hornbill for its auafangai could wear hornbill feathers
and beaks on their dancing regalia as kangakanga and could carve hornbill figures on the
ritual posts of their clan ceremonial clubhouse. However, Seligmann noted that auafangai
species and kangakanga categories for the same clan did not always correlate, and in some
instances inanimate objects such as mountains or even abstract designs served as the kan-
gakanga badges of particular clans (1910:325). While there was no ritual avoidance of
killing one's own animal kangakanga, in some clans, but not universally, members were
prohibited from eating those species (1910:322-3). A given clan group might possess
numerous kangakanga badges or emblems (1910:327). In warfare, people who shared the
95
same kangakanga would not avoid attacking one another on that basis, and as with auafan-
gai there was evidently no presumption of a spiritual essence shared between members of a
clan and their kangakanga species (1910:327).
Seligmann's account of kangakanga (but not auafangai; see below) included two addi-
tional elements that further differentiate it from theories of totemism while tying it to theo-
ries of gift exchange and inalienability. On the one hand, only members of a designated clan
were entitled to wear or display its publicly recognised kangakanga ornaments, and this
right was jealously guarded (1910:324). On the other, a clan could 'sell' or transfer their
kangakanga to another unrelated clan if the latter group made formal payments (kaua) of
ceremonial wealth objects (pigs, strings of dogs' teeth, shell valuables, bird of paradise
plumes) at special feasts, and Seligmann provides several examples of such transfers
(1910:324-5).
It will be recalled that it is the aspect of 'sale' and 'purchase' that Harrison uses to jus-
tify treating pre-contact Melanesian social identities as culturally objectified 'property'. For
several fairly obvious reasons, however, these kangakanga transactions do not correspond
with most conventional definitions of 'property' in the sense of 'objects' or 'commodities'
(absence of prices, market principles of exchange, etc.) (cf. Kopytoff 1986; Appadurai
1986). Rather, consistent with indigenous understandings at the time Seligmann was writ-
ing, I believe, the kangakanga emblems, like the wealth objects for which they were
exchanged, are more appropriately viewed as parts of the persons, single and collective,
who transacted them.5 Critically, the original group retained the kangakanga emblems for
its members as before, and neither clan was prohibited from transferring their kangakanga
to yet other clans in subsequent transactions (1910:324-5).
Moreover, in their enactment, exchange and display, kangakanga practices in Selig-
mann's time and subsequently appear to have exhibited critical capacities of interpersonal
agency to which I referred above, and it is precisely these elements of agency which pro-
vide the link between kangakanga 'emblems' and auafangai 'renown' or 'fame' that so baf-
fled Seligmann (see also below). Seligmann, for example, noted a practice of 'invoking' or
'praising' the name of one's auafangai or kangakanga species or the name of one's club-
house by calling it out loud when striking a blow in combat or while embracing one's clan
clubhouse posts upon return from a war party (1910:332). Fr. Egidi, who by then had been
resident in Mekeo for several years, noted that when asked to name the clubhouse of a par-
ticular clan, villagers would answer, '[Those people] invoke, or celebrate (for this, I think is
the meaning of the verb iauafangai whose noun is iauafangai) such and such a thing' (quot-
ed in Seligmann 1910:322). The compiler of the two-volume Mekeo dictionary, Fr. Desnois,
provided numerous definitions of auafangai in its predicate form to confirm this general
meaning: 'to brag, to acclaim', 'to regard as sacred (e.g.: totem)', 'to repeat continually,' 'to
devote/give oneself completely', and 'to exalt (a name)' (1933:142-3). This aspect of
'invoking', 'praising', 'celebrating', etc. I gloss, following Munn (1986), as 'fame' or
'renown'.
These suggestions are strongly reinforced when Seligmann's (19 10: vi, ix, 195-310)
account of the parallel concept of oaoa 'clan-badge' among the closely related neighbour-
ing Roro peoples is considered. Roro oaoa typically involved names or designs referring to
animal or plant species or natural phenomena. However, apparently unlike Mekeo, Roro did
not impose an additional distinction paralleling that oí auafangai and kangakanga. Regard-
less, as with Mekeo, among Roro, animals of a given species did not receive any special
regard from clan members who considered them as oaoa, and they could eat them freely
(1910:208). Most significantly for my purposes here, Seligmann indicated that '...although
the word oaoa is commonly used to mean badge or sign, it has a wider significance to the
native mind, and is sometimes applied to a large group of customs distinguishing one set of
people from another' (1910:207). In this latter regard, even the 'customs and methods of
performing the common acts of life' (1910:214) are recognised as the oaoa of specific
96
Mosko
groups of people. This is, I believe, precisely how kangakanga practices are now under-
stood among North Mekeo (see below).
As an indication of the close similarity between Roro and Mekeo in this regard, the
oaoa names of many Roro clubhouses were the same as those of some Mekeo clans
(1910:226). Single Roro clans were noted to possess 'a bewildering multiplicity' of oaoa
(1910:213). These included dances, dancing regalia, and carving designs on clubhouses, but
also architectural details of domestic houses and chiefs' houses, canoe names, fishing net
names, weapons, etc. 'which cannot be copied by others without offence' (1910:210). More
generally, Seligmann reported that oaoa were the 'property of groups of individuals of com-
mon descent' (1910:207), and that 'it is clear that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish
between property and oaoa' (1910:215). As with Mekeo, Roro oaoa could be transferred
between groups through 'sale' or 'exchange' (1910:211). Chiefs' titles, spear names, and
the names of bows and arrows were also listed as oaoa; and suggestive of the potential
powers or agency of oaoa generally, weapon names were derived from the 'medicine which
is rubbed on [them] to make them deadly' (1910:215).
In summary, from Seligmann and other sources it appears that at the time of the impo-
sition of colonialism and presumably earlier, Mekeo practices included certain convention-
alised forms of transactable kangakanga objectifications which served to affiliate persons to
clan groupings and to differentiate both clan group, ethnic and other groupings from one
another, as suggested by Harrison (2000). The answer to the question of whether these
objectifications conform with Harrison's notions of 'property' or 'commodities', and partic-
ularly the nature and significance of the agentive capacity of auafangai, will require a care-
ful consideration of additional subsequently gathered information.
THE CONTINUITY OF PRE- AND POST-CONTACT OBJECTIFICATION

On the basis of field enquiries conducted between 1974 and the present, I can confirm that
Seligmann's earlier gloss for kangakanga as 'clan-badge', 'sign' or 'emblem' continues to
resonate with current Mekeo usages. The notion is, however, nowadays translated by Tok
Pisin speakers as "kastom" and by English speakers as 'custom' or even occasionally as 'cul-
ture' or 'tradition', thereby signalling a considerable generalisation and reification beyond
the animal and plant elements of ritual dance costumes and clubhouses noted by Seligmann.
One often hears villagers express words to the effect, 'that is our/their kangakanga, our/their
custom' . Such an expansion would be consistent with the analyses of other cases in post-con-
tact Melanesia under the influence of colonialism (e.g. Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Lin-
nekin and Poyer 1990; Jolly and Thomas 1992; Foster 1995). It is very difficult to assess,
however, whether or in exactly which respect(s) this elaboration has occurred. Knowledge-
able elders insist that the term, kangakanga, has 'always' had the wider application for virtu-
ally any customary activity that is distinctive to the people of one group or another. That the
use of the analogous notion, oaoa, among the closely-related Roro immediately after contact
was being used to refer to virtually any customary activity, had 'a wider significance to the
native mind, and [was] sometimes applied to a large group of customs distinguishing one set
of people from another' (Seligmann 1910:207, emphasis added) implies that the narrower
focus of Seligmann's and the missionaries' accounts may have overlooked a more gener-
alised analogous practice among Mekeo. Nonetheless, Fr. Desnois's (1933:472) Mekeo dic-
tionary entry for kangakanga, based on numerous priests' notes compiled over the first four
decades of contact, suggestively includes not only 'ornament characteristic of villages deter-
mined by family' and 'coat of arms' but also the general sense of 'exclusivity' .
Regardless, the details of kangakanga and auafangai usage that I have recorded in late
colonial and post-colonial times appear to conform with the dynamics of personal partibility
and agency distinctive to Melanesian gift exchange, as I shall now outline, in contrast with
the mechanisms of commoditisation.
97
In general, clan members continue to lay claim to their clan kangakanga legacies by
means of patrilineal descent (but see Mosko n.d. and below). As in Seligmann's time, mem-
bers of the separate lineage branches of a clan which are typically distinguished as to spe-
cialised hereditary chiefly offices and functions (Mosko 1991; 1992) claim to that extent
'different' kangakanga from one another, while otherwise sharing those kangakanga prac-
tices which are common to the wider clan. But groups other than clans and their constituent
lineages (ikupu) may also be identified in terms of their own kangakanga. The chiefly lin-
eages (lopia) of all Mekeo clans, for example, would be described as having the same kan-
gakanga which is different from the kangakanga practices of the sorcery lineages (ungau-
naga). Whole village or tribal communities as well as such distinctions as between Papua
New Guineans and Europeans or Catholics and Evangelicals are similarly characterised in
terms of people of different kangakanga. As I shall illustrate below, in historical times
introduced as well as 'traditional' practices have been acquired by persons and groups who
previously lacked genealogical entitlements to them by means of formal compensatory pay-
ment in the form of pigs and/or other forms of wealth including quantities of cash.
Elders I have questioned on this matter trace the kangakanga 'customs' of all the clans
of the Mekeo and neighbouring related peoples to the myth of their culture here, Akaisa
(known as A'aisa in Central Mekeo and Walope or Oa Rove among Roro) and his younger
brother, Tsabini (cf. Seligmann 1910:303-9; Guis 1936; Hau'ofa 1981:77-83; Stephen
1995; Monsell-Davis 1981:233-4; Mosko 1985, 1991, 1992; Bergendorff 1996). These kan-
gakanga are distinguished by their 'skilfulness' or 'cleverness' (etsifa), that is, their ability
to produce specifiable or desired effects or transformations in the world, including the inter-
relationships between humans, living and dead. Villagers characterise this agentive property
of their kangakanga customs when performed in the appropriate contexts as 'hot' (tsiabu).
A stone axe is 'hot' for chopping down trees, that is, capable of effecting the changes that
result in the living tree being cut down. Fire is similarly 'hot' for cooking food. But fire is
'cold' (ekekid) for chopping down living trees, and axes are 'cold' for cooking food.6
Like other Melanesians supposedly, North Mekeo do not differentiate in the terms of
their culture between 'ritual' and 'pragmatic' domains or activities (Lawrence and Meggitt
1965; Chowning 1977). This means that every seemingly non-ritual or secular customary
activity has some ritual element, and vice- versa. Villagers, however, clearly demarcate
those kangakanga practices that either involve or affect living human (babiau) or human-
like beings who are accordingly animated by a 'soul' (laulau) or 'spirit' (tsiange) from the
actions of non-human beings which lack souls or spirits.7 To human and human-like beings,
those kangakanga practices that are regarded as 'hot' or capable of effecting the desired
change in others are effectively detached parts of other human or human-like beings, typi-
cally in the form of either knowledge or other parts of their persons or bodies. In a quite lit-
eral way, of course, all of the kangakanga customs of living Mekeo peoples, being obtained
ultimately from Akaisa, qualify as detached parts of his person - including by that ele-
ments of his thought and knowledge - which have been transmitted to living villagers by
interpersonal transaction over intervening generations (see below). Hence North Mekeo
kangakanga are generally regarded as embodying the 'hot' personal qua bodily/spiritual
efficacy of their celebrated culture-hero.
Perhaps the clearest way to describe the agency of kangakanga and auafangai is in ref-
erence to practices that most Western observers have labelled as 'magic' or 'sorcery' -
capacities for which North and other Mekeo have become renowned ethnographically and
across Papua New Guinea. The 'hot' procedures for killing by snake-bite and poisons, for
causing illness and 'accidents', for warfare, for courting and love magic, nowadays for
gambling, and so on are the kangakanga of those persons who have mastered the requisite
knowledge and techniques that they acquired from other persons and which they employ
upon still other persons. I use the Strathernian language of personal partibility intentionally
here to describe these various transactions, for there are several aspects of 'hot' interperson-
98
Mosko
al agency involved in these and other kangakanga. First, taking the example of love magic,
fathers stereotypically transmit to their adolescent sons the bits of their love charms only in
reciprocation for numerous elicitory gifts of the sons to the fathers - gifts consisting of the
sons' bodily labours (food, meat, fish, bits of tobacco, money); thus the father's love magic
is 'hot' or effective in being able to elicit certain desired personal tokens from the sons.
Importantly, although the transmission of love magic is ideally stated to be patrilineal,
fathers do not turn over love magic even to sons 'for nothing'. For this reason among oth-
ers, the lines by which love magic and other ritual knowledge is transmitted often deviate
from strict patrilines (Mosko n.d.). Second, when he is actually using his love magic to
'change the mind' of an intended lover, a man must recite certain ritual spells (menga)
which include the names of all the deceased adepts who had previously used it, for the love
charm is regarded as embodying traces of those persons' bodies (fa iofu, 'skin dirt'), and
thereby their 'spirits' or 'souls', all the way back to Akaisa himself. To the extent that a
man's love charm incorporates these relations/parts of spirit persons and he incorporates the
love charm as part of himself, he as a person is a composite being. Third, a love magician is
able to 'change a woman's mind' by directing the spirits contained in the charm, which he
holds close to his own body, to depart and enter the body of his intended lover; there the
'hot' spiritual agents of his charm change the woman's thoughts and actions towards him,
from aversion, perhaps, to love and desire. Fourth, it is assumed that a man who is effective
in practising love magic - who practises love magic as his kangakanga, as part of his per-
son _ wiii be so acknowledged with 'praise' 'fame' or 'renown' (keauafangai) by still
other persons. A man's kangakanga of wielding love magic is thus 'hot' and effective in
changing the thoughts held of him by members of the wider community or even beyond, in
eliciting their 'praise' of which his auafangai or 'fame' consists.
Other customary kangakanga practices among North Mekeo similarly involve numer-
ous dimensions of interpersonal transaction between composite persons in diverse relations
and, hence, multiple aspects of interpersonal agency. Even in more mundane-appearing con-
texts - from the observance of food taboos and rules of personal grooming to the skills of
gardening, cooking, building houses - people acquire and practise their skills through
interpersonal transactions from which they are accorded public renown. From this, Selig-
mann's account of auafangai can now be clarified as the 'fame' or 'renown' of a particular
person or group diffusely distributed in their relations with a wider generalised public or
audience as an effect of that person's or group's successful enactment of their legitimate
kangakanga practices.
To the extent, then, that descent, village, tribal, ethnic, linguistic and other groups were
so differentiated in terms of auafangai and kangakanga affiliation during pre-contact times,
it can be confirmed that cultural objectification among Mekeo not only pre-existed the
imposition of colonialism, as posited by Harrison; it was constitutive of the social order at
every scale of personhood and sociality: the single villager, the lineage, the clan, the village,
the chiefs of the tribe, the tribe, etc. The nature of that objectification, however, was signifi-
cantly different from the kinds of social identities and discriminations proposed by Harrison
in terms of 'property' and 'commodities'. And on the basis of ethnographic data gathered
over recent decades, the cultural objectification of much customary Mekeo practice seems
still to consist in the interpersonal relations and distinctions arising from elicitory kan-
gakanga and auafangai transactions involving personal detachment and attachment consis-
tent with recent theorising about Melanesian gift-exchange and sociality.
If throughout the colonial era and well into the period of Papua New Guiñean national
independence, the processes of cultural objectification, at least of customary practices, have
been largely continuous with those of the pre-contact era, it becomes a critical issue, how or
to what extent exogenous cultural and national identities arising from colonial and post-
colonial experiences have resulted in a changed or different type of objectification - mod-
elled, perhaps, on the basis of notions of private property and possessive individualism sug-
99
gested by Harrison (2000:675-6). In the next section, I discuss several of these post-contact
objectifications: the adoption of certain elements of European-style houses in the 1950s and
1990s, the recent conversion of many villagers to kerismatik ('charismatic') Catholicism in
the mid-1990s, and the public drinking of beer by women in the late 1990s. While these
illustrations might appear to outsiders as paradigmatic instances of 'commoditisation',
'modernisation' or 'globalisation', I shall argue that to Mekeo villagers they have involved
interpersonal transactions over originally Western or European kangakanga and auafangai .
THE CONSTRUCTION OF VILLAGE HOUSES

FROM MODERN BUILDING MATERIALS
Over the past century of European influence, Mekeo architecture has undergone numerou
changes, differently paced in different villages and regions within the district. Among t
North Mekeo people of Nganga and Pitoli villages, the switch to building houses of moder
manufactured materials - cement or steel posts, squared timber, planed hardwood floorin
louvred windows, corrugated iron roofs, etc. - has taken place mainly over the pa
decade, as it has been only then that they have been able to generate sufficient c
resources. Up until about 1990, most villagers' access to cash was very limited, but afte
wards the people of Nganga and Pitoli became virtually the sole providers of betel pepp
for the entire Moresby market for extended periods during annual dry seasons and perio
droughts. Practically everyone - old and young, men and women - especially during the
coastal drought of 1990-1994, acquired unprecedented access to cash and commodities.8
In the past, the kangakanga of building domestic dwellings (eka) involved obtaining
materials from the surrounding bush and through people's bodily labours and skills tra
forming them into completed structures. People's nouses were thus regarded as extensi
of their bodies and persons. As with other personal tokens of this sort, upon a man's o
woman's death the house they lived in was customarily abandoned and allowed to disint
grate before a new house could be built in the same place by their survivors (see Mosko
1985: chaps. 2, 7-8).
Once a few affluent families began building modern houses in the early 1990s, I wa
surprised to learn that it was a quite different matter from a family simply purchasing t
construction materials from town, transporting them home and organising community
labour to help. For in order to construct and live in a new house of the European design
householders had to make a payment (kaua) to their clan peace chief in the form of a fea
including one or more large village pigs.9 This payment was deemed necessary to get th
chief to plant the first post, hammer the first nail in the roof iron, and so on. People told m
'You don't just build a good [European] house like that for nothing. You have to do som
thing _ something important'. When I have asked people why they or so many others ha
wanted to build the new style of house, a common answer has been, Hsa akeauafangaini
('so that others will praise him/her').
Now the Nganga and Pitoli senior peace chiefs of the preceding generation had already
'opened up' chiefly houses to commoner villagers (ulalu). As best I can estimate, in the l
1950s or 1960s they had established procedures where ordinary people could make publi
payments to them in order to incorporate into their dwellings certain details of construct
(strong and durable palm flooring and walls, roof-lines parallel to the village promenad
etc.; cf. Hau'ofa 1981:55) otherwise regarded as the kangakanga of installed chiefs and so
cerers. The penalty for building a chiefly house without payment was customarily death
the hands of a peace sorcerer. About the same time, chiefs and to some extent installed s
cerers, had become the first to incorporate steel roofs and, later, the other modern mater
as their kangakanga for incorporation in their domestic dwellings.10 When ordinary Nga
and Pitoli villagers finally had acquired sufficient financial means in the 1990s to build
modern houses themselves, they have had to transact with their chiefs to acquire those ty
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Mosko
of houses to become their kangakanga. Interestingly, sickness, death and other misfortunes
have subsequently struck several of those people's families, and even after having made the
expected payments those misfortunes have been blamed on sorcerers or raskols sent by jeal-
ous chiefs protecting their kangakanga and auafangai from potential but unqualified rivals
or by the people's own relatives who jealously viewed them as 'wanting to be chiefs' .n The
three finest houses in Nganga village during my last visit in early 2001 were thus standing
there completed but unoccupied by the families that funded and built them. My friend,
Isotepa, put it this way: 'People who build those kinds of houses are making their own
coffins'.
THE EMERGENCE OF CHARISMATIC CATHOLICISM
As I have described elsewhere (Mosko 2001), the people of Nganga and Pitoli decided in
mid 1995 to use some of their surplus cash from the betel trade to fund the erection of two
new village buildings of modern materials. Conversations I overheard at the time indicated
that villagers were expecting by these actions that their auafangai 'fame' in the region
would be greatly enhanced. The building activities became particularly intense in the wake
of enthusiasm for a version of 'charismatic' Catholic worship that swept through the area
between October 1995 and approximately April 1996.
For as long as I have known them, villagers regard their churches and other aspects of
Christianity as originally European kangakanga which they have incorporated in their own
persons over the course of the past century or more through the appropriate compensatory
payments (kaua)\ services provided to patrolling missionaries, gifts of land for mission
buildings, Sunday offerings, regular donations of garden food, pigs and money/commodi-
ties in support of church functions, devotion of human labour to church projects, and, not
least, penitence for sins. By receiving these detached parts of villagers' persons, Church
authorities and spirits are viewed as reciprocating with potent personal embodiments of
Christian divinity - the Eucharist, the blessings of Jesus, Mary and the Saints, most partic-
ularly espíritu santu and deo nga tsiapu (i.e. the 'Holy Ghost' and or 'God's hot/power',
respectively). And similarly to when clans in the past acquired new kangakanga from other
groups, villagers have integrated the newly acquired Christian elements of worship with
those pre-existing. Hence North Mekeo churches and services nowadays include many fea-
tures of what villagers take to be pre-existing indigenous practices. With the Christian kan-
gakanga now as part of their own actions and identities, villagers argue that they are 'hot'
with the capacity to resist or frustrate the powers of the sorcerers and raskols. Moreover, for
practically all villagers nowadays at both personal and collective levels, their overt identi-
ties as both Christian and Catholic (katoliko) are considered to be essential elements of their
regional auafangai 'fame', as it is clear from many indications that all Mekeo communities
want to be known as Christian, or even more Christian than their neighbours. One often
overhears villagers reflect on other people's reputations for living a truly Christian life
according to the devotions they receive from their catechists and priests. Thus the historical
process of conversion to Christianity among Mekeo that has unfolded over the past century
or more of missionisation is a clear instance of the broader dynamics of Melanesian
exchange and sociality (Mosko 2001).
In the past decade, though, many Mekeo who earlier married non-Mekeo Papua New
Guineans and converted to their Protestant religions have returned to their home villages,
bringing with them their evangelistic creeds. Catechists, priests and villagers (both Catholic
and Protestant) I have spoken with are largely in agreement that throughout Mekeo the
Church has been seriously threatened with losing whole congregations. It is for this reason
that Church leaders recruited a touring company of Catholic evangelists from Australia to
stage two large rallies in late 1994 and late 1995 at the Diocese headquarters in Bereina.
The purpose of these rallies was to train youth leaders from all over Mekeo in the new
101
kerismatik rituals. Afterwards, it was hoped the participants would initiate similar activities
at their home villages that might counteract the activities of the Protestant evangelists.
There were no representatives from Nganga and Pitoli sent to the first rally, but there were
to the second. Beginning in November 1995 back at Nganga village, the young people who
had attended the second rally generated considerable enthusiasm for the new rituals with
nightly performances involving a significant portion of the village's youths on one of the
clan clubhouses and in the central promenade of the village. By mid- 1996, however, only
one extended family in one of the community's several clans was continuing to practise the
kerismatik style of worship at the home of one of their members, despite the fact that the
parish priest, a Tolai, and the village catechist, a senior peace chief of one of the other clans,
worked strenuously to keep the entire village involved. Older members of the community
including senior members of the Fatima Society (recently renamed The Society of Mary)
had argued that the new practices were not katoliko at all but Protestant, that is, kangakanga
practices of certain Europeans and non-Mekeo Papua New Guineans that they did not want
to assimilate to themselves and for which they wanted neither to pay compensation nor to
be renowned. Members of the elder and younger generations were in agreement, however,
that the new church building was an originally European kangakanga they wanted to attach
to their community and for which they were willing to devote appropriate compensation in
bodily labour, money and prayer in enhancing their regional auafangai 'fame'.
This example illustrates particularly well the dynamics of kangakanga and auafangai
through which novel cultural and social activities have been incorporated historically by
Mekeo peoples into their own practices and relations. Processes of historical change and
transformation as well as cultural objectification otherwise understood in terms of 'conver-
sion', 'modernisation', 'globalisation' in the North Mekeo case have unfolded in accor-
dance with principles consistent with indigenous Melanesian understandings of personhood
and sociality.
WOMEN DRINKING BIA
The third case of contemporary change and objectification involves Nganga village
women's recent attempt to incorporate beer drinking into their repertoire of practices,
agency and renown. The relevant event took place on 1 January 2000, thus dominating vil-
lagers' experience of the first day of the new Millennium.
Beer (bia) is regarded locally as a 'hot money thing' (moni kamutsi ketsiabu), and the
recent history of beer drinking among North Mekeo is closely tied with the considerable com-
moditisation of many areas of village life that was set in motion in the late 1980s and early
1990s. While this transformation may appear to be an instance of 'commodity fetishisation'
(see Mosko 1999), it has involved numerous aspects of kangakanga and auafangai transaction
as I have been discussing them so far; that is, to North Mekeo villagers, 'money' and 'money
things', similar to the embodied tokens of Christianity, are recognised as originally the 'hot' or
powerful kangakanga of Europeans and Asian businessmen in town which most villagers
have only recently been partially successful in acquiring for themselves. Moni and 'money
things' have the capacity of changing people's minds in much the same ways as ancestors'
charms and spells. For most of their post-contact history, it has been the chiefly clan officials,
and more generally village men as distinct from women, who have been able to make the
appropriate compensatory payments to elicit Europeans' moni kangakanga that they can sub-
sequently manipulate as 'hot' ritual charms in acquiring personal auafangai fame and renown
of their own. With villagers' dramatic incorporation of money and commodity kangakanga in
the early 1990s betel trade, the auafangai 'fame' of Nganga and Pitoli grew immensely. And
their capacity to change the minds of other people in the region had increased as well .
A crucial change of the time was women's adoption of 'hot' moni and 'money things'
as their kangakanga with the analogous capacity of changing other people's minds on a par
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Mosko
with men's. The reason women, both old and young, could safely use and manipulate the
'hot' money magic was that this new form of ritual knowledge was classified as 'clean'
(ikua) or lacking the 'dirty' (iofu) elements of the 'traditional' men's magic and sorcery.12
And given the unprecedented opportunity of acquiring money and money-things during
their frequent trips to town after 1990, women have become generally able to elicit moni
kangakanga from European, Asian or other Papua New Guiñean sources as parts of their
own persons, 'hot' influences and increased 'fame' with considerably less restriction on
grounds of their gender.
There was one crucial part of the acquisition of Europeans' money practices that for
most of the 1990s still differentiated women strictly from men: men and only men drank
beer publicly. And they drank it openly in great quantities and at great expense so as to have
it attached to them as part of their auafangai fame. Beer had been available in limited quan-
tities in North Mekeo since at least the 1970s, but until the late 1980s only occasionally and
in relatively small quantities. For most of the earlier period, men drank beer on chiefs' club-
houses in coordination with the formally ritualised distribution of areca nut, tobacco, food,
and so on that accompanied feasts and other large-scale exchanges. Typically, the chief or
other host would distribute a carton or two among men sitting around the perimeter of the
clubhouse. Over several hours, the men might drink one or perhaps two bottles each as they
sang traditional songs and chants (pike). With the sudden influx of money and other com-
modities to Nganga and Pitoli in the early 1990s, however, it became possible for men to
purchase beer in much greater quantities for more frequent and less formalised consump-
tion. In town or in Central Mekeo villages, young men in particular acquired a new beer-
drinking kangakanga modelled on small groups of Australian 'mates' sharing beer, listen-
ing to loud music on portable stereos radios or 'boom-boxes', and occasionally quarrelling
or fighting with men in other drinking parties. Basically, by drinking beer in public, men
exhibited their 'hot' capacities as moni autsi or 'money men' so others would regard them
as persons who could acquire money in such quantities that they could piss it away. Village
women in those days categorically did not drink beer even though it was a clean money
thing, I was told, because they did not want the 'hot' powerful beer to change their minds or
bodies or to establish their auafangai 'fame' or 'renown' as it had done to the prostitutes of
the bars and hotels of Port Moresby.
Thus it was with great surprise to me and most other villagers that on New Years Day
2000 several young women drank beer publicly in the village promenade for the first time,
much in the manner of young men. It started in the morning following prayers and the
annual New Years morning scuffle between the young women and young men. As in previ-
ous years, most of the village's young women, single and married, had proceeded house to
house smearing mud and/or talcum power on everyone's faces, ending an hour or two later
in a brawl with the young men who had resisted them.13 As spectators began straggling back
to their homes for quieter forms of socialising, the group of seven or so women gathered in
the central promenade at the downstream end of the village with a boom-box and the first of
two cartons of South Pacific Lager. They had purchased the beer in town, brought it secretly
back to the village concealed in cardboard tinned-food cartons, and throughout the day pro-
ceeded to drink it dancing to the accompaniment of blaring string-band music. Several were
dressed in the flamboyant accoutrements of bachelors' clothes, largely inspired by Ameri-
can youth and counter-culture: baggy denim jeans barely hanging from their slim hips,
over-sized tee shirts or rugby jerseys, name-brand tennis shoes, sun glasses, outlandish hats,
etc. After a few minutes, bearing the beer carton and boom-box on their shoulders, they
slowly swaggered up the promenade in slow dance motions such as young men exhibit
when they are drinking, occasionally taking sips from bottles of beer conspicuously in hand.
And they kept it up for the rest of the day, eventually getting into the second carton of SP.
My wife's and my own impression at first was that the women were ironically mocking
young men's typical drinking behaviours. But I quickly perceived that no one besides us
103
was laughing. Indeed, other people's reactions were as interesting as what the women were
doing. One young boy standing near me yelled out, aotsi keange 'they are crazy' (literally,
'they have lost their insides'). The mother of one of the women in the group walked out and
grabbed her daughter by the arm to pull her away. Small groups of men who were gathered
on platforms nearby were watching the display motionless, expressions of serious concern,
if anything, on their faces.
Since the main women participants were preoccupied for the rest of that day, I gathered
other people's impressions of what was going on first. Of the men I questioned, a few said
that they did not really know what the women were doing. But they uniformly rejected my
initial suggestion that the women were merely parodying and satirizing the men; after all, I
had thought, it was New Years and an anthropologically suitable occasion for ritual rever-
sals and contests, and it had followed immediately the annual tussle of youths. Most of the
men I spoke with focussed on the likely course of events later in the evening when the vil-
lage's string band would begin to play and the young people would turn to dancing as cou-
ples. They said they were concerned over two things: that the drunken women would dance
with men other than their boyfriends or husbands, which would almost certainly provoke
fist-fights; or that some of the drunken women would either drop their pants (as certain men
of the village have become renowned for doing in their own inebriation) or raise their skirts
enabling others to see their vaginas. As it turned out, there were no fights and nothing unto-
ward was revealed, for early in the evening just after the band started up, it started to pour
rain and everyone went home.
Among older women I spoke with on New Years day and afterwards, I received
responses for the most part similar to those of the men, while several expressed strong sym-
pathies with the actions of the young women.
As my chief female informants happened to be among the drinking women, I had to
wait till the next day to interview them. Right away, they rejected my suggestions that they
were ridiculing either the young men with whom they had just finished wrestling or men's
drinking practices. To the contrary, they had sought to acquire the kangakanga of drinking
beer for themselves - to 'open up' beer drinking so that women could drink it like men
whenever they wanted. As they explained how they had bundled up their betel pepper, sold
it for cash in town to purchase the beer, hidden it in their cargo, and so on, they indicated
that they had done just the same sort of things - made the same payments (kaua) - that
the men had done to acquire beer drinking as their kangakanga. When I told them what I
had heard from the men, they shrugged off the men's fears, indicating that what they want-
ed from beer drinking was the same as men want also - others to praise them (keauafan-
gainitsi) as 'money people' who have the 'hot' capacity for producing much money. As far
as they were concerned, henceforth women of the village could drink beer as their kan-
gakanga and not just as the practice of men. When I asked about the men's clothes that
some of them wore, they said that they got them from their boyfriends and husbands, who
were aware prior to New Years day of the women's plans and who supported them. They
denied that their boyfriends and husbands were jealous or angry regarding anything that had
happened the previous day.
Over the next several weeks that I remained in the village, I did not witness another exhi-
bition of women drinking beer. When I returned to the village in late 2000 for another several
weeks of fieldwork, I was told that none of the village women had drunk beer publicly over
the intervening year. On New Years day 2001, however, two other women - one a middle-
aged widow and the other the elderly wife of a very old man away for medical treatment -
came out dressed in ragged men's clothes, dancing wildly for hours to loud tape-recorded
string-band music played through a loudspeaker by the owner of one of the local trade stores.
This time the women were not drinking beer but 'OP' rum, a cheap PNG-produced hard
liquor that, over the past year, had become available in the liquor shops and supermarkets of
Port Moresby and the favoured drink of most of the younger drinking men in the village. As I
104
Mosko
was scheduled to leave the field for town the next day, I did not have an opportunity to inter-
view people in detail on this recent development, especially whether the transactions of the
young women a year earlier had been sufficient to establish the drinking of alcohol as
women's kangakanga. The case illustrates, nonetheless, the extent to which among contempo-
rary North Mekeo processes of change that involve the adoption of exogenous practices
remain dependent upon pre-existing understandings about the transactional dynamics of per-
sonhood and agency with respect to kangakanga practices and auafangai renown.
CONCLUSION
My arguments in this article have been addressed to several points raised by Harrison w
regard to processes of cultural objectification in Melanesia. First, as he and others have
gested for many other parts of the region, pre-contact Mekeo were keenly conscious o
tural differences at a wide variety of levels or scales of sociality, from single person
lineage, clan and village groups to whole tribal, cultural or linguistic groupings. T
forms of cultural objectification thus predate contact with Europeans and the impositio
colonial domination.
Second, while I agree with Harrison that cultural objectification in some form has per-
sisted among North Mekeo since pre-colonial times, the evidence I have presented suggests
that the processes of cultural objectification for both pre- and post-contact eras differed
greatly from his characterisations of them. Rather than consisting of prestige goods or lega-
cies as 'possessions' or items of 'property' that presuppose distinctions of persons and
things, pre-contact Mekeo cultural objectifications {kangakanga and auafangai) appear to
have arisen from customary practices involving agentive transactions and mutual elicita-
tions of parts of persons through gift exchange where the subject/object dichotomy is not
salient.
Nonetheless, third, this finding does converge with Harrison on one point, contra
numerous other recent commentators, viz. in the post-contact era Melanesian cultural objec-
tification has not necessarily been shaped exclusively by the forces of colonialism and the
formation of the nation-state. The processes of cultural objectification I have discussed here
in terms of kangakanga and auafangai appear to have been continuous up to the present
largely independent of the specific circumstances of colonialism.
This does not necessarily mean to imply, however, that there has been no change
among North Mekeo over the past century-plus of engagement with the rest of the world in
response to many facets of colonialism and the emergence of the nation-state, for changes
in these areas have been considerable; rather, fourth, many of those changes appear to con-
sist in villagers transacting with exogenous agents, thereby enabling them to adopt parts of
other persons ('kastoms\ kangakanga) as parts of themselves for which they can enjoy
legitimate 'fame' and 'renown' (auafangai). Very simply, many elements of recent change
otherwise regarded as 'Westernisation', 'globalisation', 'commodification' and 'modernity'
have occurred in accordance with pre-existing indigenous patterns of personhood, sociality
and exchange.
Fifth, this study suggests that even as regards contexts of profound socio-cultural
change and modernisation there might still be considerable analytical merit in retaining
rather than collapsing the formal distinctions between gift and commodity exchange (Gre-
gory 1982), which Harrison and others (e.g. Kopytoff 1986; Appadurai 1986) seem to rec-
ommend. The risk otherwise is that the language of 'commodities', 'possessions' and 'prop-
erty' including such notions as 'sale', 'purchase', 'market exchange' etc. to pre- and possi-
bly also some post-contact Melanesian contexts creates a sense of cross-cultural similarity
which is analytically misleading and empirically unwarranted.
And finally, sixth, responding to some critics that the New Melanesian Ethnography is
inherently synchronic and thus ill-suited to the analysis of change (Josephides 1991; Weiner
105
1992:14-5; cf. Foster 1995; Strathern 1990), I suggest that distinctively indigenous notions
of personhood, agency, custom and sociality analogous to North Mekeo kangakanga and
auafangai may be essential for grasping some of the key dynamics of Melanesian history,
modernisation, and social transformation.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Previous versions of this article were presented at gatherings of Property, Transac

Creativity Project members held at Cambridge in July 1999 and Port Moresby in N
2000 and at subsequent anthropology seminars at the University of Auckland and t
tralian National University. I am grateful to PTC convenors Marilyn Strathern an
Hirsch for allowing my participation. I am particularly indebted to Simon Harrison
stimulation his recent work on intellectual property has afforded me in formula
arguments here, although on certain points I remain critical. Others who have offe
helpful comments and criticisms include Tom Ernst, Kamal Puri, James Leach, Ton
Andy Holding, Karen Sykes, Eric Hirsch, Melissa Damián, Jacob Simit, Lawre
noae, Linus Digim'Rina, Alan Jones, Margaret Jolly, Julie Park, Francesca Merlán
Busse, Christine Dureau, Ann Chowning, Joan Metge, and one anonymous referee
fieldwork on which this analysis is primarily based has been generously provided
Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Numerous North Mekeo pers
provided invaluable information and support, for which I am forever grateful. Mar
Adolo Mangemange, Joe Menga, Mary Kekele, Ameaua Tsibo, Lt. Col. Daniel
Mjr. Roger Kipo deserve special mention. Luke Hambly has provided invaluable re
assistance. Any deficiencies herein remain my own.
NOTES
1. Several other of Harrison's recent writings (e.g. 1993, 1995, 2002), seeking similarly to establish analogies
between what he regards as Melanesian and Western property forms, would fall within the scope of this cri-
tique; but see footnote 3 below.
2. Additional analyses within the framework of the New Melanesian Ethnography would include Damon
(1983), Munn (1986), Battaglia (1986, 1990), Foster (1995), Mosko (1985, 1992, 1995, 2001), Geli (1996;
1998).
3. At a certain junction in an earlier article dealing specifically with 'intellectual property' that is not cited in
Harrison (2000), Harrison draws a much clearer demarcation between gift and commodity exchange in terms
that are nearly convergent with the analysis here:
The problem of speaking of property in religious symbolism lies in the inadequacy of the conceptions
of property I have been using. The reasons for this problem have to do with the particular opposition, which
Strathern (1983, 1988), Kopytoff (1986) and others have discussed, that Western culture posits between per-
sons and things. Accordingly, only things can be transacted as property; persons and their attributes cannot,
without doing violence to their integrity. My point is that ritual action and belief are in fact experienced in the
same way as are objects in Melanesian economics; namely, as a dimension of the self. Like gift objects,
they are not something that people 'own' but something that they 'are'. Symbols of religious affiliation
appear as inalienable constituents of individual or group identity in contrast to property only if the canoni-
cal model for property transactions is commodity exchange. But this is not necessarily the case where the
dominant model is gift exchange; because what is actually transacted in gifts, as Strathern (1983, 1988) has
argued in detail, are social identities or different aspects of these identities in their relations with others (Har-
rison 1992:240; original footnote deleted; emphases in original).
4. Jones's (1998:13-21) comprehensive study of the several linguistic dialects of Mekeo notes that the North
Mekeo (Amoamo) spoken in the villages, which provide the ethnographic basis of the present analysis, is
mutually intelligible with both East ("Central") and West ("Bush") Mekeo.
5. Elsewhere (Mosko 1983, 1985, 1992) I have outlined how in numerous contexts collective exchanges and
activities of clan and lineage groups are analogous with the agentive transactions between divisible persons.
In this regard, North Mekeo clan grouos at various levels of scale interrelate with one another as 'iwRnn<:'
6. For fuller accounts of the mechanisms of etsifa 'cleverness', tsiapu 'hot' and Mekeo notions of agency in
general including such introduced practices as Christianity, the wearing of Western-style clothes and the use
of money, see Mosko (1985, 1999, 2001).
7. The category tsiange 'spirit' includes the spirits of dead humans, the spirits of faif ai non-human but
autochthonous social beings of the bush, and the legendary deities of Mekeo myth, including Akaisa, Tsabini,
and others; see Mosko (1985); Stephen (1995).
106
Mosko
8. For an analysis of how money and commodities have been incorporated by contemporary North Mekeo into
pre-existing contexts of exchange and ritual agency, see Mosko (2000).
9. For an account of the four-fold structure of chiefly specialisation and clan organization - peace chief, war
chief, peace sorcerer, war sorcerer - see Mosko (1985, 1991, 1992).
10. It is interesting that over the past decade I have heard commoner villagers complain numerous times that,
while they must give small feasts to their chiefs and sorcerers in order to acquire the kangakanga of modern
houses, these practices are originally the kangakanga customs of Europeans who chiefs and sorcerers did not
appropriately pay to acquire as their kangakanga too: 'Why should we pay chiefs for modern houses that are
not their kangakanga^ They are telling lies.'
11. See Hau'ofa (1981) on the significance of pikupa 'jealousy' in the relations between kin and in the rivalries
between clan officials.
12. An account of the capacities that distinguish North Mekeo genders in indigenous terms is provided in Mosko
(1983, 1985: chaps. 4-5).
13. This ritual reaches its greatest intensity when the young women approach bachelors, who in trying to escape
only make the women 'boil up'. As their determination escalates, they switch from mud and talcum to pig
shit, with the ritual usually ending in a vigorous physical contest between the young women and men. It is
my understanding that this New Years kangakanga is quite widespread across Papua New Guinea and dates
from colonial days.
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Totem and Transaction: The Objectification of 'Tradition' among North Mekeo

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

Totem and Transactio

Oceania 73, 2002 89

My purpose in this article is to examine Harrison's portrayal of Melanesian cultural

CULTURAL OBJECTIFICATION AND GIFT EXCHANGE THEORY

Harrison's view of Melanesian cultural practices as objectified 'possessions' is oriented for

In Vanuatu, groups such as the Mewun described by Larcom (1982),

Elsewhere, Harrison (1995) has elaborated on indigenous Melanesian transactions involving

other symbols of cultural or religious affiliation, as goods [i.e. commodities]

Transactions between persons of two different exchange economies, for example,

approximated to commodity exchange, and in my discussion of them I shall there-

PRE- AND EARLY POST-CONTACT CULTURAL OBJECTIFICATION:

THE CONTINUITY OF PRE- AND POST-CONTACT OBJECTIFICATION

THE CONSTRUCTION OF VILLAGE HOUSES

THE EMERGENCE OF CHARISMATIC CATHOLICISM

WOMEN DRINKING BIA

Previous versions of this article were presented at gatherings of Property, Transac

JOLLY, M. 1992. Specters of inauthenticity. The contemporary Pacific 4:49-70.

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