Book Reviews

Family Feuds Or Peaceful Reform

In Ng Highlands Land System?

One Father, One Blood, a scholarly and objective book by Andrew Strathern, will find its real importance in the literature of anthropological investigation in Papua New Guinea.

It describes the descent rules which people in the Mount Hagen area had to maintain so that their descent groups could survive the turmoil of tribal warfare.

That the rules were often bent by ambitious fight leaders is not surpri sing. Recruitment and affiliation with other groups were part of this tough world of competition for land and status. Allegiance to these dynamic rules has survived pacification. As population pressures lead to land subsistence pressures, new leaders may be thrust up to take back the law into the hands of those seeking violent solutions.

A study of descent, inheritance and succession customs is built up (as Dr. Strathern so generously acknow ledges) by the work of many in vestigators in the same field. His own patient communication with the people required preparatory study of their language and the understanding co-operation of informants, which is evident in this book. He had to weigh conflicting evidence and test the importance of mythical explanations, sometimes from sources suffering emotional bias.

The author’s conclusions are care fully documented. Thankfully, he does not harvest from his informants the kind of conforming statements that are so often sown in discussion. He links the behaviour and adaptability of the people to their own empirical rules and the way in which forceful personalities—the “big-men” of the Mount Hagen area—both use and bend the rules to their needs.

The role of the people and their big-men in the original Mount Hagen world was built around the need for fight leaders to have followers and affiliates so they could promote the needs, and defend the rights, of their group. It followed that big-men also took a leading part in influencing

marriage patterns, land use and ceremonial exchange.

Those sharing common descent within an exogamous group find their marriage partners outside their own clan. The women they marry are held to a contract to provide their husband’s clan with children. Wives do not become members of their husband’s clan and if he dies before they do, they may revert by returning home. Young children may accom pany them, but these children will have an inviolate right to rejoin the clan of their dead father if they are not persuaded to affiliate with their mother’s group. The frequent New Guinea habit of widows marrying their brothers-in-law (usually the oldest brother of the dead man) is not so much an act of compassion as a practical means of making sure children are not lost to the clan.

Within the clan, the significance of polygamy is that segments and sub clans derive descent from a parti cular female ancestress. There is an important emphasis on brotherhood both from descent and by association.

In a community which is totally

without any central authority or hereditary chieftainship system, there is considerable competition between individuals seeking the status of big men. Refugees from the continual fragmentations of warfare, or from family quarrels, migrate to affiliate.

Great importance was once attached to the ability of famous fight leaders to attract men (from outside accepted descent lines from a common father) to join up as de facto members of the fight leader’s group. People were im portant and closely united by group objectives.

Land Commissioners charged with the difficult duty of peacefully main taining rigid boundaries of land-use or ownership frozen by pacification will not find fixed formulas in this book. Traditional custom became flexible under the pragmatic pressures of living.

Patrilineal descent from a real or mythical owner ancestor is not always the only evidence of a modern land right. Indigenous rights to a land area may justify access by more than one group. Administration officers familiar

(Continued on p. 79)

Land use and ownership can be separate

with that apparent contradiction: “The gardens belong to them but the land is ours”, will be encouraged by this book not to seek quick, obvious solutions. The right to use land can in fact be separate from parallel ownership. The reader will also better understand the reluctance of New Guinea politicians to disturb land tenure systems of this kind and will doubt the capacity of any government to enforce radical change.

Meanwhile, population increase in some places exceeds four per cent, and nearly everywhere the land pres sures are growing. Australian pacifica tion created an occupational vacuum for the former followers of fight leaders. This was met by the govern ments Highlands labour scheme, pro viding up to three years’ work in a distant district with the advantage that on repatriation those returning had monetary wealth to purchase community status.

The huge road programmes and the development of the coffee industry also provided occupational therapy for people who had a subsistence economy to protect them from hunger hardship. Other government and expatriate initiatives created com mercial opportunities for a new kind of “big-man” who no longer would need a group of followers. But group allegiance and individual leadership have continued to be expressed through syndicates operating trucks or purchasing cattle.

We are now in a more difficult phase in the Highlands, influenced by a decline in government leader ship and a feeling that administration control has been relaxed. At the same time, lack of self-discipline has made it impossible to prevent serious over production in the coffee industry upon which so much of the central Highlands depends for the injection of capital to maintain a developing [ullage economy. The duration of labour contracts on distant planta tions has gradually declined and the pattern of recruiting has responded o resistance in both the. Eastern and Western Highlands, to concentrate uore on the Southern Highland dis rict.

The diversions and excitement that -uropean settlement once provided is ’iving way to resentment, particularly imong mobs of partly educated foung men who wish to participate n a future of peasant farming com- •

lined with seasonal coffee-harvesting

abour.

Among the young there is mis placed nostalgia for the turmoil of :lan and tribal competition. When

subsistence hardship due to popula tion increase is compounded by un employment, there will be a danger to public order because traditional followers may force new fight leaders to take violent solutions justified by duty to a descent group.

The obvious solution by migra tion has emotional resistance. The authorities should confer with the people to organise further massive swamp reclamation schemes, more intensive agriculture and subsidise works that will attract secondary industry.

The manpower of Papua New Guinea has never been properly

organised and in all developing countries there is both need and precedent within established Inter national Labour Conventions for forced labour at nominal wages to be used in their own as well as in the national interest. —lan Downs.

(One Father, One Blood, By

Andrew Strathern. Australian National University Press. $7.50).