Papua’s Mountains

Study of violence in Papua’s Mountains

Papua Besena, the separatist movement, wants to send home all people from the former UN Trust Territory of New Guinea living in Port Moresby because, so Miss Josephine Abaijah and her followers allege, the “Chim bus” are aggressive and often violent, quite different from the peaceable Papuans.

If it were not for its price of $3O, the Somare Government would probably widely dis tribute Bloodshed and Vengeance in the Papuan Mountains, by C. R. Hallpike.

Alternatively, at a much lesser cost, it could send out an ex tract from a report made in 1955 by R. T. Galloway, then assistant district com missioner at Tapini, showing that at least 44 murders, three manslaughters, three suspected murders and 32 other crimes of violence had been committed among the 3 000-odd people of the Goilala sub-district during the previous six years. This was about four times the rate of violent crime in New York, then the highest in the world.

Chris Hallpike, an English anthropologist who worked in 1970-72 among the Tauade, one of the groups in the Giolala area, argues that the traditional pig feasts and other gift exchanges have been the main factor in the de struction of the people’s original clan organisation, have atomised their society, and are “intimately associated with the h igh level of violence”. If Hallpike is right, the then Tauade are very dif

ferent from other groups in Papua New Guinea, not only in their conduct but also in re spect of its cause and effects. (With unusual candour, the author writes that “social anthropology might be defin ed as the study of lies that na tives tell to anthropologists, especially anthropoligists who work with people like the Tauade”.) French Catholic mission aries and Australian govern ment officials have been in the Goilala area since 1911, but it took over 20 years before a police camp was set up at Aporata. Four years later, in 1938, the Fathers started their main station at Kerau.

It took many government patrols, over many years and often with bloodshed, before some stability of law and order was achieved. It took even longer for the Tauade to see the government as more than “Just another, even if rather strange, fighting force, actuated by motives beyond the grasp of ordinary mor tals”. Over the years, officials and missionaries established primary schools and en couraged the people to grow cash crops, but there is little to show for it.

The Tauade did, however, play an active part in the development of tracks and bridle paths (the missionaries introduced horses and mules), so that one wonders whether the author may not be some what pessimistic in his as sessment of their response to pressures from the outside world. Mr Louis Mona, their

MP, is now Minister for Defence and, no doubt, urging and helping his constituents to get into the mainstream of their nation.

The author observes that the Tauade, in spite of their display of pride and self-as sertion, “do not believe them selves capable of creating any new institution, whether social or material” all has been created by the culture heroes. If so, then one must look to their young men away from home, mostly in Port Moresby, for whom urbanisa tion may well prove to be the catalyst in the move from tra ditional self-destructive violence toward taking part in constructive national development.

This is a very good book, with few blemishes, e.g., two patrol officers who were dis missed for unlawful acts, and one of whom was gaoled, were not respected by the Tauade as people, but because they seemed to have adopted so many of the violent ways so dear to the hearts of the Tauade; the first government school was started in 1954, not 1962.

The greater part of the book will not interest anyone ex cept anthropologists, but the first two chapters are of con siderable general interest. In deed, those two chapters de serve to be read by every Papua New Guinea politician and public servant entrusted with changing a situation in which a group of people, the Tauade, “far from regarding the imprisonment, as opposed to the execution, of mur derers, as a liberal and humane policy, consider it an exasperating and inexcusable

weakness.”

Harry Jackman

(Bloodshed And Vengeance In The Pa

Puan Mountains: The Generation Of

Conflict In Tauade Society. C. R

Hallpike. Published by Oxford University Press, Melbourne. $30.00)