Table of Contents
The language spoken by the North Mekeo peoples of the Central Province of PNG has been classified by linguists (Jones 1998; Ross 1988) as one of three dialects of Mekeo in the Western Papua Tip cluster of Western Oceanic. Consequently, their language possesses many contemporary reflexes of Proto-Austronesian reconstructions. With regard to the topic of territorial categories and institutions, for Proto-Austronesian *banua and *tanah rendered as ‘land’, ‘territory’ or ‘dwelling place’, North Mekeo have paunga and ango, or ‘village’ and ‘land’, respectively. [1] Note that Proto-Oceanic for ‘land’ is *tanoq (Pawley and Ross), tana(q) (Grace 1969a) or *panua. In this chapter, I explore the meanings villagers themselves attribute to these notions, roughly extending to generalised understandings about space and time, particularly the contours of human society and the human body.
The last of these domains—the human body—might initially appear to fall outside the theme of this volume. However, as I have described about North Mekeo culture earlier (Mosko 1985), space and time, society and the body are conceived as homologous and interconnected. Moreover, in recent publications (Mosko 1992, 1997, 1998a, 2001a, 2000b, 2002), I have been investigating additional related dimensions of North Mekeo sociality, particularly the dynamics of personhood, chiefly agency and socio-cultural change, which may now shed considerable new light on North Mekeo notions of territoriality. I thus begin within some of the parameters of my original accounts of North Mekeo culture, social organisation and embodiment. First I locate North Mekeo notions of village and land in the local cosmology of the entire world, ango faka, as comprising two distinctive kinds of space, the village or human world, paunga, understood to be an ‘outside’ place, and the bush, ango aonga, or ‘inside’ land, an ‘inside’ place. In the temporal rhythm of daily human activities, however, the village/bush spatial duality is recursively crosscut by the inside/outside distinction to produce a fourfold totality of space-time relations—a structure of bisected dualities that I have characterised as distinctive to the culture generally. Thus North Mekeo notions of land and village are first apprehended through temporal coordination of inside and outside spaces.
It is in accordance with these same dimensions of meaning that North Mekeo conceptualise the human body and society. In the second section, therefore, I attempt to summarise how indigenous classifications and processes involving the human body and social relations in analogous terms of inside and outside also conform to the dynamics of the bisected duality pattern. Borrowing the terminology of chaos theory, I argue that for North Mekeo, world, body and society are not merely formally analogous, they are fractally connected dimensions of one another, thereby constituting an instance of self-similarity or self-scaling (Gleick 1987; Stewart 1989; Mosko in press).
In the third section of this chapter, I introduce newly acquired ethnographic information suggesting that the lands, bodies and social relations of North Mekeo are understood to be substantively as well as structurally connected. In several field trips in the past decade, I have learned of a substance termed ngaka, which is thought to cycle between villagers’ lands, bodies and social relations in the course of human life and death. Interestingly, North Mekeo can be seen here to qualify as a coastal Melanesian instance of the ‘fluid ontologies’ characteristic of non-Austronesian groups in the Highlands of PNG (Goldman and Ballard 1998; Stewart and Strathern 2001) and the ‘flow of life’ which has been reported widely for Austronesian-speaking societies of South-East Asia, particularly Indonesia (Fox 1980). In this context, I focus on the implications of processes and transactions involving ngaka in accordance with other writings concerning ‘partible personhood’, sociality and agency among Mekeo specifically and in Melanesia generally (Mosko 1985, 1992, 1995, 1998b, 2001a, 2002; Strathern 1988; Wagner 1986, 1991). In short, the critical element of interpersonal exchange and elicitation of which North Mekeo people and social relations are composed and decomposed is the substance, ngaka acquired originally from resources and beings of the territorial world, incorporated into the bodies and relations of human beings and, on death, returned to the ground in human burials. I regard this emendation of the North Mekeo ethnographic record to be itself of considerable ethnological value as it conjoins recent discussions of the dynamical fluid ontologies of the New Guinea Highlands and the flow of life across Indonesian societies with the supposedly distinctive Melanesian notions and processes of personal partibility and sociality.
With these points as ethnographic background, in the final section I focus on the intersection of North Mekeo notions of territoriality and personal agency with chiefly polity. Mekeo people have by now become one of the more well-documented examples of Austronesian-speaking ‘chiefly’ societies in Melanesia (see Seligmann 1910; Guis 1936; Hau’ofa 1981; Stephen 1974, 1995; Mosko 1985; Bergendorff 1996). Yet there remain in the recent ethnographic and historical literature of Mekeo (as for many other Austronesian-speaking societies in the Pacific) questions about the exact nature of ‘chieftainship’, and particularly the nature of chiefly agency (Mosko 1991a, 1992, 1995, 1997a, 1997b, 2001b; Hau’ofa 1971, 1981; Powell 1996; Hage 1998; Scaglion 1996; Peterson 1999; Stephen 1995, 1996, 1998; Bergendorff 1996; Rumsey 1999). With reference to the foregoing analysis of North Mekeo classifications of space, time, body, person and society, I attempt to clarify the nature and territorial extent of Mekeo ‘chiefdoms’.