The entire world, ango faka (lit.: ‘great world’), for North Mekeo consists principally of two kinds of place, the village, paunga, and the bush, ango aonga (lit.: ‘land inside’). As the label indicates, the bush is conceived as an inside place. Thus when passing from the village to the bush, people or things ‘go inside’ (ke koko). Correspondingly, the village is viewed as an outside place, and moving from bush to village is to ‘go outside’ (ke pualai). This nomenclature is in fact used quite regularly in villagers’ discourse, as one often hears people remark, ‘So and so has gone inside’ (i.e. to the bush) or ‘So and so is coming out’ (i.e. returning from the bush to the village). And the existential experience of villages as relatively open places as compared with the enclosed, lushly vegetated, canopied spaces of the bush generally is consistent with the outside/inside designation.

Mekeo villages (paunga) are named and possess distinctive histories of their original settlement (see below). Stereotypically, villages are rectangular in layout, with a peripheral fence or hedge (fangapu, literally, ‘skin place’) of colourful crotons dividing the village from the surrounding bush. Domestic houses are arranged along the length of the village in parallel rows. Two clan clubhouses (ufu or kofu), each belonging to a different resident clan, stand facing one another at opposite ends of the village. The domestic dwellings and clubhouses, however, along with all other artefacts of daily life, are concentrated on the perimeter of the village, as the central promenade, termed the ‘village abdomen’ or ‘womb’ (paunga inaenga) is ordinarily kept entirely clear of all structures. ^[2] It is in the village abdomen that many of the most important rituals are performed, most significantly mortuary feasts, and in pre-colonial times it was in the ground underneath the abdomen that people buried the bodies of their dead relatives. The abdomen of every village thus served as the ritual focus for the human groups who resided there (Mosko 1985: Ch. 2).

While village and bush are thus opposed categories as outside to inside, human life is dependant largely on regular movements and transformations of objects between the two domains (Figure 1). A preponderance of things composing the village perimeter—the building materials for all types of human dwellings (domestic houses, chiefs’ clubhouses, platforms)—are obtained from bush materials and are transformed into village resources. Garden foods and nearly all other things processed and consumed by human beings in the village are similarly obtained in untransformed states from the bush. Indeed, the very space constituting a Mekeo village was initially cleared ‘out’ of the inside space of the bush. This means that the outside village contains much that originated in the inside bush.

At the same time, the inside bush regularly receives contributions of essentially outside village products. In particular, it is in the region of the bush immediately surrounding the rectangular village where human beings deposit their waste products—their own bodily waste products and all the other detritus of their daily lives. Thus just as the village is inhabited by considerable amounts of transformed bush materials at the perimeter, a significant part of the bush contains large quantities of transformed village materials deposited in the bush adjacent to the village. But before village wastes are carried to the nearby bush, each morning they are swept and gathered into piles in the village’s central abdomen.

So as a consequence of this temporal two-way transfer of materials between village and bush, each of the two zones is bisected. The peripheral zone of the outside village largely comprises bush materials transformed by human labour into village resources. In the paunga’s abdomen those things are accumulated once their usefulness has been exhausted. The remote bush is the source of materials for village resources, and it is in the adjacent ring of bush space surrounding the village that those things are redeposited once they have become wastes. In terms of inside and outside, the village contains one unambiguously outside place, the peripheral zone of transformed village resources, and an ambiguously inner part of the outside village, the village abdomen where wastes accumulate. Analogously, the bush contains one unambiguously inside place, the remote bush, and the ambiguously outer part of the inside bush adjacent to the village where human wastes are deposited. The North Mekeo world as a totality is thus constituted of an initial duality of inside bush and outside village, which is bisected by the same duality again to result in purely inside and outside spaces plus an ‘everted inside’ space of the bush adjacent to the village and an ‘inverted outside’ at the village’s central womb. ^[3]

Following my own work (1985: 32), these relations can be characterised as:

Within the Austronesian sphere, I do not believe that this classificatory patterning of village and bush is unique. Although cast in the different terms of the sea versus land, Sahlins has identified for Fiji, and thus for much of the remainder of Polynesia, basically the same structure of a bisected duality (Sahlins 1976; see also Hocart 1936; Valeri 1985).