I now turn to the relation of notions of land and village to the politico-ritual institution of North Mekeo chieftainship. For it is chiefs, and indeed the whole fourfold hierarchy of chiefly clan officialdom, who are instrumental in the regulation of these transmissions of ngaka among village and bush places, among people and their outside and inside bodily zones, and thereby among the social relations that define tribal groupings.

Basically, every named clan should have a full complement of four chiefly and sorcery offices, as noted above. The division of labour between the peace and war officials corresponds with the distinction of internal and external tribal relations, respectively. Thus peace chiefs and peace sorcerers are responsible for the regulation of the two main types of inter-clan exchange that I have described already: the transmission of exogamous bloods between clans of opposite moieties in procreation and the inverse exchange of bloods between clans in mortuary feasting and de-conception. These are, in fact, the essence of the kofuapie and pisaua exchange relationships that have received considerable attention in the various ethnographic accounts of the Mekeo peoples from Seligmann onwards. To the extent that the bloods of conception and de-conception embody the good and bad ngaka obtained originally from their own tribal territories, peace chiefs and peace sorcerers can be seen as the official regulators of life and death in the sphere of intra-tribal relations.

War chiefs and war sorcerers, in contrast, regulate life and death in the sphere of intertribal relations. At the advent of the colonial era, Mekeo tribes were predominantly endogamous entities. Peaceful marital exchanges of life-giving blood occurred between clans of the same tribe. Even so, distinct tribes also exchanged blood and, through it, ngaka. Violent death in warfare, like death caused by peace sorcery, is dependent on the ritual insertion of bad ngaka into the open bodies of enemies so that they cannot effectively resist physical assault and the consequent excretion of bodily blood from inside to outside. In order to be capable of inflicting death in this way, tribal warriors had to ensure that their own bodies were effectively closed to the bad ngaka of enemy war ritual. It was the responsibility of war chiefs and war sorcerers to insert bad ngaka into tribal enemies’ bodies and prevent its absorption in the bodies of members of their own tribe. Thus, complementary to the peace officials, war chiefs and war sorcerers regulated life and death in the context of exchanges of blood and ngaka between hostile tribal groups.

This implies that territorial tribal groups, like clans and human bodies, constituted collective bodies with internal and external dimensions; that a result of war exchange was to further bisect the internal and external dimension of tribal relations with inverted and everted extensions; that intertribal warfare, like intra-tribal marriage and feasting, involved processes of life and death; that life and death in the context of war, as in peace, involved the flow of good and bad ngaka; and that it was the war chiefs and war sorcerers of clan groups who regulated these processes.

In war and peace, chiefs and sorcerers acted only on behalf of fellow clan members. Ethnologically, this is a very important point. From pre-colonial times to the present, North Mekeo have been organised into tribal entities with territorial associations, as described above, but they have never possessed anything like a ‘tribal chief’ with authority over an entire tribal domain. As Godelier (1991: 303) has observed, among North Mekeo there are tribal ‘chiefdoms’ but no tribal ‘chiefs’; that is, there are no politico-ritual functionaries whose dominion extends to an entire tribe. This contrasts in some respects with supposed chiefly societies elsewhere in Melanesia (e.g. the Trobriands; see Mosko 1995, 1997b; Powell 1997), Polynesia, Micronesia and Indonesia.