Much like the various flows of ngaka I have outlined here, my attempt to trace the relations of North Mekeo territorial categories to chiefly institutions has been hardly a direct one. In order to appreciate the meanings that villagers themselves attach to the categories pangua and ango, it has been necessary to consider them in relation to the broader spatio-temporal classification of the world or cosmos as a bisected duality of inside/outside plus their eversions and inversions as well as their fractal counterparts with respect to the human body and society. This, therefore, is my first conclusion: that in at least this one Austronesian setting, categorisations of land and territory must be seen in the context of indigenous self-scaled constructions of body and society. As I have already indicated, this conceptual scheme has been reported widely across many parts of the Austronesian-speaking Pacific.

Secondly, these analogies are not just formal associations inasmuch as the flows between village and bush, between the inside and the outside of bodies, and between exogamous clans and endogamous tribes involve the circulation of the one substance vital for life and death, ngaka.

Third, to the extent that it is elements of ngaka that are the critical components of the composition and de-conception of people and relations, North Mekeo agency and sociality as I have elsewhere analysed them in terms of personal partibility and the countervailing processes of conception and de-conception are encompassed thoroughly in the cosmic flows of ngaka. In this regard, the North Mekeo case provides an important point of convergence for some of the most convincing but heretofore separate models of the dynamics of Melanesian and Indonesian societies: partible personhood and fluid ontologies for the former, and the flow of life for the latter.

Finally, the system of North Mekeo clan chiefs and sorcerers provides another provocative example of what I have elsewhere argued pertains to the Austronesian sphere more generally: that there may be ‘chieftainships’ that are congruent with more or less territorially based tribal domains, but these domains nonetheless lack tribal ‘chiefs’.