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By Simon J. Harrison
One of the humans of Avatip, a group within the Sepik quarter of Papua New Guinea, the main prestigious and valued kinds of wealth are own names. during this interesting research, Simon Harrison analyzes the importance of names within the context of Avatip ritual, cosmology, and ideas of the individual, and indicates how the Avatip process of names parallels the gift-exchange platforms of many different Melanesian societies. In ritualized debates, which shape the world of Avatip political lifestyles, rival leaders and the teams they signify fight in oratorical contests for the ownership of strategic names, and as they achieve this, continuously manage delusion, ritual and cosmology. by means of exploiting the interior chances of this symbolically constituted economic climate, those aggressive approaches over the last century were steadily reworking the political procedure from a comparatively egalitarian style to 1 in accordance with hereditary inequality and rank. the writer deals a critique of the analytical separation of economic climate and the symbolic order, arguing that it obscures the procedures of political evolution in Melanesia and disguises the elemental similarities underlying the sociocultural variety of the quarter.
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Extra resources for Stealing People’s Names: History and Politics in a Sepik River Cosmology
Example text
Although Avatip descent groups seem in this respect quite different from those of the Highlands, the underlying mechanisms are very similar. The strictly agnatic structure of Avatip descent groups is not the result of an emphasis on patrilineal values as such. It is an effect of the structure of alliance relationships. If a subclan were to incorporate sisters' children, it would make itself a donor to their mortuary payments, instead of a recipient. It would deprive itself, in other words, of its main source of shell wealth, and cease to be viable in the system of alliance payments.
But each of the three communities retains a strong sense of separate identity, remaining largely endogamous and having an organisationally independent ritual system. The populations of the three communities in 1978 are given in Table 1. Avatip is by far the largest of the communities, accounting for more than half of the total Manambu population. It is also the oldest Manambu 16 The Manambu Table 1. Populations of Manambu settlements in 1978 (includes absentees) Avatip Total Yentshanggai Yawmbak Lapanggai 884 339 59 1282 Malu (including Apan and Kamandjaw)fl 561 Yuanamb^ 362 Total Manambu population a 2205 Source: Government Census November 1978.
Nowadays, they are more likely to be taking up well-paid careers as teachers, policemen, clerks and so forth. In general these young salary-earning absentees maintain close ties with their kin. They come home on leave and are an important source of money and goods. Avatip was subjected to heavy labour recruitment until the end of the 1950s. But it has not experienced the same levels of permanent outmigration, and depopulation, that some of the other river-villages have suffered from (Curtain 1978; 1980: 324, 332).