Transformations in kinship,land rights and social boundaries among the Wampar in Papua New Guinea and the generative agency of children of interethnic marriages

Introduction

Children of interethnic marriages often face particular challenges in navigating social relations and boundaries relevant to belonging and identity. Through their creativity in dealing with these issues, they contribute to social and cultural change. Drawing on my study among the Wampar in Papua New Guinea, ¹ I illustrate how children contribute to the transformation of social life in negotiating identities and rights in a context of socioeconomic changes characterized by a growing number of interethnic marriages and new patterns of land use and income generation.

The increasingly ethnically diverse population within the Wampar territory, resulting primarily from interethnic marriages (Beer, 2006a), entails that not only adults, but also children must negotiate social boundaries based on kinship and ethnicity. This is especially the case for children of interethnic couples, particularly those with non-Wampar fathers. For the Wampar, kinship continues to play an important role in organizing social, economic and political relationships. As Beer makes clear (Beer, 2006a: 32), ‘the kin group is central because economic activities and decisions take place within it, and it regulates access to land, which is the most important and contested resource’. Accordingly, the question of who qualifies as a member of a Wampar corporate group has become a major concern, since this implies rights over and access to land (Beer, 2008: 100). Thus, kinship connections, ethnic affiliation and access to primary resources are intricately related among contemporary Wampar.

In situating how kinship connections are defined and social relationships constructed in such a context, I draw on ‘new kinship studies’ (Carsten, 1995, 2000). By definition, interethnic marriages involve the formation of kin networks that extend across cultures, identities and group boundaries. Beer (2010a: 146–151) refers to ‘transcultural’ kinship in such contexts, since these networks involve the negotiation of specific, sometimes incommensurable, notions of relatedness and the social identities they entail. Thus, what Carsten refers to as ‘relatedness’ involves the use of culturally situated symbols and meanings, created by social actors through their practices. ²

In this article, I explore the centrality of children and their agency in the process of kinship and identity construction. Montgomery (2009: 14) notes the pivotal role that children play in anthropological theorizing on kinship, citing the work of Carsten (1991) among the Malays of Langkawi Island as an example of addressing this question. In order to get an understanding of the experiences of the children of interethnic marriages, I explore their interpretations of their situation and the kinds of actions that they take in making sense of their belonging. By examining the discourse and practices of children with non-Wampar fathers, I recognize children as capable agents of change. Hence, I build upon James’s (2009) approach on agency that recognizes children as individuals who, as I show in this article, are active in constructing their own life and engage in transformative practices as part of their negotiations of social structures and relations. I also take a generational perspective whereby children are viewed in relation to another social group, particularly adults. Alanen’s (2001, 2003, 2009) exposition on the concept of generation as constituted by a relational and structuring process of social positions is informative in exploring the situatedness of the varying perspectives of children and adults in the context of transcultural kinship and the kinds of interactions or interdependencies that are forming between them. Mayall and Zeiher underpin this approach in the sociological study of childhood where ‘processes in child–adult relationships are central to understanding the lives and experiences of children’ (2003: 10).

In this article I first discuss the interethnic marriages and their implications on kinship. I then discuss the impact of changing environmental and economic conditions on social boundaries and kinship practices. Against this backdrop, I describe the varying situations and perspectives of children from interethnic marriages in relation to those of the adults, to their parents and lineage leaders of their Wampar kin. Children whose father is non-Wampar face challenges in situating themselves socially. While they share the common experience of having non-Wampar fathers, their individual interactions with kin on both sides of their transcultural kindred also account for the differentiations of perspectives and notions of belonging. I present cases of children from two families where the fathers are of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. I focus on six children/young people (two sons and a daughter from each family) who are between 13 and 20 years old and are either still in their primary and secondary grades or temporarily out of school. Some started attending school when they were past the age of 7, which is not unusual in Dzifasing. For example, in 2009, children in the first grade ranged from 7 to 12 years old. In Wampar, a child or a young person is called garafu. The unmarried girl and boy are daer and bangets respectively. The children in my case study share similar experiences with most other children in the village. They grow up playing with peers or attending the same school in the village, joining in community social events and engaging in the same livelihood and economic activities whenever possible. However, in changing socioeconomic conditions, when issues of social boundaries and rights arise, these children face challenges that other children with Wampar fathers do not. I therefore analyse how these children position themselves in this situation, how they make choices, and redefine rights and practices for inclusion or exclusion. I also show how gender shapes their choices and affects their options.

In conclusion, I argue that children take part in constructing social relationships and identities, engage with the discourse on ‘ethnicity’ or belonging and get involved in the structuring of kinship. Through the children’s engagement in these processes, new opportunities or possibilities for children and adults are emerging. Amid the economic changes and perceived demographic pressures that shape kinship discourses, practices and organization, children draw on their transformative and productive potentials, which their adult kin see in them.

Kinship, interethnic marriages and children’s land rights in Dzifasing

The research took place in Papua New Guinea, a country that is culturally diverse with more than 800 ethno-linguistic groups. It focuses in particular on a village called Dzifasing, which is one of the eight Wampar villages in the Markham Valley in Morobe province. In Dzifasing, children are at the centre of the dynamics of the discourse and practices of kinship due to a high rate of interethnic marriages between Wampar men and women and non-Wampar migrants coming from all over Papua New Guinea. Children who are born out of these mixed marriages represent an important social category that challenges modes of incorporation and social differentiation. Earlier ethnographies identify the Wampar kinship system as patrilineal (e.g. Fischer, 1975: 293–296; 1996: 129), although practices are more flexible and varied than what the rule prescribes as people respond to changing socioeconomic conditions. Based on this normative description of Wampar kinship, a child’s affiliation and rights to land vary significantly according to his or her gender. Normatively, a son inherits rights to land from his father’s lineage and may decide how the land should be used and distributed while a daughter receives limited usufruct rights on land apportioned by her (classificatory) father or brother. For children of mixed marriages, however, kinship affiliation and land rights are not only defined by their own gender, but are also moulded by the gender of the in-marrying parent (mother or father).

Lineage membership and clan affiliation are not questioned when a Wampar man marries an afi yaner (non-Wampar woman). However, children whose father is a ngaeng yaner ³ (non-Wampar man) face questions about their belonging to a lineage. For these children, lineage membership and clan affiliation are more than symbolic as they have economic and political implications for their position. The gender of the in-marrying partner and the gender of the child thus define in complex ways their rights and belonging.

Many interethnic marriages result from rural–urban migration of people seeking jobs and business opportunities in the nearby city of Lae, which is about 60 km away from Dzifasing. These marriages, when considered in the broader historical context, show a pattern that resembles the one identified by Beer (2006a: 25–30) in her study of interethnic marriage in the nearby Wampar village of Gabsongkeg. The trend started with marriages mostly of Wampar men to women from the neighbouring Adzera. From the 1960s onwards, men from more distant coastal and lowland areas married in. Women from these areas did the same, but mostly three decades later. It was only in the 1980s that men and women from the Highlands started marrying in.

Most interethnic couples stayed in Dzifasing and have gardens of subsistence staples, but their right to use land for other purposes is sometimes contested. This is especially the case with uxorilocal non-Wampar men. In such cases a common form of differentiation involves the way children of the marriage are referred to: miks pikinini (mixed child), miks manki (mixed boy), miks meri (mixed girl), or pikinini bilong ngaeng yaner (child of a non-Wampar man); but ethnonymic identifiers are also stressed, as for instance, meri Tolai (a Tolai girl/woman) or man Sepik (a boy/man from the Sepik). ⁴ While children of non-Wampar fathers acknowledge these terms they also put emphasis on their connections through their Wampar mothers, and want to be recognized as children of Wampar women.

However, practices among the Wampar suggest flexibility of norms with a tendency towards bilaterality ⁵ where links through the Wampar mother are gaining importance. A Wampar woman can continue to enjoy her usufruct rights to land belonging to her lineage even after marriage. For women marrying non-Wampar men, their usufruct rights allow their families to cultivate gardens for subsistence production. Children from these marriages are dependent for their livelihood on the usufruct rights of their mothers, which are now being passed down to them, although this may be contested by the mother’s kin.

Shifting economy, ethnic politics and children’s contribution

Changing environmental and economic conditions are shaping the politics of ethnicity and kinship organization among the Wampar in Dzifasing. The Wampar formerly had a booming cash crop economy based on the growing and selling of buai (betelnut or areca nut). After an unknown pest hit the areca palms in 2007, devastating the harvest and killing off most mature palm trees, there was a dramatic shift in economic activities towards the cultivation of cacao and cattle farming. With the entry of a mining company, people are hoping to receive royalties and compensation payments resulting from mining activities in the future. These transformations have opened the field for further discourses on inclusion and exclusion, and for new practices on the organization of kinship, which particularly affect the lives and future of children with non-Wampar fathers.

In the Melanesian context, matters of lineage and clan boundaries as well as customary tenure are not exclusive but based on actual social relations of nurturance and reciprocity. With the economic transition brought in by global market forces and capitalism, there is a discursive tightening of social boundaries of kinship along the lines of biological descent. ⁶ In Dzifasing, however, the exclusionary effect of the new economic activities is offset by the demographic weight coming out of interethnic marriages, particularly the children from these marriages. These children are valued as a social capital for their contribution to the economy and their productive potentials, including their educational achievement. These are resources that children possess and that they know are valued in their society, and they therefore make use of them in negotiating their interests. Children’s involvement in economic activities is not only in subsistence production but also in cash cropping, with their labour input being integral in the agricultural production and marketing of produce. A close analysis of children’s work among the Tonga in Zimbabwe (Reynolds, 1991) has shown that children’s contributions to the economy in terms of their labour input can be significant and corresponds to a valued position in society. Among the Iatmul in Papua New Guinea, children, whose access to resources are not restricted, are characterized by economic independence, allowing them freedom to fulfil their needs and interests (Weiss, 1981). This has also been true for the Wampar in Dzifasing even during the time of the betelnut economy.

The betelnut, a mild stimulant chewed all over Papua New Guinea together with betel pepper and lime, used to be the main source of cash income for the Wampar. This form of cash income was accessible for both adults and children. Cultivating areca palms does not require huge tracts of land or a lot of work. Children can plant their own areca palms and claim ownership of its produce; ⁷ they climb the palm to harvest the nuts and have them sold through a parent or other adult kin and get cash in return. Adults actually depend on children to climb thin palms because most grown-ups are too heavy to do so and they might break them. Children recall how they used to have 20 or 50 Kina (about US$7–17) as pocket money to go to school with before the demise of the areca palms. They reminisce of those days when they could often go to Lae and buy things considered as luxury items, such as cosmetic kits for girls, or beer for teenage boys. This access to cash and wealth was the same for any family that had enough areca palms. Land boundary issues and the question of who has rights to use a lineage’s land were not the immediate concerns of the day. Interethnic couples, including those where the husband is a non-Wampar, had access to land for gardens where they could also grow areca palms and harvest their nuts.

Upon the demise of the areca palms, everyone started to look elsewhere for a more sustainable source of cash income, which had a significant impact on the way kinship and ethnic boundaries are being drawn. One option people turned to was cacao. Since growing cacao requires a more sizeable land area than growing areca palms, the landowning families began to actively secure the boundaries of their land and delimit the access for those they considered as having no rights based on kinship. They also turned to cattle farming, which had a long history in the Markham Valley dating back to the 1970s, when a government-sponsored test farm was established. With the end of the betelnut economy, large tracts of land were fenced for cattle grazing and new herds were established, even if profits from this venture were small compared to income that was derived from the sale of areca nuts. As cattle farms require a sizeable investment, families are now documenting their lineage history to retain proof of ownership and even go to court to establish legal title to their land.

Since large tracts of land are required to grow cacao and graze cattle, land came into focus as the only source of long-term wealth, and the discourse about male foreigners, or ngaeng yaner, turned more hostile. The ngaeng yaner and their children are now viewed as threats, as competitors for land, a resource that people deem is getting scarcer (cf. Beer, 2006a: 35). Rules for the ngaeng yaner and their children were discussed and announced during public community meetings. The public discourse was that a ngaeng yaner must, in theory, go back to his place of origin and take his family with him (which means that a Wampar woman, particularly when a bride price has already been paid, must also leave with her children and husband). Restrictive rules on land use prohibits ngaeng yaner families from planting cacao on any land, including in their plots used for vegetable gardens, unless offered or permitted by the lineage leaders, who are either the (classificatory) father or brothers of the Wampar woman. How families and their children respond to this situation also depends on the quality of kin connection and relationships with their Wampar and non-Wampar kin. This is notwithstanding the factor of land size that may or may not be available to the lineage or the productive potential of the property. The growing of cacao and intensification of cattle farming thus underline not only the economic dimension of kinship but also the politics of affiliations. In addition, a stricter interpretation of the rule of virilocality is demanded and restrictions or limitations on what used to be traditionally accessible land are being reinforced.

While the economic shift to planting cacao and cattle farming leads to a tightening of kinship and ethnic boundaries, the prospects for a possible future economic windfall expected to come from a large-scale multinational mining operation has the exact opposite effect. A mining company has found large and economically viable gold and copper deposits in a territory that the Wampar claim as historically belonging to them. It plans to build a processing plant and tailings disposal facility in their vicinity. When the Wampar in Dzifasing learned about this, they began forming into Incorporated Land Groups (ILGs) to defend their claim and to profit from expected royalties and compensation for damage to their land. The formation of ILGs is an offshoot of the Land Group Incorporation Act of 1974 ⁸ that legally recognizes customary land ownership. This legal regime has been introduced by the state to accommodate the global industrial capitalist economy. One step towards formal incorporation into ILGs is the listing of members of the clan, or the documentation of a clan’s genealogy. In engaging the globally operating and heavily capitalized multinational mining industry and the accompanying legal regime of the state pertaining to land tenure rights, counting the children is suddenly important because they can boost clan size. In this process of constructing clan membership, in some cases yaner fathers and their children are included in the list. ⁹ The reasons given were so that they can also benefit from the royalties or compensations expected from the mining company in the future, and to boost the membership of their clan to get a larger share of the money for the whole clan. In this instance, the discourse and practice of who are clan members and who are entitled to the land are not necessarily in a neat and coherent equation.

As lineage leaders actively use clan names and affiliations in this context of group representation, children with non-Wampar fathers also draw on this same structural dimension of kinship, which they are cognisant of as having not only social but also economic and political consequences on their lives. As we see later, they challenge the norm of filiation based solely on the father. Emphasizing bilateral affiliations, they choose to identify themselves also with their Wampar mother’s lineage and clan, and they express their sense of belonging and inclusion through this connection.

Children’s strategies and varying perspectives

In this section, I cite cases of children with non-Wampar fathers to show not only the collective dimension of their experience but also the individual choices they make and how they make meaning of their social positions, relationships and identity. I show their perspectives and relate them to their parents’ and adult Wampar kin’s views. Here, the relational interaction and interdependencies between these two generations are playing out in the construction of kinship and ethnic boundaries. The consequences of kinship extend not only to ethnicity but also to gender, which as I show in this section, are closely intertwined and have a differential impact on a son or a daughter of a non-Wampar father. Daughters are aware of the discourse that specifically limits their rights and opportunities compared to their male siblings.

Conclusion

Beer (2006a: 22) notes that most Wampar take a pragmatic approach in the process of exclusion and inclusion. Both children and adults proved to be equally pragmatic in their approach. Children also exhibit the competence to situate themselves on the issues of land rights and clan affiliation. They dynamically respond to the changing socioeconomic conditions in effecting desired or more secure positions. Both adults, particularly the lineage leaders, and children make use of ‘structure’ and ‘norms’ as resources for qualifying inclusion among the Wampar. Despite hostile public discourse shaped by changing patterns of land use and the Wampar practices of inclusion and exclusion, children of interethnic families are able to carve out a place for themselves in Wampar society. Children draw on their structural affiliation to their mother’s side as part of their assertions of belonging. In the process, they do not only pose as a challenge, but more important, also negotiate the ‘rules’ of kinship and social boundaries and generate new or additional meanings of social relations. They take actions based on their knowledge and understanding of their kinship relations, which can lead to choices that can be a mutually benefiting situation, for them and their adult kin, although it can also be questioned or contested by other kin.

Children are aware that having land rights and being recognized as members of a clan are important markers of their integration and recognition as equals in the Wampar society. Some strategies that children put to use include drawing on genealogical links through their Wampar mothers and thus affiliating with the mother’s lineage and clan, asserting their attachment to the place by birth and social ties, and through acquired cultural knowledge as they grow up in Dzifasing, but more critically, keeping a comportment that gains acceptance and good relationships with the mother’s brothers and other Wampar kin. With children’s own categorization of inclusion, they contribute not just to blurring boundaries of ethnicity but transform them as they relate them to their notions of belonging and relatedness. Through this, they modify rules of incorporation into a social group and challenge the static ordering of social relations and boundaries.

While the general discourse tends towards excluding yaner and their children, landholding lineage leaders are in fact more accommodating to their nephews with yaner fathers, also because of their labour input and economic potential. The nephews, on the other hand, consciously take this opportunity to cultivate this relationship. However, for daughters of yaner, options are narrower. If they want to ensure their stay within the Wampar territory and to be integrated into a Wampar lineage, they will have to marry a Wampar man and maintain good relations with his family or remain unmarried. The contrasting option for the children to move out of Dzifasing can be a more secure and generally uncontested positioning, either by claiming rights from their father’s lineage or by pursuing higher education for a possible career or job prospects elsewhere. Making use of their fluid identifications allows them to have other options.

The formation of Incorporated Land Groups in Dzifasing, in anticipation of possible royalties or compensation from the mining company in the future, shows an additional dimension in the structuring of kinship when yaner fathers and their children are given an equal footing as far as formal representation of clan membership to the state is concerned. Nominally, yaner and their children are included as ‘co-owners’, but this does not equate with having full rights unless one is being integrated as a meaningful member of a lineage, as in Greg’s case. In the absence of conflict or contestations within his mother’s lineage, his sense of belonging and rights to land are assured. The practice of clan making by the lineage leaders in the context of land group incorporation in Dzifasing also indicates accommodation of bilaterality and a form of inclusiveness beyond descent. While it may run counter to the hostile discourse that intensifies the rules of exclusion and tightens the boundaries of inclusion, lineage leaders, nevertheless, adopt this inclusive practice for pragmatic reasons. Even in cases when the yaner father is excluded from formal membership in the ILG, the children are a resource that lineage leaders do not fail to tap: whether in the process of clan membership expansion for higher royalties or compensations, in getting the much-needed labour and farmhands, or in accessing productive skills. They are assets and beneficial to a lineage’s projects or agenda. Through the children’s use of lineage and clan affiliations and the lineage male leaders’ inclusion of the children, they mutually constitute meanings of membership, relatedness and identity.

Thus, children of yaner fathers, to be counted as Wampar, to continue to live in Dzifasing, to work on a piece of land and most important, to inherit rights like other Wampar children, actively construct meaningful relationships that reconfigure kinship, land rights and cultural identity in the process. A fuller picture on the construction and transformations of kinship, land rights and social boundaries emerges by taking into account the discourses and practices children generate. Children’s strategies are as varied and numerous as their individual experiences of childhood. In this case, children of interethnic marriages, particularly those with non-Wampar fathers, have also shown the extent and potential of their transformative capabilities and their agency to challenge social boundaries.