Only the names have changed: Dialectic and differentiation of the indigenous person in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Indigeneity is becoming a more important way for the rural communities of Papua New Guinea (PNG) to represent identity, as it is in many other parts of the world. Anthropologists have largely been critical of the essentialism of indigenous identities, and describe indigeneity as an emerging consciousness of the denial of sovereignty. I argue that Dumont’s distinction between dialectic and differentiation as alternative ways to think about social wholes helps to sort through contemporary discussion of the emergence of indigeneity. An account of indigenous peoples’ claims as a dialectic of recognition leaves many questions unanswered; Dumont explains why and suggests an alternative path. The case of Auhelawa, a society of PNG, illustrates how a self-conception rooted in territory involves a transformation of the cultural construction of personhood. Auhelawa indigenous identity not only draws upon colonial discourses of race, but upon a distinct ideology of names as individuating labels. The discourse of kinship, by contrast, provides a context for people to imagine a wide-ranging network of relationships between groups based on the power of lineage names to connect people to remote relatives in other places. This conflict of discursive frameworks indicates a deeper conflict between different concepts of the person, an issue highlighted by Dumont as well as his forebears, Mauss and Durkheim.

Keywords

Dialectic Dumont globalization indigeneity

For almost a whole generation, anthropology has been struggling with its own units problem, mainly under the heading of globalization. Anthropologists have learned to assume that social orders are not isolated and self-contained systems, but are each facets of a larger, manifold and complex unity, as Wolf (1982) argued. Today, scholars conceptualize the global order in a variety of ways, but the objects of research that anthropologists seek now have definitively shifted away from single wholes and towards the junctures between cultures. The entire world is a contact zone, a scene of interaction and influence.¹ As such, anthropologists are much more interested in explaining processes of change rather than continuities, flux rather than order, and becoming rather than being, since these are increasingly seen as the dominant facts of the human condition. Louis Dumont is one example of a theorist whose work is seen as no longer addressing the right questions. As an exponent of French sociological theory, he is committed to seeing social life as a total phenomenon, and to social analysis as a comparison between actual societies qua totalities. One of the main complaints of structuralist analysis is that it favours a synchronic view of the social system when a diachronic account of social systems is needed to understand conjunctures of cultures. The central question of the new anthropology is to account for the production and formation of a new state of affairs out of the contests and contradictions between opposing social forces. A focus on how a pre-existing scheme of categories constructs reality is not as important.

Dumont is not only aware of this problem but he also identifies a tension in ways of thinking about diachronic processes which can be seen in debates about how to grapple with cultural conjunctures. The tension is between dialectic and differentiation as alternative models of diachronic process. Often western, ‘modern’ thinkers tend to treat the process of change as dialectical when it is in fact differentiation. Dumont argues that the formal manifestation of the social totality is the hierarchical opposition between structural categories. Every element of society is ranked in terms of how it reflects the central value of society as a whole. Elements are not simply distinguished on the basis of distinctive features. Rather, in every opposition, one side also stands for the whole, and the other element is defined in terms of how it is different from this standard. This kind of hierarchical opposition, which in many ways is similar to Jakobson’s concept of marked opposition, is defined by Dumont as ‘the encompassment of the contrary’ (Dumont, 1980c: 239). Difference between elements thus creates contradiction at one level, but unity at a higher level. Dumont recognizes that his way of arguing that opposing social forces can be reconciled and integrated was not the only one, but had a ‘formidable neighbor’ in the Hegelian dialectic (1980c: 242). He writes:

On the one hand we have ‘structure,’ on the other, ‘dialectic.’ The followers of ‘dialectic’ readily consider ‘structure’ to be sterile. … [The structuralist’s] oppositions, complementariness, and polarities are not surpassed through a ‘development.’ However, there is certainly a temporal process corresponding to [structure], that of differentiation. (Dumont, 1980c: 242–3, emphasis in original)²

Dumont does not spell out how a process of differentiation unfolds except to suggest that it is an inversion of the classic three-step formula of the dialectic, so I will offer my interpretation. Differentiation is a process whereby different social facts are organized and ranked according to where they fit in a hierarchy of values. In the flux of diachronic time, one experiences phenomena as part of the same continuous experience. Values filter this continuous experience by offering points of intersubjective alignment with respect to the environment as a world. A society’s central values serve as the background against which lesser social forms can be distinguished as foreground elements. To be clear, when a person perceives the world through the lens of value, foreground elements are more prominent only in a metaphorical sense that one sees them as limited in relevance, narrow in range, and less important. If, for instance, reciprocity is the central value of one’s culture, then, following my metaphor, one does not see it everywhere precisely because it is the most basic form of action. Over time, a society thus might proliferate a variety of many different representations, rules and institutions, each fulfilling a distinct and narrowly defined function, but without necessarily changing the overall balance in favour of its core values. Thus what appears as change in the object is at another level parallax, or a rearrangement of the relationships between elements in the scene.

Dumont concludes by noting that the difference between dialectic and differentiation is that ‘a totality without precedent can be produced synthetically’ through dialectical movement, but that differentiation presupposes a pre-existing totality (Dumont, 1980c: 243). He then suggests that ‘moderns’, including social analysts, tend not to see hierarchy where it exists but ‘put everything on the same plane’; that is to say, modern ideology emphasizes the opposition of elements as a given but obscures their hierarchization within a whole, and hence also their complementary unity (Dumont, 1980c: 244). If it is the modern error to treat social facts in isolation, then I would argue that when anthropologists examine cultural conjunctures, they can similarly mistake differentiation within a whole for dialectical synthesis.

One of the puzzles to which this distinction is relevant is the resurgence of claims to indigenous sovereignty as the basis for making political claims within national and international publics. If there is an emerging global order, it is one in which difference is a key principle. In spite of persisting inequality and domination, the global order is in some ways also a cosmopolitan order. As such, when looking at indigenism in the frame of the global, anthropologists have argued that this is a kind of struggle for recognition. Nonetheless, accounting for new identities only in terms of a dialectic of recognition ultimately proves to be limited, and many scholars have maintained that these new identities derive from western culture’s concepts of otherness. The debate harkens to Dumont’s warning that modern ideology obscures the necessary unity and totality of social life, and that change is often a differentiation within a whole.

Having suggested why Dumont is relevant for this discussion, I then describe an ethnic consciousness among Auhelawa of PNG as a case in point. I see their self-awareness as Auhelawa as a differentiation within a totality grounded on the value of individualism, which exists alongside kinship as an alternative site for the differentiation of persons. These two alternative modes of framing the self correspond to two alternative ways of reading names. In moving between frames for construing the meaning of names, I suggest that Auhelawa oscillate from one totalization based on kinship to another based on primordiality.

Globalization and indigeneity

Anthropologists generally interpret the assertion of indigeneity as a special kind of emerging political consciousness.³ Globally, claims to indigeneity are so diverse that they escape easy definition. The concept centres on communities who have and continue to face colonial dispossession and now seek, in national or international spheres, a recognition of sovereignty that has been denied (Maybury-Lewis, 1991, 2002). Indigenous groups seek protection from discrimination, rights to land and territory, communal autonomy within the nation-state, or guarantees of livelihood, among others, all usually grounded in continuing traditions. The ethnography of indigenous politics has tended to highlight the paradoxes which emerge in these instances. Authenticity, for instance, is a double-edged sword in many cases (Cattelino, 2010; Conklin and Graham, 1995; Graham, 2002; Jackson, 1991, 1995; Jackson and Ramirez, 2009; Kirsch, 2007; Li, 2001b). Furthermore, while indigenous movements base their claims on their uniqueness and attachment to territory, they also push for recognition of their claims in global arenas, in cooperation with diverse movements from many places (Karlsson, 2003; Muehlebach, 2001; Pelican, 2009). More importantly, indigenous demands for autonomy and self-determination are often voiced in terms of human rights. Not only is such a conceptualization of their aim predicated on a western, liberal mode of politics, but it presumes that at some level indigenous people must be incorporated into a political sphere in which they can be recognized as having rights. If they demand too much autonomy from the state, then they undermine the basis for this recognition. If they embrace rights talk too readily in order to accomplish their aim, they may undermine the autonomy they desire because they will ultimately have to rely upon a state to guarantee it (Graham, 2002; Povinelli, 2002).

This particular dilemma, what we might also call the double bind of liberal recognition, is often at the root of many anthropological discussions of not only indigenous identities but also multiculturalism generally. In order to have full social standing, one must have the recognition of an other, and hence accept one’s dependence on that other even in the act of defining oneself in opposition to it. One admits one’s place in a political sphere in the same moment as one asserts one’s autonomy. On this point, there are some scholars who see the dialectical emergence of indigeneity out of the colonial encounter as itself a powerful challenge to the ethnocentrism of liberalism, and the source for a cosmopolitan global order in which cultures coexist. This progressive force, in their view, derives from the creative agency of local actors to exploit a variety of ideas about them as symbolic resources. Where it suits them, they adopt different languages of rights, of cultural heritage or environmental conservation to make their demands intelligible to national and international audiences (Graham, 2002; Jackson, 1995; Muehlebach, 2001). This can even go as far as reworking the meaning of citizenship itself to include and permit difference (Blackburn, 2009; LeFevre, 2013). Tania Murray Li argues that indigenous identities are the ‘contingent products of agency’ of local actors who engage with state institutions and their systems of classification and regimentation of populations (Li, 2000: 151; see also Li, 2001a, 2001b). In other words, power defines fields of action and creates new possibilities for self-identification at the same time that it delimits and defines people for its own purposes. The emergence of indigeneity is an unintended consequence of power. Escobar (2006, 2008) and Comaroff and Comaroff (2009) each make similar arguments. Others see a dark side to indigenous identity, claiming that it is an artefact of official schemes of ethno-racial classification (Geschiere, 2009; Ghosh, 2006; Kapila, 2008; Mamdani, 2001; Shah, 2007), the internationally hegemonic discourses of natural resources (Agarwal, 2005), or property rights (Geismar, 2013). In short, indigenous consciousness is a governmentality of cultural difference (Geschiere, 2009; Malkki, 1992).

Dumont consistently stresses that modern ideology leads western social analysts astray. Other cultures will always be incomprehensible until the ideological construct of the universal individual person – Homo aequalis – is treated as the particular cultural fact that it is. Specifically, this ideology leads scholars to construe social reality in exclusively political terms (Dumont, 1980b: 10–11).⁴ Although humans depend on each other and society as a whole, this interdependence tends to be treated as a space of conflict, struggle and domination. Indeed, Dumont also argues that modern ideology never fully succeeds in rupturing the social totality, but at best can only generate a new hierarchical order which subsumes the social forces which cannot be reduced to individual agency. Everything that genuinely pertains to the social whole is just transvalued into some kind of subordinate variant of individual agency. Hence the Leviathan of the sovereign state subordinates the social body, or more ominously, the Herderian cultural spirit stands in place for everything that is not individual, and a corporate, exclusive nationalism based on essential attributes becomes the main way westerners understand cultural differences (Dumont, 1994).

My aim in this article is to address this western ideological bias directly, as Conklin and Graham (1995) do when they show how the liberal concept of individual personhood is translated between cultures (see also De la Cadena, 2010; Graham, 1993, 2005; Merlan, 2009). I do not want to argue for one specific normative conception of indigeneity, or who is and is not indigenous, as many sceptical analyses imply when they argue against essentialism (Kuper, 2003; Kendrick and Lewis, 2004). Rather, as Conklin and Graham do, I claim that the media of political representation determine the nature of political subjectivity because every semiotic form presupposes a particular place, time and person. I would add that each mode of communication, in constructing agency, also presupposes a specific hierarchy of self and other. Where the person is defined as a role within a social totality, political equality is encompassed by difference. Self and other depend on each other for their completeness. Yet where Homo aequalis is the dominant mode of personhood, difference is encompassed by sameness and transformed into an essential otherness. This is the political mode of recognition in which conflict and domination are the only possible outcomes.

What’s in a name?

Auhelawa is a society occupying the southern coast of Normanby Island in Milne Bay Province, PNG. Auhelawa conceptualize themselves as persons in two main ways: (1) they understand themselves as enmeshed in a network of kin ties, and (2) they see themselves as Auhelawa in essence, that is, as an attribute of themselves based on birth. They also understand PNG itself as composed of similar kinds of ethnic groups, some of which are part of a larger race called Papuan, which is itself one among many races of humans. This discourse of identity, in which the key tropes of belonging are birth, blood and connection to a homeland, seems to derive from kinship ties. Yet upon closer inspection, it clearly has roots in a racial ideology. Being a member of an indigenous group in this racial sense is one of the main ways in which Auhelawa frame their relationship with foreign cultures. While people resent racism, everyone takes the idea that all humans are members of one or another race, and that the indigenous Papuan race was itself composed of similar exclusive biological divisions, for granted. What it means to be Auhelawa shifts depending on whether a racial frame or a kinship frame is used to interpret ‘Auhelawa’ as a symbol of oneself.

When Auhelawa perceive themselves through the frame of kinship, they see themselves as a node within a rhizomatic web of relationships extending across the wider inter-island region. In this frame, Auhelawa is not the name of a group but of a place. In this frame, Auhelawa is comprised of a number of matrilineages, occupying one or more noncontiguous areas where residents live in small villages and make subsistence gardens. Every lineage descends from a single ancestor who migrated to Auhelawa several generations ago, and so every lineage has an extralocal connection to the lineage from which they branched off at some point in the past. Every matrilineage also has one of seven or so bird species as a totem. Lineages of the same totem, like lineages of the same migratory origin, are assumed to be related even if there is no memory of a common genealogical ancestry. Matriliny as a relation includes both matrifilial connection to a local group and a large class of people who are bu'una (co-totemic lineages). The discourse of matriliny assumes that historical and genealogical connections between people are the basis for identity.

An important part of the discourse of matriliny is that the memory of one’s relationships, especially bu'una relationships, has to be transmitted to future generations. While one’s matrilineal relationships are based on shared substance of blood, relationships of bu'una and relationships between matrilineal segments have to be recorded and remembered. In the precolonial era, every lineage maintained a shrine for keeping the skulls of its dead members. Matrilineages now bury their dead in mission-style cemeteries, and use these as a new way to record their history. Elders of the lineage pass on the knowledge of the lineage by decoding the memorials, skulls or headstones, and telling the history they symbolize. These memorials also serve as a medium for the construction of relationships lineages have with other groups. Lineages which have a bu'una relationship can share the same shrine, and should be able to tell the same stories of the skulls in it. Hence, people not only convert genealogical knowledge into the symbolic form of a memorial, but these memorials serve as a further basis for bu'una lineages to demonstrate their connection by giving corresponding explanations of the history of the memorial. In this way, the memorialization of genealogy and the practice of narrating memorialized history not only affirm lineage membership but also create the possibility for its extension beyond the local sphere. The discourse of kinship imagines one’s genealogical relatives as being both local and extralocal, immediate and historical.

The system of conferring personal names on children serves as another illustration. Every member of a lineage is named in honour of a deceased matrilineal ancestor. In genealogical narratives of the migration and descent of the lineage, a few names recur frequently. This group of names is supposedly unique to the lineage, having been passed on in perpetuity. A mother who wants to give a certain name to her child must ask the ‘owner of the name’ to confer the name. The owner and the recipient become related as ‘aivelahe (namesake), which is a lifelong relationship in which the elder gives support to the junior. Such namesake relationships are thought to be part of a cycle of reciprocity in that a mother who names her child after a relative will usually be the namesake for that relative’s child. Among the genealogies I collected, there is a tendency for mothers to name children after members of other sub-lineages within their lineage, creating cross-cutting ties that also have the additional effect of circulating the names among the different branches of a maximal lineage. Bu'una relationships can be established and verified on the basis of names as well. If a person of a different lineage possesses a name which is also of one’s own lineage’s stock of names, then this proves that one shares a common genealogical ancestry with the person, because both are connected to the name through its transmission through genealogy. The transmission of names as a mode of relatedness can even be used to decouple kinship from biology. For instance, it is common for a lineage to be bu'una with a lineage whose founder it adopted or gave shelter to when she arrived. Though genealogically unrelated, these lineages might reside in the same territories and share lineage memorials and burial grounds. They also often create reciprocal namesaking relationships among their children, effectively blending together their memorialized ancestry. Likewise, people can not only discover bu'una on the basis of their names in other parts of the region, they can also reinforce or even create future bu'una relationships by becoming namesakes to each other’s children.

As a frame for social relationships, the discourse of kinship instantiates a specific way of reading names as signs of these relationships. Any act of communication is governed by metacommunication at some, usually implicit, level which fixes the message in relation to the context of its utterance. Discursive frames are one example of metacommunication in this sense. They create a universe of all possible messages in which certain ideas are presupposed, always unstated, and form a background against which utterances are read. In doing so, they must suppress certain possible relationships of signification and highlight others, thereby making certain readings seem naturally self-evident and others seem implausible (Agha, 2007; Keane, 2003; Silverstein, 1998). For instance, the discourse of kinship establishes a relationship between three elements as the main way to construe social identities. A person is a member of a lineage group through their relationship to a mediating third term, such as a lineage memorial, totem or shared history. Personal names also exhibit this triadic formula. The basis for the connection between a person and their name is the mediation of another person, the namesake. Also, the discourse of kinship puts emphasis on the historical roots of social relationships, both in memorials and in personal names. It privileges what Kripke has called the ‘causal theory of reference’, the idea that names attach to what they name, or symbols refer to their objects, because they derive from an original performative act of naming in which each iteration of the original dubbing extends a causal chain and reinforces the association between a name and what it names (Kripke, 1980; see also Lee, 1997).

The discourse of kinship explains that a person has the name that one does because of their relationship to one’s namesake, and more generally to the ancestors who previously held the name, and any other people who also have the same name. For example, during my fieldwork, my adoptive family wanted to give a Father’s Day dinner for Francis, our father. Francis didn’t want to be the only guest of honour, though. So he suggested, with his usual wry humour, that the party be for ‘all the Francises’ and then invited several of his ‘aivelahe named Francis, both his sister’s children and his bu'una. Francis played on the idea that he was Francis insofar as he was one of many Francises, all of whom are related through matri-kinship and in a sense derived from an original Francis. The result was to take something foreign and convert it into a familiar form in which one matrilineal group gives food to an affinally linked matrilineal group and its bu'una.

Names of one’s affines and patrilateral kin are taboo. The practice of avoidance of these names corresponds to the triadic frame of construing names as well. One frequently used avoidance technique is to substitute the generic word naniwa (something) or naniwa haidova (something somewhere) for the name, as if it were a filler word indicating the speaker’s search for the name. In this case the conspicuous absence of the name from the utterance itself indexes the fact that the name attaches to the named person through a matri-kinship link, which is also the basis for the prohibition on its utterance by the speaker, who is of another clan. More than a few times a speaker in this situation would interrupt himself or herself, pick up a piece of gravel and toss it in the direction of a person who would be permitted to utter the prohibited name, and say, ‘You say his name!’ In other words, the inclusion of another’s voice in the utterance also signals that the referential connection is based on the intermediation of matri-kinship.

In these cases, the speaker presents their talk as a self-conscious and deliberate choice against uttering the prohibited name, which indexes the background of matri-kinship which makes naming possible.⁵ In this light, more common and conventional forms of avoidance make sense. In place of prohibited names, people generally use kinship terms in place of names, nicknames, or teknonymy such as ‘N's father’ (N tama-na [where N is a matrilineal relative]). Teknonymy in particular highlights that the prohibited name attached to the named person on the basis of matri-kinship. It denotes the person by connecting them to another name, either of a person or of a village, which the speaker can utter because of their matrilineal connection to it.

The necessity of name avoidance also provides a lens through which Auhelawa understand their own language in a regional context. Auhelawa recognize that their language overlaps significantly with many other languages of the region. One explanation given for this is that words shared between language groups were introduced into Auhelawa by the migrant ancestors of specific villages, replacing older forms with the same meaning. Also, people explain these borrowings as a change resulting from word prohibitions that people observe when a person dies. If a deceased person’s name resembles a word, then people avoid using the word as well as the name. They opt for using a borrowed word from another neighbouring language. People say that many words in Auhelawa used today resulted from such temporary prohibitions becoming conventional. The theory more than the actual practice is worth noting because it shows that Auhelawa think of words as being kinds of names, and as such presuppose a triadic formula for connecting words to their meanings. The overall result of this theory is that people conceptualize the Auhelawa language itself as having a relationship to the Auhelawa people only by way of the language’s connection to other places, peoples and languages. Hence, people say that Auhelawa is a mixture of other languages, having no essence of its own.

For Auhelawa, one’s name refers to oneself as an individual, and relates oneself to a complex social whole which perdures in time. Each explicitly named entity is encompassed by a Maussian personage bearing that name and defined in hierarchical opposition to it. Mauss (1985) argues that in societies bound together by a system of total services, people do not see themselves or each other as individuals but as the present incarnation of their ancestors.⁶ Each individual exists in society only with respect to the role they play and the services they do for others. Likewise in Auhelawa, one’s personal identity is encompassed by social role. When one finds a namesake to give a child a name, and avoids uttering prohibited names, even calling upon others to speak the name for oneself, one imposes a hierarchy of meanings for names. Given this metacommunicative hierarchy, the sound of the name’s utterance itself constitutes a mutuality of matrilineal being (Sahlins, 2013).

Yet kinship is not the only framework which Auhelawa use for understanding themselves, nor is the Maussian personage necessarily the only mode of being. I found that many people also talked about themselves and others in a discourse of identity which was racial and territorial. In this discourse being Auhelawa means being born to Auhelawa parents. Auhelawa is an exclusive identity, contrasting with other places throughout the region. I want to first note that this kind of exclusive identity contradicts the way that kinship discourse frames intraregional relationships in terms of bu'una. In this frame, a person is Auhelawa because they are from Auhelawa and were born there, and is not simultaneously part of another group even if their ancestors came from there. Language differences and differences of ‘custom’ also mark identity in this frame. The mixedness of Auhelawa language which can be read in historical terms is also sometimes read as indicating the uniqueness of Auhelawa as a group. Now that Auhelawa language is used in the early grades of the local schools, teachers have tried to rediscover the original Auhelawa words which they feel have been replaced by words from other languages. In other words, they are trying to establish a direct, unmediated connection between Auhelawa people and the language they speak.

I also want to note that this kind of racialized identity entails a reworking of the idea of kinship. A child that has one Auhelawa parent and one parent from abroad, irrespective of the mother’s origin, is often called mikisi (mixed) or hapkas (Melanesian Pidgin for ‘half-caste’), as though the child were not pure Auhelawa. People of this region together make up a larger category called papuwa (Papuan), which is similarly an exclusive racial label in contrast to other races of the world. Some of the other human races which Auhelawa compare to Papuan are dimdim (white, European), sina (Asian, from China), so-called ‘red Indians’ (Native North Americans) and nigolo (African, apparently from the word Negro). Auhelawa distinguish Papuan from other regions of PNG, especially the northern region of New Guinea, on the basis of birth. The Auhelawa use of racial categories is not, however, just a false consciousness being held over from the colonial period. One informant who had extensive work experience outside of Auhelawa during the colonial period encountered the social application of the colonial-era racial ideology when he lived as a domestic servant for an Australian family. He recalled vividly that, in that era, workers like himself were forbidden to wear trousers in town and had to mark themselves as different by wearing a laplap. For him, the absence of trousers was the distinguishing mark. He would also say that ‘today’ Papuans could wear trousers and shirts, like dimdim. On the one hand, this informant recognized that settlers used rules like these to stigmatize Papuans. On the other hand, he also used another version of colonial racial ideology to account for differences among people within Papua New Guinea. He said that the reason there was such a big difference between people of ‘New Guinea’ and people of ‘Papua’ is that the former were hapkas diyurman (half-Germans) and the latter hapkas dimdim (half white, or possibly half Australian). The two groups had been given different cultures by this colonial parentage. For this reason, he objected to the union of the two former colonies, which he saw as imposed by New Guineans on Papuans. So, the racial system does survive, but its influence is not as a hegemonic ideology but as a source of metaphor about cultural differences, and this racialization is also a naturalization of an essential connection between place, birth and membership.

A racial-territorial discourse of identity is incompatible with kinship discourse. In racial discourse, identities do not create connections to disparate groups and places. Instead they subdivide the region into discrete local groups. Even though in kinship discourse a lineage considers itself to be descended from a foreign place, and also related to all the people who migrated from that origin to other parts of the region, it does not consider itself to be mixed. Rather, each node of a network of bu'una lineages embodies the totality, as the transmission of ancestral names is supposed to substantiate. Mikisi or hapkas describe people as individuals. To an extent, I think, Auhelawa recognize that they cannot have both kinds of relationships at once. I often heard that the regional trade among partnerships between bu'una was not possible anymore because they had been taken over by marketing in the provincial capital, Alotau. The reason given was that people were now afraid that bu'una could not be trusted because they would rather trade with their wantoks, that is, people of the same community, and might cheat others.

Indeed, one of the principal contexts for the use of a racial discourse of identity is the markets of Alotau. In my research I found that the main way Auhelawa households earned a cash income is by marketing betel nut and garden produce in Alotau, usually one person from the household taking one or two trips per year and staying for a week or more at a time. Staying in town is uncomfortable, disorienting and expensive. Auhelawa describe the experience of travel in town as being a ‘passenger’ (pasindia), meaning they feel adrift and bereft of the comforts and security of home (see Strathern, 1975; Schram, n.d.; Wardlow, 2006). No one could afford to stay in even modestly priced guest houses, and so they either stayed with kin who live in town or in one of several squatter settlements and neighbourhoods within town which are identified by the origin of their residents, called ‘compounds’. It was more common for people to sleep in their market stalls near people from the same area as them. Market areas bring together people from throughout the region into an especially dense and confined shared space. Sellers choose to put up their stalls among people of the same place of origin, and the market area is thus informally subdivided into sectors. Auhelawa, for instance, tended to set up stalls near other people of southern Normanby, which was generally regarded as the ‘Duau’ (southern Normanby) section of the market. People of other islands also had separate areas where they congregated. People of one area within the market helped each other, for instance, by making change or by tending stalls for each other. There was a sense of trust which obtained between people of one market area which allowed people to overcome the general disorientation and insecurity of being in town. This kind of trust and familiarity was precisely what people felt they no longer could assume with bu'una. Giving a non-relative access to money or valuables is uncommon because of the presumption that it will be pilfered. Yet such trust was granted in the context of the marketplace. If a Duau person acquired enough capital to build a boat and start a cargo business, this would be seen as a boon to all Duau people, because that boat would mainly run between town and the owner’s home area, and could carry passengers. Mutual support between people of the same place was always perceived as a benefit which came at the expense of others. Conversely, the social microcosm of the market produced a perception of competition between groups based on their origins. I heard of sporadic market violence between groups of different places, for instance between Duau and Trobriand Islands, over prices or perceived success in selling. This was attributed to jealousy between groups. Hence, in the social context of town marketing, exclusive identities based on place provided a framework for relationships of cooperation and antagonism.

Here it is useful to point out that such ethnic processes are common in urban Papua New Guinea, and are generally referred to as ‘the wantok system’, that is, a generalized ethic of mutual support among people of common origins, the same or similar languages, or similar cultures. In Port Moresby, for instance, ethnic neighbourhoods of Highlanders are well established, and control several sectors of the informal economy, especially taxi driving, at the exclusion of other communities. Ethnic competition in Moresby often flares up in the form of reciprocal killings, and the random interpersonal violence of urban life often gets refracted through the lens of the urban ethnic microcosm, with reciprocal demands by the local communities for compensation. Anthropologists have emphasized, along with many of my informants, that ‘the wantok system’ is a generalization and extension of the norms of kinship which can give rural villagers easy access to urban and unfamiliar communities (see for example Benediktsson, 2002). At an interpersonal level, people’s use of relationships may in fact work this way, and perhaps even recapitulate the regional dimension of social relationships found in Auhelawa kinship. However, in the context of the stranger sociality of urban places, people define themselves as part of an exclusive group in opposition to other groups of different origins. Being a wantok is a mode of difference which manifests where sameness is the presumed background. For instance, only Morima people could expect to be allowed to stay at the so-called Morima compound. Likewise, only Duau people thought they would be helped collectively by an individual Duau person’s passenger boat service. As such, what might at one level appear to be a complex interpersonal network looks like ethnic cooperativeness from the outside. Since everyone of one place acted to support one another and benefited from each other, it was seen from the outside as though they were acting in concert, like a legal individual.

Auhelawa experiences with ethnic loyalties in town resonate with an emerging discourse of autochthony in the rest of PNG. For instance, after several decades, a number of communities in Southern Highlands Province near the town of Tari recently achieved their demand for the creation of a separate province called Hela. A similar movement in Western Highlands Province to create a new province for a group of communities called Jiwaka has also succeeded (Kolo, 2009). In both cases, the advocates for secession each claim that their provincial governments and representation in Parliament favoured the peoples living near the provincial capital towns, leading to uneven development of services and unfair distribution of benefits from resource projects. Both the demands for justice and the proposed solutions are predicated on the assumption that wantoks of one ethnic group would and should support each other at the expense of other groups. Prior to secession, political elites used their power to benefit their ethnic group at the expense of other people in the province. The solution creates new political units which better reflect the ethnic makeup of the region. A similar kind of naturalization of territory and birth as the basis for membership in a community comes in the form of discourse which pits asples man (people born in the local community) against kam man (people who have come from elsewhere). During the 2007 general election in the town of Madang, debates about candidates were phrased in terms of a conflict between original inhabitants and migrants in 2007 (Anonymous, 2007a, 2007b; Pamba, 2007a, 2007b). When I was doing fieldwork in Milne Bay Province, I also often heard complaints about a new ferry service which connected Alotau to the distant cities of Port Moresby and Lae and, according to residents, brought huge numbers of Highlanders and other ‘outsiders’ to Milne Bay who were taking local jobs and causing fights.⁷

There is also an alternative framework for the interpretation of personal names in Auhelawa which echoes the way racial discourse construes names of groups. Christian naming, practised by both churches in a christening ritual, is perceived to function differently than does the conferral of the lineage name. Christian naming individuates the person whereas conferral of a lineage name is thought to relate the person to the lineage and its history. For Catholics and Uniteds, the name given in baptism or dedication is significant because it is recorded in the church’s records, and theoretically also in the records of the church as a whole. The Catholic mission, for instance, possesses a liber baptizorum which records all of the baptisms conducted since the founding of the mission in 1954. I attempted to transcribe the records, thinking of them as a convenient source of genealogical data. When people learned that I was doing so, many middle-aged and elderly people asked me to look up their date of birth, which they assumed had been faithfully recorded when they were baptized as infants. As I inquired more about this generation’s memories of childhood, I found that most people believed that every Catholic’s date of birth was recorded in the baptism record. They thought of the baptism record as a big database in which each unit of information represented an individual person. Their baptism name and that of their parents was, in their minds, the key which would allow them to look up this personal information. Baptism records are only one example of a membership list in which names function as individual identifiers. The United Church also keeps records of its members who receive baptism and become deacons in the congregation. These lists are used by the pastor to take attendance every Sunday for the purposes of compiling statistics. In the past, a government-sponsored cooperative store also maintained a list of members with accounts. Similarly, lineage-owned trade stores make lists of shareholders and lists of people who owed money for credit purchases. In all of these contexts, names function as labels of individual persons.

This technique of identifying people in lists has also transferred into the domain of kinship. Many people maintain written genealogical lists of their lineage ancestors and their descendants to the present generation. While such an encoding of lineage history could function to demonstrate bu'una links, I saw people invoke written genealogical lists to justify their claims of ownership of land. If they could provide a more complete account of their descent, they believed they could persuade others to their view of the social relationships between local groups. The possession of such lists was considered to protect one from the possibility that other lineages would lie about their history. Written lineage histories do not depend on their correspondence of other people’s histories for verification. They are more suited to settings premised on adversarial relationships, like land courts. In this example, the lineage is individuated from other local lineages by its lineage history. Lineages are imagined in the setting of courts to function as corporate groups and hence as legal individuals.

People see the baptism record as doing something that genealogies and memorials could not do, and wanted to capture that new possibility. In a real sense, they are right, not because a written document or official record is more permanent or legitimate. Rather, the two semiotic technologies function according to different logics. The discourse of matriliny presupposes that only certain people can utter names, and so identify a person by a name. Yet here, the name identifies the person independently of the medium or the user. These records present a wholly different picture of the members of the group. They differentiate the levels of the social whole in a new way, making individual identity the background against which kinship belonging is read. I take all of these examples of identifying people based on names as evidence of a changing function of naming as a social practice, and hence the development of an alternative ideology of how a name attaches to what it names. The naming of persons in baptism and membership lists is read against the assumption of a direct, apparently unmediated, link between name and named – in other words, an assumption of individual personhood. A list of names, often taking the form of a written document, also symbolizes a group as the sum total of the list in contradistinction to other groups. It follows in this conception of naming that the named is a discrete unit which possesses distinctive essential qualities. A person is a discrete individual uniquely identified by their personal name. A lineage’s genealogy in this conceptualization is a discrete group, not a microcosm but a corporation. People play up the differences between the two modes of naming in a sense as well. In my recording of genealogies, I found that many people did not pass on lineage names to their young children. Some said that their lineage had ‘run out of names’ to pass on, or that they ‘were tired of hearing the same [lineage] names over and over again’. I have no evidence about whether this attitude is common, or how precisely parents’ practices of naming children has been affected. However, the statement suggests that people consider it at least plausible that one could break with the past mode of personal naming in favour of the alternative individuating mode of naming. To make the statement requires at least a partial reflexive awareness of the differences between ways of naming and their different underlying values. The conferral of lineage names is predicated on relational identity and alternative naming practices are predicated on individual identity.

Structures and dialectics of personhood

In conclusion, I want to consider what the contrast between kinship discourse and racial discourse in Auhelawa can tell one about the nature of indigenous identity. In kinship discourse, one possesses personhood through one’s relationships with others. In racial discourse, one possesses personhood on the basis of innate, inherent qualities, generally biological and embodied in the physical individual. These alternative concepts create different ways of perceiving identity. I have tried to show that one can observe this in the different ways the two discourses construe the meaning of names. Each offers a different implicit theory of how a given name attaches to that which it names. Kinship discourse assumes the mediation of name-givers, elder matrilineal kin who carry forward a name of an ancestor, as part of the performative act of naming. A similar kind of triadic framework connects the people of one lineage to their bu'una through the mediation of ancestral memorials and oral histories of migration. By contrast, racial discourse construes names as individuating labels. Ethnonyms signify possession of innate qualities which are commensurable among groups as different branches of a basic human sameness. People not only understand human races in this way, they apply the same logic to regional differences within PNG and within their own province. This discourse suppresses the possibility that one’s connections to one’s name and identity could depend on another person to be effective. Rather, in this discourse people come together as members of a named group only on the basis of meeting the same criteria of membership of birth, blood, or origin. This theory of names also resonates with the way people now use Christian names as individuating labels, and how they use names in the contexts of membership lists as a new way of constituting membership in a lineage. A similar logic underlies the constitution of voluntaristic groups, particularly Christian congregations (Schram, 2010, 2013).

The racial discourse also clearly would provide support for Auhelawa to identify themselves as an indigenous group in the sense that many other peoples of the world now use that term. Kinship discourse does not imbue the term Auhelawa with the natural self-evidence of autochthony which Peter Geschiere (2009) observes is a key ingredient in the making of indigeneity. Racial discourse, however, creates the possibility of imagining that kind of an identity. In other words, the Auhelawa case is a good illustration of the double bind of liberal recognition in which indigenous identities are articulated. In order to name themselves and define themselves, Auhelawa must take up the terms through which the other, the culture of the globalizing West, sees them. Not only is a racial discourse part of the legacy of colonialism in PNG and elsewhere, but the institutions of the globalizing West are predicated to a great extent on individuals as actors and social groups as corporations based on the common interests of members. In this framework, kinship and territorial identities are reread as being innate, exclusive forms of belonging.

Anthropologists have found that understanding indigeneity as part of a struggle for recognition of cultural difference traps people in a double bind. Indigenous claims to autonomy are predicated on their participation in a liberal political space. Many now argue that this position of indigenous cultural other is a projection based on ethnoracial classifications. What I’ve tried to show in this paper is that this is at best part of the story, and Dumont’s theory of hierarchy helps tell the rest. Only in modern societies, Dumont argues, do people attribute a universal personhood to every individual as an internally complete and self-sufficient being. In other words, modern societies are those in which the equality of all persons is premised on sameness. Thus one would tend to assume that indigenous identities can be produced by a basically universal logic of political struggle for recognition. It is better to think of this vision of indigeneity as a differentiation within the culture of Homo aequalis. The culture of Homo aequalis is not merely the western culture in which liberalism is born. For Dumont, a society based on the central value of individualism is itself impossible. Modern society sees the world atomistically, and lacks the reflexive awareness of the necessary relationship of part to a pre-given whole. Because a society in which there are only individuals and no groups is impossible, the modern culture of the West is always proliferating lesser versions of its core value of individualism. In this respect, when western culture is confronted with cultural difference, it classifies this as a kind of essential inequality in hierarchical opposition to the normal, expected equality of individuals. Thus Dumont (1994) argues that Herderian nationalism was a differentiation within the totality of modern values. The nation is a collective form defined in hierarchical opposition to the value of individualism. It is a community which is modelled on the autonomy of the individual, which it achieves by excluding all those of different birth and blood. Elsewhere Dumont anticipates the problem of indigenous identities when he compares racial discrimination to caste inequality. He says: ‘[O]nce equality and identity bear on the individual souls, distinction could only be effected with regard to the bodies’ (1980a: 263, emphasis removed). Hence, people whose social identity is based on their ties of kinship and clanship will appear as marked in hierarchical opposition to the ideal of individual autonomy. Their cultural difference will be transformed by its encompassment by its opposite, the individual, and thus become a primordial, exclusive sovereignty.

Footnotes

Notes

Ryan Schram is a lecturer of anthropology at the University of Sydney. His PhD thesis, completed in 2009, demonstrates how Christian ideologies influence the way people of Auhelawa (Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea) conceptualize and engage with new forms of economic value, and change in general. His current work examines the practices by which people adopt and shift between different modes of reflexivity, and the sites and artifacts through which people elicit different kinds of intercultural boundaries.

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