Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- List of maps and tables
- Preface
- 1 Prologue: anthropology in the Papua New Guinea highlands
- 2 Papua New Guinea highlands prehistory: a social anthropologist's view
- 3 Configurations of intensity
- 4 Warfare
- 5 Leadership and politics
- 6 Social structure
- 7 Male–female relations
- 8 Ceremonial exchange
- 9 The legacy of the past
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- List of maps and tables
- Preface
- 1 Prologue: anthropology in the Papua New Guinea highlands
- 2 Papua New Guinea highlands prehistory: a social anthropologist's view
- 3 Configurations of intensity
- 4 Warfare
- 5 Leadership and politics
- 6 Social structure
- 7 Male–female relations
- 8 Ceremonial exchange
- 9 The legacy of the past
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I observed one case of a newly wed lad of our acquaintance taking the field against his bride's family a few days after his wedding. I also overheard two or three instances of men shouting that they had just made their sisters war-widows, or their wives brotherless.
Fortune (1947:109) writing of the Kamano of the eastern highlandsSocieties of the eastern highlands were marked by residential instability perhaps as late as the historic period. A mixed economy of hunting, collecting and supplemental agriculture precluded permanent sedentism until the innovations of sweet potato agriculture became apparent, were taken up, and then assumed dominance in subsistence. This process, too, occurred relatively late compared to societies westward, as the prehistoric and other related material presented earlier amply demonstrates. With this lack of residential continuity and impermanence of settlement, small populations rarely interacted, they were adequately spaced on the landscape in relation to each other, and any mechanisms to deal with intragroup or intergroup problems or disputes were unnecessary. Individuals, disadvantaged or threatened, could simply break away from larger groups; groups themselves could stay well clear of each other, for the economy was ‘extensive’ and the perception was likely to have been that land was plentiful relative to people and economic practice, and avoidance, when trouble occurred, offered the path of least resistance. In western highlands societies, the prevailing conditions at that time were just the reverse.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Evolution of Highland Papua New Guinea Societies , pp. 62 - 89Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987