Introduction

This is a study of cosmology and political life among the Manambu, a people of the Sepik River in northwestern Papua New Guinea. When I was planning my fieldwork early in 1977, there was little published material on the Manambu apart from an outline of their language (Laycock 1965) and a brief but fascinating ethnographic sketch by Newton (1971). These suggested close cultural links between the Manambu and their downriver neighbours, the Iatmul, whose culture had been the subject of one of the most original monographs in the ethnographic literature (Bateson 1958).

Before I had ever been to Papua New Guinea, I had been intrigued by Bateson's references to ceremonial debates, in which Iatmul descent groups disputed the ownership of ancestral names and totems, and by his characterisation of the Iatmul as a people among whom personal names formed ‘a theoretical image of the whole culture’ (Bateson 1958: 228). But I had no plans to make such matters the focus of my own research. I hoped to study a more familiar theme in Melanesian ethnography: the ceremonial wealth-exchanges which tend to be an important feature of traditional Melanesian politics, and the self-made leaders, or Big Men, who earn their status and influence in these transactions.

But it was clear from the start of my stay among the Manambu that the villagers had an intense, and highly disputatious, preoccupation with the ownership of personal names.