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Maring Hunters and Traders: Production and Exchange in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

University of California Press

The island of New Guinea nudges the equator at its western extremity. Yet between the steamy coastal plains the land is compressed and heaped up into a series of high ranges and temperate valleys. On the northern and southern fringes of the highlands in particular, the topography is heavily dissected. Here it is possible for the traveler to move within a day's march through several resource zones spanning many hundreds, even thousands, of meters from major valley floors to the mountain peaks. Such close-packed environmental differences are paralleled by cultural diversity.

Despite their sometimes forbidding habitats, no New Guinea societies were ever truly isolated. Exchanges of goods and people across cultural boundaries assumed great importance in many areas. This natural and cultural diversity encouraged considerable traffic in material objects, and studies have clearly shown that trade is most highly developed between communities of differing ecological or cultural regions with specialized natural or manufactured resources. It is such locally specialized products that provide the bulk of goods traded across regional divisions (Gewertz 1983; Harding 1967; Hughes 1977; Keil 1974; Schwartz 1963; Tueting 1935). This book is concerned with the social, cultural, and ecological dimensions of the production of valuables and trade among the Maring people on the northern fringe of the central highlands of Papua New Guinea.

Trade is but one aspect of regional and intergroup relations and

must be understood in the context of other kinds of dealings, such as marriage, warfare, ceremonial exchange, and their political-economic dimensions. But trade is also bound up with humankind's interaction with the environment—the economics and ecology of production or exploitation, by which the supply of trade goods is affected, as well as the distribution and consumption of goods whereby continued demand is generated.

Although there are numerous studies of intergroup relations throughout the New Guinea region, systematic attention to trade has concentrated on the lowlands and islands. Numerous ethnographies of the highlands make passing reference to trade. The only substantial treatments are by Hughes (1973; 1977) for a large area of the highlands and foothills, and Keil (1974) for the Benabena region of the Eastern Highlands. Other briefer descriptions and analyses of note include those provided by Rappaport (1968) for the Maring, Strathern (1971) for the Melpa, Heider (1970) for the Dani, Kelly (1977) for the Etoro, Reay (1959) for the Kuma, and Godelier (1977; 1986) for the Baruya.

Highland trade can be characterized by a constellation of features: traditionally a virtual absence of any form of organization approaching markets (but cf. Keil 1977) and a general lack of communal or cooperative activities beyond expeditions of men traveling for companionship and protection; the short distances individual traders travel; the passage of goods in small consignments, generally in one-for-one exchanges; the overwhelming concentration of trade in the hands of men; and the general restriction of goods to valuables or luxuries other than food. Even within these limits on goods, the range of items is quite astonishing, though highly variable from one region to another. In aboriginal times trade goods included stone axes, a variety of marine shells, salts, live animals (notably pigs and cassowaries, but also dogs, fowls, and marsupials), plumes of numerous species of birds, furs and skins of several marsupials, animal-tooth and vegetable-bead necklaces, cosmetic tree oil and pandanus oil, tobacco, pigments, medicinal and magical earths, weapons, drums, string bags, kilts, bark capes, bone daggers, fiber belts and armbands, besides other handicrafts. Luxury foods were seldom distributed in trade, and staple foods never. With the exception of pigs, the great bulk of high-value goods were produced exclusively by men and were generally for the use of men in ceremonial gifts, decorations, or ritual observances.

The organization of trade and the range of items traded is, perhaps, more varied in lowland and island New Guinea. The most obvious contrast with the highlands are the great maritime trading systems of the north coast (Barlow 1985; Hogbin 1951; Lipset 1985; Tiesler 1969), Admiralties (Schwartz 1963), Vitiaz Strait (Harding 1967), Massim (Belshaw 1955; MacIntyre and Young 1982; Malinowski 1922; Seligman 1910), south coast of Papua (Dutton 1982; Malinowski 1915), and the Fly-Torres Strait region (Landtman 1927). Some of these systems, notably the Vitiaz Strait, involve specialist middlemen traders. Trade importantly depends on cooperation between groups of individuals, not least because of the technical requirements of sailing. Besides a great variety of valuables similar to those traded in the highlands, numerous luxury and everyday items of manufacture were traditionally traded in lowland and island New Guinea. Importantly, luxury and staple foods were, and still are, commonly traded.

Where trade systems were dominated by high volumes and frequent consignments of staple foods, rather than other goods, markets were significant institutions, and the bulk of transactions were conducted by women. The lower and middle Sepik and the Tolai area of New Britain are examples of such female-dominated, subsistence-food-oriented traditional markets (Barlow 1985; Epstein 1968; Gewertz 1983; Salisbury 1970).

Although trade has been a neglected field of study in the highlands, a great deal of attention has been focused on systems of the distribution of great volumes of valuables—primarily pigs and shells—in ceremonial exchange (e.g., Bulmer 1960; Feil 1984; 1987; Josephides 1985; Lederman 1986; Meggitt 1974; Sillitoe 1979; Strathern 1971). In some regions ceremonial exchange may indeed have developed at the expense of trade, or by the transformation of trading relations (cf. Healey 1978a ), but I suspect that highland trade has attracted so little attention not because it is of limited material significance, but because in comparison to ceremonial exchange it appears so utterly mundane. And whereas the analysis of the exchange of valuables continues to concentrate on its more dramatic and ceremonialized forms (e.g. Lederman 1986), the study of production has concentrated on subsistence foods rather than valuables. The pig, of course, is a paramount valuable that has figured prominently in analyses of production, if only because it is largely nurtured on garden produce. There are, nonetheless, massive amounts of other objects variously known as valuables,

wealth objects, and prestige goods which require considerable labor to produce, are consumed in very different ways from subsistence items, and which are redistributed in prestations and trade.

This work examines the interconnection between the ecology of the production of valuables through the exploitation of nonsubsistence goods and the social and cultural organization of production and exchange. An important focus is the dynamic operation of production and trade through time. Although synchronic studies illuminate the functions of trade (or other activities) in effecting the distribution of specialized goods between ecologically and culturally...