Sovereignty vs Rangatiratanga 581

NGATA, A.T. 1922. Te Tiriti o Waitangi: He Whakamarama. (English translation, The Treaty of Waitangi: an Explanation, by M.R. Jones, 1962, Christchurch, Pegasus Press.)

OLIVER, W.H., 1960. The Story of New Zealand. London, Faber and Faber.ROSS, Ruth M., 1972.The Treaty of Waitangi: Texts and Interpretations. New Zealand Journal o f History, 6(2): 129-

57.------------ , 1972. The Treaty on the Ground, in The Treaty of Waitangi, Its Origins and Significance. Wellington,

Department of University Extension, Victoria University.SINCLAIR, Keith, 1959. A History of New Zealand. London, Pelican.Republished 1984, London, Pelican

Books/Allen Lane.WARD, Alan, 1978. A Show o f Justice. Auckland, Auckland University Press/Oxford University Press.WARDS, Ian McL., 1968. The Shadow o f the Land: a Study of British Policy and Racial Conflict in New Zealand

1832-1852. Wellington, Historical Publications Branch, Department of Internal Affairs.WILLIAMS, Herbert W.,1975. A Dictionary of the Maori Language. Wellington, New Zealand Government Printer.

‘HISTORY IS A WAY OF MUSING UPON OURSELVES’

Roderic Lacey Australian Catholic University, Ballarat

One reviewer of Umberto Eco’s novel The Nam e o f the Rose argued that

Eco has thus decided to write a novel, not simply because what cannot be theorised must be narrated, but because literature can both narrate and theorise, and is thus an ideal situation to carry out and develop the semiotic discourse (Schiavoni 1984:573).

In Eco’s hands semiotics is a unifying process in which various kinds and levels of discourse are brought together and into tension with each other, and literature is both an art form and a form of self-critical awareness, a discipline for seeking meaning.

What follows is a reflection on the tensions between people who seek to communicate across cultures. Since it is a fragment from a larger sequence of experiences and encounters by a historian among the mountain dwelling Enga of Papua New Guinea, it is a short story rather than a novel. In this sense it is a piece of fiction. The use of these terms from literature recalls the sceptical though humorous jibes which some of the American missionaries, on the edge o f whose station we resided, used to greet me and inquire after my research. One, in particular, would ask how my novel was going, rather than how my research was progressing.

The outcome of that research among the Enga from 1971 to 1973 was a doctoral dissertation which addressed, in a formal way, issues of methodology about the status and interpretation of oral traditions as historical sources (Lacey 1975). Perhaps, if I had been free from the constraints of a doctoral programme, I could have written an intuitive and autobiographical piece of literature akin to Kenneth Read’s The High Valley. Perhaps, in what follows about the interactions and relationships between Kapenge and me, there are some echoes of Read’s vivid portrayal of his relationships with Makis. Elsewhere I have reflected, in a more formal manner, upon my relationships with Kepai (his actual rather than his fictionalised name), and our mutual growth in historical consciousness through the dynamics o f the ‘conversational narratives’ we wove together (Lacey 1980).

James Hillman, whose epigram1 flies at the masthead of this opening statement, writes of ‘healing fictions’ and of the ways in which, in our evolving life histories, we have an underlying myth or plot, images stemming from our imaginative story or fiction, which we call our life (O’Connor 1986:12).2 And Jerome Bruner points up the reciprocity and tension between telling our life histories and living our lives: ‘Narrative imitates life, life imitates narrative’. Bruner continues:

There is no such thing psychologically as ‘life itself’. At very least, it is a selective achievement of memory recall; beyond that, recounting one’s life is an interpretive feat (1987:13).

So life narratives are not, according to these views, written or told in any kind of flexible, or neutral, vacuum. They are neither detached from the person’s deeper structures and experience, nor from the shaping context of their culture.

582 Roderic Lacey

People anywhere can tell you some intelligible account of their lives. What varies is the cultural and linguistic perspective or narrative form in which it is formulated and expressed. And that too will be found to spring from historical circumstances as these have been incorporated in the culture and language of a people. . . . For language constructs what it narrates, not only semantically but also pragmatically and stylistically . . .(Bruner 1987:16,17).

The offering of this narrative ‘Fiction’ to a collection for a person who acted as sponsor, mediator and supporter as I moved from Graduate School, through the emerging University of Papua New Guinea, out into Fieldwork, seems appropriate. The form, style and language of the autobiographical tale create the possibility of capturing, in concrete images, the ambiguities and tensions of finding my way in an unfamiliar place among people whose language was so different to mine, as I sought to work towards some kind of reciprocity. While the one who was recipient of this paper sought to mediate the cosmos of the Kalam people to a wider world in collaboration with a Kalam colleague, this fragment of autobiographical fiction represents part of a process through which I have been seeking to communicate my changing interpretations of the experience of being a field worker among Enga. As Eco might claim, this kind o f narrative reflection cuts across the confining boundaries of different disciplines and integrates reflection with the art form of story.

RITUALS OF EXCHANGEIt was a bright, clear dry-season morning when I first met Kapenge. The day was still young. The grass

still glistened with dew. Wisps and swirls of mist drifted lazily down the high rugged green valleys to greet the morning sun. We bargained with women who had coughed at the door of our small house. It lay at the edge of the American mission station and straddled the well-worn track along which they came carrying net bags full of vegetables. They were on their way down the valley to the market at the government station, which occupied another plateau to the northwest.

Kapenge had walked down from his high ridge-top gardens to the south with some of the market women. He held back until the bargaining over vegetables was ended. We were recent newcomers in this valley. People bargained with us over food for sale, artifacts and prized trophies like bird of paradise feathers. Their offers and the bargaining which followed were like visiting cards in the earlier times of our English forebears: rituals of introduction and recognition. But here, among the valley people, these rituals had other meanings which we discovered in fragmentary, often awkward ways. Our neighbours used these goods to discover who we were, not so much in terms of the generosity or otherwise of our returns; more to see the quality and kinds of our responses to them.

There he stood across the grass in the early morning, waiting for me to go out and speak with him. He did not speak anything other than his mother tongue. I was to discover that, unlike other men of his age, he had not been wooed out to plantation work on the coast or in islands nearby. So he had not learnt Tok P isin , the tongue I used at first for conversation and inquiry. Luckily there were school boys near only too willing to show their agility with English. One acted as interpreter at this first meeting with Kapenge.

He was a graceful, strong, but not heavily built man; tall, too, for usually stocky mountain people. His face was long, forehead high and he had a fine pointed beard. As he stood there so elegantly with his axe locked into the strong wide leather belt around his waist like a short fighting sabre, he was to me for all the world like an aristocratic, if not heavily clad hidalgo. He sat on the grass folding his legs and gathering his loin covering under him with elegant, restrained movements. This covering held firmly in place by that same solid belt from which he withdrew his axe, was a dusty faded piece of tradestore cloth in front and thick green and yellow bush leaves at the rear.

Now with his long sensitive hard-worn hands he drew from his string smoking bag, which hung at his chest, his opening gamut in rituals of discovery, testing and exchange. And he gestured to me to sit opposite him as he laid these treasures in the grass between us. They were small finely polished green and grey stone- axe heads come to him from ancestors. They had now been replaced by steel axes first brought by missionaries and government officers when he was a youth, or perhaps even a boy. He praised his treasures from an age past in gentle well-tempered tones and pointed to them questioning me with a wry smile and his limpid, searching brown eyes.

I did not bind myself into the web of exchange and friendship which Kapenge spun. I cut loose, found a way out. Across the river the local mission anthropologist was building up a collection for an area museum. Soon after we arrived he told us that he would like us to direct those who offered us ancient artifacts to him so that he could purchase them as stock for this museum. Through the school boy interpreter this was the response I offered in a tentative way to Kapenge’s opening gamut. Those eyes searched mine for meaning. He gathered himself and his goods gently together. Not to close the gates o f friendship completely, he offered, in parting, his services as a teacher of the old ways. He had learnt, he revealed, from local talk, that my work was to ask about ways from before. That was why his opening offer had been goods from that past.

'History is a Way of Musing upon Ourselves' 583

Gracefully the h idalgo replaced his weapon in his belt as he resumed his journey down to the market. A mist of ambiguity lay between us as he walked in the brightening sun away from our house.

* * *

The distance of almost two decades and memory have sharpened and simplified the ambiguities and the unfinished business between the elegant Kapenge and me in that first meeting. Perhaps, too, distance and memory have made me wiser now about its meaning. His parting offer to be my teacher was to come to fruition in ways I had not foreseen in those early awkward days among his mountain people.

It was almost a year before we came together for that teaching.In the months between I moved away from the small house with woven cane walls and tin roof where my

family stayed, on that central mission station. With a guide and interpreter I went out to meet men of knowledge in clans scattered up and down the large valley in which we lived, and out into more distant valleys, too. I negotiated with them to teach me the wisdom from their ancestors distilled in traditions, family trees, chants, songs and ceremonies. These had shaped them into men of their clans as they grew up in the times before Australians and Americans broke into their valleys to bring a different world of knowledge.

After several months of trekking, conversing, questioning, listening and recording, I chanced upon a rich vein of chants taught to young men who were being purified and initiated into manhood. This was secret and powerful knowledge. But these chants were revealed to me by a man, older than both Kapenge and me, in his son’s house and with his family as audience. This poet and man of wisdom urged me to record his chant on tape, because his elder son was going away to study on the coast and his father was afraid that his son would lose touch with these rich traditions. The chanter of this tradition also bade me to travel among neighbouring clans and play this tape, so that other men of his generation would be challenged to respond to what he had done. Their wisdom would be then on record for a new generation, who might become detached from or forgetful of this rich heritage of teaching, as they became drawn by the new knowledge and ways brought by men from my world.

M apuai’s chant, for this was his name, moved his son to tears. He did not realise, as a young man schooled in the new world, that gardeners, men of the soil, had such treasures hidden away. The chant recalled in epic form and concrete images the feats of forefathers who had braved the dangers of travelling through valleys and over ridges settled by enemy clans to bargain with the owners of famous and powerful sacred plants and their chants. In exchange for these plants and songs the heroes gave wealth in shells, oil, bird of paradise feathers and axe heads. They survived their ordeal, returned home and the plants and their power brought their new owners strength and wealth as they struggled with rival clans in exchanges. These chants sung their praises for what they had done for their people in their quest for prosperity and power. Their journeys through danger, carrying their people’s wealth, had brought in a new age and that was in generations before Australians came promising another way of life.

Now I journeyed through our valley and neighbouring ones bearing the tape of Mapuai’s chant and seeking men who might sing in response of their hero-ancestors. At the mission station I asked people who might, in this local clan, teach me such knowledge. Not to my surprise it was revealed that the best local teacher would, without doubt, be Kapenge, the elegant hidalgo with searching eyes and an axe in his belt.

Soon he responded to messages sent out into the high ridges to the south where he was opening new gardens.

Each day for five in a row we retired to a small shed beside our house. It had chairs and a table and three of us sat there for several hours on end: Kapenge, Petrus an interpreter and I. Kapenge’s teaching took on a formal style as though he were a schoolmaster and I his pupil; though from time to time he cast us together in the roles of colleagues in pursuit of the old wisdom. This sequence was broken one day out of the five, when, because of the pull of clan business, we met outside a m en’s house some distance away to the south. In this formal ritual of teaching and learning he led me through a wide range of traditions, many linked, in his understanding, with those powerful rituals of youth purification and initiation. It was only on the last day that he agreed that I had been taught enough for him to chant the praise poems in honour of those heroes of his people who had ventured out to bring the sacred plants and songs to his ancestors. This he recited rather than chanted. We moved to another building on the mission station to record his testimony on tape.

His praise song told of a chain of successive owners of these named plants who dwelt along the main valley from the west to the final owners among his clansmen, who resided near the mission station. A chain of heroes was commemorated and their praises sung along the valley.

584 Roderic Lacey

Those conversations between us, with Petrus as mediator and interpreter in our midst, were for Kapenge and me a turning point and an exchange between our different worlds. I had a sense that as I sat questioning and listening to this quietly spoken man of knowledge he was becoming vindicated as a member of those mountain dwelling clans. Fragment by fragment, as he taught me, he was revealing the pains and hurts of his colonial experience.

When the local American missionary confronted him, soon after this station had been founded, Kapenge was a bachelor guardian of the sacred plants hidden in their place of seclusion high and deep in the forest. The clansmen believed that these plants had the power to purify and strengthen young men, to turn them into sober, watchful and courageous protectors, providers, dreamers and seers for their people. The missionary with his simple, blinkered vision saw plants and rites as ‘works of Satan’ rather than as sources of strength, continuity and integrity for the people.

He stood at a forked road for young men such as Kapenge. He hurled a bitter choice at them: reveal their secrets, show these insignificant bog iris plants to the ordinary uninitiated people; end their evil practices and become Christians, better people, freer persons.

Kapenge stood, tom by doubt, by deep attachment to the sacred ways of his ancestors, yet drawn by the power and wealth of the foreigners. They offered steel knives and axes which would bring revolution into gardening and forest clearing, food for an expanding population. The new men and their henchmen sat on bags of shell money which would give every man easy access to power and prestige in exchanges.

These ‘red m en’ offered his ‘black m en’ a new age, and dangerous, destructive teachings. In stem loyalty, beyond his years, Kapenge had reached a painful and ambiguous decision: he guarded the secrets of the plants and all they meant for his people’s continuity, traded and worked for steel tools, shell and their metal and paper money, but closed his ears to the new teaching.

While other guardians broke away and had their plants exposed to people’s gaze, Kapenge stood firm and refused baptism into the foreigners’ religion. So now, among his peers, he was known as a sturdy man of tradition, but stood in the new age on the cold fringe; one who was seen as letting the good life, brought by the red men, pass him by.

Here we were conversing together, with Petrus, a younger man who had followed the red men and taken on their schooling and my language. We sat within the arena on which those earlier, bitter confrontations and those hard decisions had scarred the young Kapenge. I was ambiguous. A tisaa from the red m an’s world of learning out on the coast, but one who asked about and knew something of the wisdom of his ancestors; a bingsu, as these mountain people called pastors in this American mission, since I lived with my family in one of their houses. Yet I seemed to have an interest in things sacred and valuable from that earlier life of his people.

The body of wisdom which my teacher and colleague spoke of in those days together became a foundation for my understanding of what many other men of knowledge had taught and would teach me during our time in these high valleys. The shape which Kapenge gave to his teaching formed my emerging vision of the power and significance of the traditions of the mountain people. I know now, as I did not sense in our encounters, that we shaped this together, since he was responding to my searching, probing questioning, as I gained more confidence and sense of direction.

And as I moved out of the valleys down to the coast to write and to teach young people in an emerging island nation, my mind, attitude and vision of ‘people’s history’ carried within them the imprint of Kapenge’s teaching and wisdom. To now unravel those threads of his spirit, upon the tapestry of my own mind is a task which occupies me, since I returned to the land from where many of the red men had come.

And the elegant hidalgo who stood in the bright green grass early on that dry-season morning, what did he gain in our exchange? In my memory’s eye I see that, like the heroes from those praise chants, he and I travelled through a landscape of wisdom and memory. In his telling and teaching to an attentive listener, an active but trustworthy questioner, perhaps Kapenge came into his own territory. He risked travelling out of his gardenlands on the high southern ridges and entering the enemy’s station, bringing gifts. Were they peace offerings? Or were they to put me to the test so that this stranger might reveal his true colours and some red m en’s wisdom? A bond grew between us in our encounter and conversation. So the agenda of his plan was threaded into his teaching. Perhaps the man on the fringe came closer to both his ancestors and the new generation and perhaps , too, he came more fully to himself as a person.

* * *

An exchange took place between us. I discovered much. He recovered some of his person and identity. I wonder now if he has any memories of those conversations. I certainly do. I wonder, too, what kind of an exchange it was between us men and our worlds.

'History is a Way of Musing upon Ourselves' 585

NOTES

1. The title of this paper is taken from James Hillman’s Healing Fiction, p.46. I have modified Hillman’s singular into a plural for this paper. His original words read: ‘History is a way of musing upon oneself. The field research in Enga Province of the Papua New Guinea Highlands upon which this paper is based was supported by grants from the University of Wisconsin, the Wenner Gren Foundation and the University of Papua New Guinea.

2. O’Connor, in Dream s, p. 12, is commenting on the substance and meaning of a passage from James Hillman (1978:3).

REFERENCES

BRUNER, J., 1987. Life as Narrative. Social Research: An International Quarterly o f the Social Sciences, 54/1 (Spring 1987): 11-32.

HILLMAN, J., 1978. Loose Ends. Dallas, Spring Publications.------------, 1983. Healing Fiction. New York, Station Hill.LACEY, R., 1975. Oral Traditions as History: an Exploration of Oral Sources among the Enga of the New Guinea

Highlands. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison.------------ , 1980. Coming to Know Kepai: Conversational Narratives and the Use of Oral Sources in Papua New

Guinea. Social Analysis, 4 (September 1980):74-88.O’CONNOR, P., 1986. Dreams and the Search for Meaning. North Ryde, Methuen Haynes.READ, K.E., 1966. The High Valley. London, George Allen and Unwin.SCHIAVONI, F., 1984. Faith, Reason and Desire: Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Meanjin, 43/4 (December

1984):573-581.

PARTICIPATION IN THE MODERN SECTOR AND THE WIDTH OF URBAN INTERETHNIC INTERACTION:

A CAUSAL MODEL OF DATA FROM PAPUA NEW GUINEA

H.B. Levine Victoria University of Wellington

Ralph Bulmer was Professor of Anthropology at the University of Papua New Guinea when I arrived there in 1972 to take up a position as senior tutor. I began doing fieldwork for my PhD on urban ethnicity six months later, just as he was leaving the department. Although this topic is far removed from Kalam ethnozoology, my focus was on categorisation, an exploration of the origins of Papua New Guinean urban ethnic categories, as well as the formation of urban ethnic groups. Ralph encouraged and facilitated my research from the very beginning, and I have always been very grateful for his support.

In this paper, I present a causal model of the effects of a number of variables on the width of interethnic interaction. Although I make little direct reference to the aforementioned urban ethnic categories, they do form the basis for the model and the original data. The reader may consult Levine (1976), and Levine and Levine (1979) for fuller discussion of urbanisation in Papua New Guinea and dynamic aspects of ethnic categorisation, as I have limited myself to presenting new material here.

This discussion can stand alone however, as an attempt to give an explanation of the combined effects of education, employment, ethnic origin, residence and length of time in town on interethnic interaction. I think it will be useful in any situation where these variables are fundamental to urbanisation, and a set of urban ethnic categories can be obtained. Indeed, one of the most important aspects of urbanisation as a social process in all newly developing countries is that people with varied regional, social and cultural origins mingle in the towns. Residence, employment and recreational activities all provide contexts which encourage or permit interethnic interaction. The increase in the range of social interaction is both a universal consequence of urbanisation itself, and a factor which in turn influences its further course.

The particular aspect of interethnic interaction which I explored in Port Moresby and Mt Hagen was variation in the range of primary interethnic ‘social recreational interaction’, interaction which was friendly and entered into by choice. It was proposed that individuals who had social characteristics associated with participation in the ‘modem’ urban sector would be more likely to have such voluntary interaction with people from other areas whether or not they maintain identification with their clan or tribal group.