Exchanging the Past: A Rainforest World of Before and After / Edition 1

by Bruce M. Knauft

Overview

Twenty years ago, the Gebusi of the lowland Papua New Guinea rainforest had one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Bruce M. Knauft found then that the killings stemmed from violent scapegoating of suspected sorcerers. But by the time he returned in 1998, homicide rates had plummeted, and Gebusi had largely disavowed vengeance against sorcerers in favor of modern schools, discos, markets, and Christianity.

In this book, Knauft explores the Gebusi's encounter with modern institutions and highlights what their experience tells us more generally about the interaction between local peoples and global forces. As desire for material goods grew among Gebusi, Knauft shows that they became more accepting of and subordinated by Christian churches, community schools,and government officials in their attempt to benefit from them—a process Knauft terms "recessive agency." But the Gebusi also respond actively to modernity, creating new forms of feasting, performance, and music that meld traditional practices with Western ones, all of which Knauft documents in this fascinating study.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226446356
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	08/01/2002
Edition description:	1
Pages:	303
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Bruce M. Knauft is the Samuel C. Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory University. He is the author of four previous books, most recently Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology and From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology. His edited volume Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies is currently in press.

Read an Excerpt

Exchanging the Past: a Rainforest World of Before and After

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By Bruce M. Knauft

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2002 Bruce M. Knauft
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226446352

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Chapter 1 - A World of Before and After

In 1980, the Gebusi were far more traditional than I had any right to expect. And if the Gebusi were traditional, so was I. A fledgling researcher, I had bought fully into anthropology's classic lure: to study a people who were as remote and little-contacted as possible. With the help of my advisor, I picked an appropriately blank spot on the map of interior New Guinea-- a terra incognita in the tropical rainforest. This ethnographic blankness was even more accurate than I suspected: my first expedition revealed the area to be as devoid of people as it was infested by mosquitoes. The nearest sizable group was an unstudied population of about 450 people who had been ethnographically designated as the "Bibo" but who in fact called themselves "Gebusi" (see map 1 and photo 1). Along with my wife and fellow doctoral candidate Eileen Cantrell, I lived with Gebusi from 1980 to 1982.

Though my first fieldwork was dated by its search for the primitive, I won't forswear its results. Anthropology will be poorer if it gives up on the diversity of cultural pasts. Even the study of social change seems impossible without documenting earlier conditions--the "before" that implicates the "after."In the present case, it was only upon writing and publishing the results of my first fieldwork that I began to realize how unusual it was for Gebusi traditions to have persisted so strongly into the 1980s. Courtesy of remoteness, historical circumstance, and luck, Gebusi had never been subject to missionization, wage labor, out-migration, expropriation of land, cash cropping, or much in the way of direct government interference. When they were first contacted--by Australian patrol officers in 1962--Gebusi were still using stone axes.

The first years of colonial influence were, from the Gebusi point of view, beneficial. In addition to receiving occasional trade goods, these benefits included especially the Australian pacification of the Gebusi's more numerous and militaristic neighbors, the Bedamini, who had raided Gebusi border settlements with impunity. Beyond the securing of their eastern flank, however, Gebusi received little colonial attention except for a yearly census patrol that passed through major settlements to count heads. In 1975, a scant thirteen years after first contact, the Australians left and independence arrived at the Nomad Station and for the new country of Papua New Guinea. In 1980, children younger than five had never seen white skin and so fled when they first saw us.

At the time of our initial arrival, indigenous customs seemed robust as well as profound. Indeed, though I hardly realized it at the time, the pacification of the Bedamini along with the simultaneous introduction of steel tools--which enabled larger garden clearings and bigger houses-- probably encouraged more feasting and ritual activity among Gebusi than had been possible before the Australians arrived. In 1980-82, all-night spirit seances led by one or more entranced spirit mediums were held until dawn an average of once every eleven days. At these songfests, lascivious spirit-women entered the medium's body and exhorted the all-male audience with tales of flirtation and sexual enticement (Knauft 1989). Public enactment of spirit-world beliefs abounded: ritual feasts, dances in stunning costumes, and initiations in full splendor at the communal longhouse. Ritual homosexuality was actively practiced: teenage boys sucked the penises and swallowed the semen of older men to acquire the life force of male adulthood (Knauft 1987a). Initiation ceremonies boasted elaborate rituals and a full complement of bawdy jokes, feasts, dances, spirit seances, and folktales.

Practices and beliefs concerning sorcery were equally striking. Gebusi deaths from sickness were invariably followed by spirit seances and divinations to identify the sorcerer responsible. Through a dizzying and ominous set of inquest procedures, sorcery suspects were forced to undergo divinations and risked being executed (Knauft 1985a). A mortality tabulation of 18 clans revealed that virtually one-third of Gebusi adults had been murdered. The rate of killing was among the very highest documented in a human society (Knauft 1987c). Most of these killings were executions of persons who had been accused of sorcery and scapegoated within their own communities. During the precolonial era, slain sorcerers were routinely cooked and eaten: the accused sorcerer was considered inhuman and was treated in the same manner as a game animal of the forest. These patterns persisted under colonialism and after independence; they were often effectively hidden from government awareness. In 1977, a man killed his half-sister on the spot after the corpse of his daughter "opened its eyes" and "looked at her" during a corpse divination. In 1978, a man and his brother were killed and eaten as sorcerers, and in 1978-79, two elderly widows were killed as sorcerers in separate cases. In one of these instances, the woman's body was stealthily exhumed and eaten in a neighboring village.

Immediate Exchange

For Gebusi and their neighbors, killing sorcerers was a normal part of the cycle whereby some persons were exchanged directly for others. Gebusi society and culture were firmly configured through what has been called "direct reciprocity." This orientation is aptly illustrated by marriage practices. In contrast to many parts of the world, including significant parts of Melanesia, Gebusi strive to exchange women between different clans or lineages: the bride's true or classificatory brother should marry a true or classificatory "sister" of the groom. In effect, every marriage should be balanced--a double marriage. Accordingly, Gebusi lacked customs of bride-wealth, in which a preponderance of valuables are given by the groom's side as an initial exchange for the bride to compensate her natal kin for their loss of her domestic and reproductive abilities. By contrast, a Gebusi woman should be compensated directly by one given in return--a woman-for-woman system of marital exchange. Analogously, among Gebusi men, sexual pleasure was received in direct and immediate reciprocity for the task of "growing" a young man to adulthood, that is, the pleasure of supplying semen in orgasm for homosexual insemination.

This logic of immediate and equivalent reciprocity also informed Gebusi feasting and killing. For major feasts, visitors hunted game deep in the forest while the hosts processed sago palm and readied one or more domestic pigs for slaughter. Major visitors brought net bags laden with dried meat and fish to the feast. At the conclusion of the ceremony, visitors presented these prized foods to the hosts, who reciprocated with large rolls of cooked sago and steamed pork. The exchange of valuable feast food was immediate and equivalent. By contrast, Gebusi lacked patterns of large-scale competitive exchange--found in highland and insular areas of Melanesia--in which large gifts of food or wealth indebt the receivers until they can repay or exceed the amount with a return gift at a later time.

A logic of direct reciprocity also informed Gebusi exchanges of persons-for-persons at death. To them, each and every death from sickness was a murder--the killing of one individual by another through supernatural means (Knauft 1985a). The relevant beliefs will be discussed in due course, but the larger point is that each loss of life through sickness called for a compensatory death in exchange. This retribution was accomplished by executing the sorcery suspect held responsible for sending the sickness. In the same way that the sorcerer may have spiritually eaten and consumed the body of the victim, the sorcerer's body could be cooked and eaten. And in the same way that the sorcerer caused the victim to suffer prior to death, the accused sorcerer could be burned or tormented before being slain. Given this logic of direct replacement, it is not surprising that a man was far more likely to be attacked as a sorcerer following the sickness-death of another male, while women were more frequently killed following the sickness-deaths of females (Knauft 1985: 133-35). In one case in which a teenage initiand had died from sickness, the young male sorcery suspect was tied and dressed up like an initiate before being slain and eaten.

In principle, then, Gebusi believed that every sickness-death merited a sorcery execution. In practice, this principle was followed a bit more than one-quarter of the time; between about 1940 and 1982, 26.5 percent of known sickness-deaths (56 of 211) precipitated the killing of at least one alleged sorcerer or led to another sorcery-related homicide (Knauft 1985a: 124). Correspondingly, not every marriage was completed as a direct replacement through sister-exchange. This reciprocity requires equal numbers of "brothers" and "sisters" in each kin group, but the small size of Gebusi clans led to unequal numbers of male and female clan siblings. In addition, some strong-willed young women resisted effectively and refused the marriage proposed for them (Cantrell 1998). As a result, the actual rate of sister-exchange was just a bit above half of all first marriages (Knauft 1985a: 169). When the marriage was not reciprocated, both sides were supposed, in principle, to simply accept that an exchange was not possible. But disgruntlement could easily fester over time. Indeed, one of the strongest findings during my initial fieldwork was that imbalance in marriage exchange was highly correlated with sorcery accusation. In-laws who were related to each other by virtue of an unreciprocated marriage were highly prone to accuse each other of sorcery (Knauft 1985a: chap. 7; 1987c). Though glaring in statistical terms, this pattern was largely denied by Gebusi themselves. They claimed both to me and to each other that the identity of sorcerers could be known only through spiritual means: "We don't know what makes sorcerers angry. We just see the divination and we attack the person who the spirits show us is guilty." In structural terms, however, lack of direct reciprocity in marriage was often a strong motive for reversing this imbalance by other means--through killing.

The cultural logic of exchange in Gebusi sorcery accusations helps account for the surprising fact that no Gebusi, as far as we know, actually tried to practice sorcery. The risk to personal survival of being known as a sorcerer was so great that it was one of the last things Gebusi would contemplate doing. Empirical evidence aside, however, the spiritual and physical "proof " of sorcery practice--derived from elaborate spiritual inquests and divinations--was self-evident to Gebusi. As a logic of projective belief and direct exchange, the execution of sorcery suspects provided its own justification.

In political terms, this system of violent scapegoating worked as a strong leveling mechanism. Compared even to the decentralized societies of the fringe New Guinea highlands, Gebusi had little in the way of leadership roles or centralized authority. To be aggressive or publicly self-interested was considered antisocial--similar to how a sorcerer might act. Potential male leaders as well as sharp-tongued widows were often accused of sorcery. The problem of unrequited sister-exchange also made it very difficult for a man to marry and retain more than one wife; he easily became the target of marital resentment or sorcery accusation. Though the spirit medium stood out as a figure of important spiritual authority, his influence was limited to his entranced state. Gebusi made a notably clear distinction between the medium's spirit familiar, which provided the voice of spiritual advice during seances, and the persona of the medium himself, which had no special authority in daily life.

In sum, direct reciprocity among Gebusi combined features of heightened political decentralization, sister-exchange marriage, male ritual homosexuality, domination of women, and a person-for-person model of killing and cannibalism that took the life of the sorcery suspect as compensation for the life of the sickness victim.

On the positive side of exchange, Gebusi who died of sickness were reincarnated as beautiful or powerful animals of the forest: the red bird of paradise, the hornbill, the egret, the cuscus, the cassowary, the lizard, the turtle, or a large fish. By means of this animation, the physical world became the spiritual embodiment of Gebusi ancestry as well as the home of those animals and plants that had never been human. Collectively, this corpus of spirits formed a parallel world that Gebusi could communicate with and enjoy through the entranced discourse and singing of the spirit medium. Voiced through the medium, the words of the spirits were echoed in deep song by the men of the community during all-night se´ances. During these songfests, Gebusi could interact with spirits who saw and understood things that Gebusi themselves could not. By this supernatural means, the spirit familiars of Gebusi mediums could locate and reclaim the "lost spirit" of many sick persons, thus keeping them from more serious illness or sorcery. The spirits could also help Gebusi locate lost pigs and forecast the success of fish poisoning or hunting expeditions. They could also help identify sorcerers.

In ritual dances and initiations, Gebusi celebrated the integrity of their rich and helpful spirit world. These festivities brought together beautiful images of the spirits--their feathers, fur, foliage, and other icons. These icons were arranged in aesthetic harmony and literally embodied on the dancers, who became the center of attention during the nightlong celebrations. As an enactment and celebration of this spiritual concord, groups of Gebusi from different settlements came together in a spirit of camaraderie and collective enjoyment to witness these spectacular dances. Along with a wide range of other Gebusi ceremonies, ritual feasts and dances were quite frequent in 1980-82.

Time Passing

What changes, by the late 1990s, had occurred in Gebusi society and culture? More personally, what had happened to the individual Gebusi I had known as friends and confidants? Only snippets of information had come to me in the interim, and none of it was very revealing. Some colleagues suggested that modern developments--Christianization, schooling, out-migration, and a trickle of economic development--would surely have brought major alterations. But others emphasized that the more things appeared to change, the more they actually stayed the same, based on deeper continuities of culture and meaning.

Even concerning homicide, different alternatives were possible. By 1982, I knew the killing rate had already declined to about half its precolonial levels--from a whopping 39 percent of all adult deaths to 23.3 percent during Australian colonialism and then to 19 percent between 1975 and 1982. Much of this reduction came from the cessation of Bedamini raids, which had decimated a number of settlements. But Gebusi scapegoating and killing of sorcerers within their own communities had continued. What had happened since 1982, however, remained a mystery to me. Given the continuing absence of Australian intervention, some colleagues thought that the rate of killing could have risen. In recent years, tribal violence has reemerged dramatically in parts of the New Guinea highlands. In some areas, new forms of violence are associated with so-called "raskol" behavior of young criminals; violent gangs of raskols have arisen in cities or towns and then spread to rural areas. Gebusi had always been able to hide most of their killings from government officials. Now, with Gebusi left on their own, patterns of the past could easily reemerge or find new expressions. This view was held by the missionary who had lived among the neighboring Bedamini people since the mid-1960s. But other changes were also in the wind, and these linked the scapegoating and killing of sorcerers with customs now associated with a backward past rather than with progress toward a hoped-for future. I was truly uncertain as to what I would find.



Continues...

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Prelude
1. A World of Before and After
2. Sorcerers of the Past
3. The Severed Head and Other Affairs, 1982-98
4. The Guards of Nomad
5. The Demise of Sorcery’s Revenge
6. The New Spirit
7. School Bells and the Energy of Hard Benches
8. The Corners in the Round
9. Subaltern Modern
Afterword
Notes
References
Index