Vandkilde 2008: “Leoni’s House. Materialising Identity and Change in Contemporary Papua New Guinea”. In Chilidis C., Lund J. & Prescott, C. (eds.): Facets of Archeology. Essays

KOLLEGER FRA NÆR OG FJERN : 145

LEONI’S HOUSE: MATERIALISING IDENTITY AND CHANGE IN

CONTEMPORARY PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Helle Vandkilde

THE MOBILITY OF CULTURE Travellers have a particular potential to change their social environment. One reason is that they often move between societies and thus across cultural borders, and sometimes even settle abroad for a period of time before retur-ning to the point of departure. Another, more general reason relates to the cultural, economic and social capital continuously produced and consumed throughout the human life cycle, since capital emanating from quite different venues offers varied opportunities for investment in strategies of identifi ca-tion. In archaeology, travelling is increasingly recognised as forming part of the transcultural fl ows that brought social change in the past (Hedeager 2007). A case in point is the immense geographical spread of culture and change in the European Bronze Age in which traffi c in both materials and people must have played a signifi cant role (Kristiansen & Larsson 2005; Vandkilde 2007). The global reality of the present is of course light years from the interconnec-tivity of the prehistoric past, but may nevertheless, through selected and ca-refully studied cases, and using archaeological methods, deliver theoretical and practical insight into the dual issue of travelling and change.

The case study1 below discusses a contemporary situation at Baluan Island in the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea, and it serves to

1 The present work was carried out as part of the Galathea 3 expedition under the auspices of the Danish Expedition Foundation. This is Galathea 3 contribution no. P2. The article is spe-cifi cally based on archaeological and anthropological fi eldwork in the Manus province of PNG in December 2006 and January 2007 and presents the initial results of a thorough study in preparation. I thank the Danish Expedition Foundation, the Bikuben Foundation, the Faculty of Arts and the Institute of Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics at Aarhus Univer-sity, Danida, Jyllandsposten, Carlsbergs Mindelegat, Moesgård Museum, Polaris Electronics, Trimble (Geoteam A|S), and Thrane & Thrane for supporting the fi eld work. Thanks also goes

146 : OAS NR. 10. FACETS OF ARCHEOLOGY. ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF LOTTE HEDEAGER ON HER 60TH BIRTHDAY

underline that material culture, knowledge, and social strategy are crucial and interwoven ingredients in movement-related social change. It is no doubt true, as globalisation studies in anthropology and sociology emphasise, that culture most of the time occurs imbedded in practice (e.g. Friedmann 2006). The global is thus experienced and consumed locally. During a complex pro-cess of local appropriation, global culture becomes translated and can even generate reactions of resistance; different responses emanating from pre-exis-ting understandings of identity and personhood. When this is said, however, the travelling component of transcultural fl ows suggests that culture can to some extent occur divorced from place. During periods of increased intercon-nectedness, culture becomes more ‘footloose’ than we are normally prepared to accept. The current intense movement across wide geographical distances of people, objects and knowledge probably occurs less territorially anchored than usually thought (cp. Inda & Rosaldo 2006). This momentary or ‘in transit’ deterritorialisation of culture may correspondingly help to understand why societies around the globe now change at a far greater speed than previously, even in regions well away from the main streams of globalisation.

Transculture is central to this debate, i.e. all sorts of foreign commodities and simulacra, which are diffi cult to put a precise label of origin on. They include globally available consumer goods varying from daily necessities purchasable at the supermarket, such as coffee, tea, rice, sugar, fl our, tin-ned fi sh and fuel, to luxury objects of more restricted availability. These are internationally branded commodities and copy wares counting new tech-nological wonders, such as digital cameras, MP3 players, mobile phones, television, computers, Internet connection, but also modern ideas of comfort in the home, particularly in the kitchen and the bathroom.

BALUAN ISLANDBaluan is one of several smaller islands in the enormous seascape of the Manus Province. The island is situated some 4-5 ‘speed boat hours’ away from the main island of Manus with the town Lorengau, which is the re-gional centre of commerce and administration. Electricity is created by fuel-driven generators, rain water is collected in large tanks, and telephones and televisions are far from commonplace. Travelling has always been a funda-mental part of culture and society in this part of the world (cp. Malinowski 1922), and even today the main fl ow of culture happens through human

to my fellow travellers: Steffen Dalsgaard , Christian Suhr Nielsen, Signe Helles Olesen, Ton Otto, Mads Ravn, Anders Emil Rasmussen, and Jeanette Varberg. Many warm thoughts travel across the world to Keket, Mayo, Soanin, Mellar, Leoni , Kevin, Linda, Chalaban and all the other people whose hospitality and help have much exceeded expectations. I am especially indebted to Ton Otto, who has generously made available to me the insights of 20 years of anthropological studies of culture and change in the region of Manus. Ton Otto also made sev-eral useful comments to the present article; any mistake of course remains my own.


mobility, inasmuch as modern communication equipment and hypermedia are not optional. Likewise, deep and prolonged anthropological fi eldwork has – in spite of gradual long-term and periodic more abrupt changes – no-ted a distinct duration through time of kinship-bound institutions of culture, exchange, and leadership (Otto 1991; Otto & Petersen 2005). This persistence of tradition is still evident when visiting Baluan today, where most people speak the local Paluai language as well as Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of PNG. Central to Baluanese tradition is the chiefl y lapan system of rank and male leadership dually based on favourable kinship positions and indivi-dual accomplishments through competitive exchanges of valuables.

Even so, it is clear that traditional institutions are currently opposed by new strategies of identifi cation and life styles coupled to the economic trends of monetarisation and commodifi cation. This movement towards a money economy has been under way for quite some time, and it may be argued that paper money constituted the forerunner of the more massive transcultural impact associated with the current globalisation. Leoni, her house and per-son, forms part of such an environment of change, in which she is both sign as well as agent. Her strategy successfully combines luxury transculture and local tradition rooted in kastam – a Tok Pisin concept, which means ‘tradi-tion’ and refers to the customs of the ancestors (Otto 1991; 2002).

NEGOTIATING AND MATERIALISING BELONGING Leoni is a traveller, or rather, she has been. She has spent most of her adult life abroad and in the PNG capital of Port Moresby as professional fi lm ma-ker. After retirement she has returned to her native Baluan where her chiefl y family resides. She has inherited considerable tracts of land and is also a woman of independent means deriving from marriages and her previous well-paid job. Earlier, she belonged to the upper echelon of the expatriate minority of islanders. Now she has joined a small group of resourceful re-patriates. All the time, however, she has strategically invested parts of her expatriate capital in traditional exchanges, which has brought a lot of local goodwill. She is around 50 years old and has a grown son by a British citizen from whom she is now divorced, but she is not precisely a divorcee inas-much as a rich lawyer from the Sepik presently functions as her ‘husband’. Kin relations exist to Sir Paliau Maloat, the great political leader and mo-derniser who was knighted just before he died in 1991. Immediately before reaching Leoni’s carefully designed house, one passes her relative’s impres-sive fl ower-covered white marble grave.

Her household includes a few relatives and quite often her adult son, who otherwise spends part of the year at school in England with his father’s fa-mily. When visiting Baluan, he is in charge of a few speedboats and does some related trading and sport diving. He clearly ranks high in the hierarchy


of expatriate youths, who cannot afford an education in Europe or the United States. Many young people dream of going to Australia but merely a privile-ged few manages to enrol at a boarding school or a university college there, whereas a larger proportion goes to Lorengau or even Moresby.

Despite its small size, Leoni’s house is literally an eye catcher owing to its direct position on the ground rather than on pillars as other houses on Baluan. This fi rst-hand impression of exceptionality is confi rmed when inspecting its interiors, especially the modern facilities fully integrated in the house design. The kitchen and bathroom compare with European standards, and contrast strikingly with the traditional low-technical outdoor sheds for showering, the planked toilets in the shallow seawater (Fig. 1), and the separate kitchen build-ings with open fi replaces and lack of plumbing. Leoni’s bathroom with its indoor toilet and shower is unique on Baluan, and the small well-designed kit-chen is also quite outstanding due to its modern equipment and references to a cosmopolitan culture of cooking (Fig. 2). Like the bathroom, it has piped water fl owing from a large water tank, in addition to the white hardwares of refrige-rator and stove. Commodities then mainly classify among modern comfort in the home, but also consumer goods such as Sprite and Pepsi are present. The house, moreover, contains more furniture than usual in Baluanese houses alt-hough often of a traditional if also classy kind; notably a fi ne wooden bed with carved animalistic legs and several pretty handmade baskets used as wall de-corations. The veranda is also a traditional trait, but much more spacey than the narrow loggia-like verandas of most Baluanese houses, and it is adorned with Italian-style fl ower-pots also serving to set it apart.

Fig. 1. Baluanese toilets are built on wooden posts in the shallow water along the coast. They consist of a narrow wooden plank leading to a small shack of wood or palm leaves. One toilet is often shared by a couple of households.


The house thus encapsulates transcultural ideas of comfort and style, and local tradition of housing is adapted to this, rather than the opposite way around. Furthermore, its various refi nements cannot merely be described as luxuries inasmuch as they considerably ease the daily life of a middle-aged woman, even if they also provide prestige. The house must have been quite costly to build. It is currently also costly to maintain, because of its energy-demanding modern devices: Due to rising oil prizes on the global market, the fuel necessary to run generators and speedboats is becoming increasingly expensive.

Leoni’s personal conduct and repertoire of languages (Paluai, Tok Pisin, English, and French) categorise her as a well-educated woman of the world, and the modern facilities of her self-designed house accord well with such a global or cosmopolitan identity. This may, however, seem in opposition to her overt and strong devotion to the local habit of betel nut chewing, which is a mildly in-toxicating and deep-rooted traditional practice repeatedly used to confi rm so-cial relations and to symbolise peace and alliances. Frequent chewing impacts visibly on body appearance and forms part of local identifi cation both socially and culturally. The resultant brightly red-coloured lips, teeth, and gums do not seem quite in harmony with Leoni’s otherwise global ways of articulating and materialising belonging. This apparent controversy between global modernity and local tradition should nevertheless be further contextualised:

The old tradition of spreading wealth, rather than collecting it, is as al-ready mentioned, still alive on the island, and the lapans, or chiefs, feel es-pecially obligated to follow this custom, which is also a central mechanism

Fig. 2. Snapshot from Leoni’s kitchen showing shelves with things relating to cooking and the consumption of food. The wide assortment of implements is carefully exhibited and accords with the otherwise transcultural style of the kitchen.


underpinning the authority of the offi ce. Leoni has been able to invest global culture and money in her house and in her son’s business, and in spite of her lapan association through kinship she seems to have managed this without confl icting seriously with older traditions. Leoni is, in fact, able to act more freely than most islanders and she has obtained much more freedom of ac-tion than traditionally considered proper for a woman. A dominant factor is here her former expatriate, now repatriate, identity, but it is nevertheless an explanation that needs to be amplifi ed.

Kastam understood as ‘old ways’ cannot easily be ignored, and repatria-tion is tricky in this respect, since it always implies (degrees of) cultural ali-enation due to the period of absence from the island. Several years abroad implies acquisition of new forms of potentially valuable cultural, social and economic capital, but also a corresponding loss of the complex cultural knowledge that is tied to day-to-day life and interaction on the island. Leoni has always been aware of the power of tradition and she has thus studied it carefully. Accordingly, she has invested considerable amounts of money in traditional exchanges, and she works actively in support of the traditional leadership of her clan. Clearly, Leoni’s betel nut chewing should be seen as part of such a major strategic practice aiming at re-appropriating kastam, which in this way can be considered a sort of exchangeable commodity.

Leoni’s local status and infl uence are steadily on the increase through her own making, and at the very core are strategic investments of expatriate capital in global and local forms of modernity. She is respected by the peo-ple around her, men and women; her veranda often housing a lively mass of visiting guests and relatives who come to ask and give advice on various matters. Also, her relative, the lapan of the Sauka clan, occasionally seeks her advice. These small-scale social events are in fact usually accompanied by the exchange and social chewing of betel nuts, and Leoni is often seen around the island visiting relatives and friends while carrying her small tra-ditional straw basket with betel nuts. After her return to Baluan, her ways of being and belonging may still not be quite in accord (cf. Lewitt & Glick-Schiller 2003), but she copes strategically and successfully with the situation. She is not openly ambitious in terms of local politics, but through her refi ned combination of global and local capital she clearly impacts on the generally restraining cultural understanding of what women can do and not do in an androcentric society, hence contributing to changing the structural frames of agency. Leoni exemplifi es how cosmopolitans through their manifold resources may manage to give tradition an extra push (Sahlins 2005), thereby contributing immensely to social and cultural change. In my view, Leoni is representative of an emerging new social class on Baluan. The longer-term success of this class will depend on its capability to obtain, maintain and make combined use of global and local capital.


A PERFORMATIVE MODE OF CHANGE Baluan’s basic kinship-bound institutions of culture, exchange, and leaders-hip are now for the fi rst time under more severe pressure: Up-and-coming ‘new style’ leaders are currently able to position themselves independent-ly of the lapan system and can therefore avoid dispersing wealth (Fig. 3). Instead, it is overtly displayed in house architecture and interiors, oversize speedboats, high-tech gear and other forms of transcultural luxuries gene-rally not available to people on the island. In reality a new class-defi ned identity is fl agged, which escapes competition due to the unequal access to these transcultural goods and due to the obligations of traditional leaders to redistribute wealth. Together with the increasing presence of capitalist principles in the economy the emergent class structure may suggest an im-pending societal transformation, in effect perhaps marginalising traditional leadership. Any player on the fi elds of power, as exemplifi ed above by Leoni and her doings, will nevertheless also in the future have to cope actively and shrewdly with a broad cultural category, which we may call tradition.

Fig. 3. A wealthy repatriate has over the last few years worked towards becoming the paramount leader of Baluan, and apparently with some success. To obtain his political objective transcultural luxuries are accumulated and displayed while considerable resources are simultaneously invested in promoting and developing kastam. This course of action notably happens independently of, and in competi-tion with, the traditional lapan leadership in which each clan is headed by a chief. The up-and-coming leader is here shown directing a traditional canoe race from his forty-feet speedboat with two enormous engines, hence illustrating how glo-bal and indigenous types of capital can be combined to form a joint strategy.


At the very least, Baluan society can at present be described as having en-tered a performative mode of change characterised by a ‘hot’ social climate of creativity (Sahlins 1985). This situation may prove to be historically uni-que since the old institutions have endured earlier periods of abrupt change, such as the one Margaret Mead noted had happened between her two major fi eldwork campaigns in 1928 and 1953 and associated with the religious and political Paliau movement (Mead 1956/1975; Otto 2002). Similarly, the last twenty years of monetarisation can be considered a generally undermining factor, but it has nevertheless happened parallel to, and sometimes even been incorporated into, the traditional institutions (Otto 2002).

The above case study may help to provide some further answers to the question why the present situation of change reaches deeper than previ-ously. New kinds of travelling and culture form part of the answer. Leoni clearly possesses a spirit of entrepreneurship central to Melenesian societies, and her story also fi ts well with the larger picture of increasing world-wide interconnectedness. Importantly, there are other similar, local stories of en-trepreneurial people from Baluan who engage in travels, thereby enhancing their status and improving their possibilities for a future on the island. The majority of these persons mostly reproduces the indigenous travelling cultu-re, but new elements with a potentially transforming effect are also added:

The day-to-day travels of resident islanders continue the maritime trade and exchange patterns of millennia, with the addition, however, that commoditi-es and money have now moved much more into focus. For quite some time it has been customary for some islanders to settle away from the island in near-by or faraway urban settings, where jobs, education and new forms of cultu-re are available. These expatriates move to and from on an irregular basis and various forms of transculture move with them in a footloose sort of way that will have at least some impact locally. Among these, young people engage in imagined collectivities made possible through hyper-mediated transculture that furthermore spreads directly from expatriates to residents (Fig. 4). This highlights the role of young people as an important channel through which global culture enters local island societies, pervades tradition and thereby contributes to social change. Cultural travelling, in fact the forerunner of tou-rism, is also an impacting factor. A few islanders get the once in a life-time chance, mostly through engagements of culture and sports, of embarking on a journey to Europe or maybe the United States as cultural travellers, retur-ning with inspiration, money, and materials. This clearly has impact on the future possibilities they see for themselves and their kin in the local village. Reversely, the occasional visits of western cosmopolitans introduce and dis-play global culture that will receive some sort of local response.


By comparison, a small group of repatriates, among them Leoni, stands out as probably the most assertive factor of change because these agents embody and reinforce the generally unequal access to transculture on Baluan while simultaneously managing to negotiate their identity in the complex set-up of local culture and social rules. Re-appropriation of traditional values is a precondition for obtaining infl uence and respect, and thereby probably for successful repatriation. It is predominantly repatriates who possess transcultural luxuries in a ‘hands on’ fashion, and they also have the crucial knowledge of how to deal with these novelties in a proper way. This resto-ration of former migrants to their place of origin, only now begun, is a new type of movement made possible by today’s globalisation. These repatriates were resourceful even before they left the island and the chance is that they have multiplied their resourcefulness on their return. It may be argued that the entrepreneurial initiative, so fundamental to Melanesia in the past and present, have become basically uncontrollable as a result of the many new possibilities and inequalities now emerging from the combination of novel forms of travelling with transcultural and indigenous resources.

Fig. 4. Resident and expatriate youths on Ba-luan often mediate belonging to imagined communities of global coverage through their body language, clothing, hair style, tas-te in music and the wall decorations of their rooms. Hip-Hop, West and East Coast, Bob Marley Rastafarians, and sport-hero subcul-tures – soccer, basket ball, etc. – in addition to Hollywood glimmer – are particularly po-pular at present.


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Documents

Vandkilde 2008: “Leoni’s House. Materialising Identity and Change in Contemporary Papua New Guinea”. In Chilidis C., Lund J. & Prescott, C. (eds.): Facets of Archeology. Essays