Ethnographic Presents: Pioneering Anthropologists in the Papua New Guinea Highlands: 12 (Studies in Melanesian Anthropology) - Hardcover
Synopsis
Until the middle of this century, the Western world knew little about the peoples of the Central Highlands of what is now Papua New Guinea, and vice versa. Only in 1930 was the curtain abruptly lifted on those valleys and mountain ridges, with their tens of thousands of inhabitants whose mineral resources, service as laborers, fealty as colonial subjects, and souls became objects of intense interest on the part of gold prospectors, Australian administrative officers, and missionaries. For the most part, these early interlopers were mere sojourners, and all were too preoccupied with their immediate objectives to learn or report much about the lives of people whose very existence had only recently been suspected.
Within the general framework of how and why they conducted their early Highlands fieldwork, but with the freedom to develop their essays as they chose, potential contributors were asked to reflect on a range of interrelated topics:
Before the Highlands: training and theoretical orientation prior to the experience; previous fieldwork; why the Highlands and a particular region were chosen; expectations and preparation.
Arrival: first impressions of the region and the people; the colonial encounter; selecting and establishing a field base; hosts' reactions and expectations; hosts' understandings of the fieldworker's objectives.
Fieldwork: logistics of living in the field; relationships with administrators and/or missionaries; the role of the anthropologists in the community; what the community gained from the ethnographer's presence; methods employed.
Analysis: how the anthropological climate of the times shaped or influenced analyses; how the Highlands experience may have changed the author's theoretical orientation.
After the Highlands: how return visits or later work has been influenced by the first encounter; how the early work relates to issues subsequently prominent in Highlands ethnography or anthropology in general.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Terence E. Hays is Associate Professor (Anthropology), Department of Anthropology and Geography, Rhode Island College, Providence, RI.
From the Back Cover
"Each of the 'pioneers' gives new insights into her/his own work while not incidentally adding chapters to the history of anthropology."--Eugene Ogan, University of Minnesota "Insightful, instructive, and delightful to read. . . . I found the variation of background, anthropological focus, and personality of the fieldworker to be one of the most important contributions this edited volume makes."--Jane C. Godale, Bryn Mawr College
From the Inside Flap
"Each of the 'pioneers' gives new insights into her/his own work while not incidentally adding chapters to the history of anthropology."
--Eugene Ogan, University of Minnesota
"Insightful, instructive, and delightful to read. . . . I found the variation of background, anthropological focus, and personality of the fieldworker to be one of the most important contributions this edited volume makes."
--Jane C. Godale, Bryn Mawr College
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Ethnographic Presents: Pioneering Anthropologists in the Papua New Guinea Highlands
By Terence Hays, editorUniversity of California Press
Copyright © 1992 Terence Hays, editorAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0520077458
One
A Historical Background to Anthropology in the Papua New Guinea Highlands
Terence E. Hays
In 1971, newly arrived in Port Moresby to begin fieldwork in what was then the Eastern Highlands District of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea,1 my wife, Patricia Hurley Hays, and I checked in with the Department of District Administration. After introductory small talk, we described to the administrator what we hoped to accomplish and showed him on a map the field site we had chosen. He said that he had no personal familiarity with the region indicated, as was usually the case in such interviews. Expressing surprise that we seemed already to have a general idea of what we were likely to find there, he said, "I've never understood how you anthropologists can choose villages for your research from halfway around the world."
The process didn't seem so mysterious to us, although, as is obvious from the essays in this volume, the choice of a specific field site for ethnographic research is always the result of a combination of professional priorities, personal tastes, and chance. I had been captivated by the Highlands literature, both popular and professional, and had chosen the University of Washington for my doctoral training because of the presence there of three Highlands specialists: L. L. Langness, Kenneth E. Read, and James B. Watson. All three had done their work in the Eastern Highlands and, with Watson as my supervisor, I soon became convinced that the Kainantu region served my needs concerning my intended research focus (folk biology in a subsistence-based economy) and that Watson's expertise and his continuing contacts there would aid in the logistics of fieldwork. As for the precise field location, several alternatives seemed equally suitable, but conversations with David Cole and Kerry Pataki-Schweizer, who had personally walked over most of the region, led my wife and me to choose a settlement they independently praised for its
friendly people and gorgeous physical setting. Those factors were important to us as novices who anxiously wanted our field experience to be pleasant as well as productive.
Our case was probably typical of fieldworkers who went to the Papua New Guinea Highlands in the 1960s as well as the 1970s, but what of those who had trained us and guided us in our choices? Almost no intensive ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in the Highlands by professional anthropologists until the early 1950s, when the contributors to this volume were participants in an unprecedented boom, with a dozen ethnographers entering the Highlands from 1950 to 1955: Kenneth E. Read and Paul Wirz in 1950; Catherine H. and Ronald M. Berndt in 1951; Richard F. Salisbury in 1952; Marie Reay and James B. Watson in 1953; D'Arcy Ryan and Virginia D. Watson in 1954; and Ralph N. H. Bulmer, Robert M. Glasse, and Mervyn J. Meggitt in 1955. This was also the period when Louis J. Luzbetak began his service as a missionary anthropologist in the Wahgi Valley, as Heinrich Aufenanger, John Nilles, and others continued their long-term work in this dual capacity.
Beginning fieldworkers today usually have a general appreciation of the vast intellectual legacy of these "pioneers" (see Andrew Strathern's discussion in the concluding essay in this volume). But they often lack a clear sense of what field research in the Highlands was like before the natural, social, and cultural landscapes were transformed by cash cropping, trade stores, and local government councils, and before the painstaking hand recording of texts and notes gave way to the tape recorders and portable microcomputers increasingly regarded nowadays as indispensable aids. Beyond providing much-needed historical perspective on how fieldwork was conducted in the earlier days, the essays in this volume address why questions as well. Both anthropologists and Papua New Guineans can benefit from a fuller and more accurate sense—from the viewpoints of those who were actually there—of what ethnographers were trying to accomplish in the Highlands during the colonial period. How and why did they choose the Highlands? On what informational base did they make their choices? What did they expect to find there, and how were their expectations met? What were they trying to achieve, individually and collectively? And how did these factors inform the intellectual and social legacy of this burst of activity?
Opening Up the Middle KingdomIn 1847, J. Beete Jukes, naturalist aboard H.M.S. Fly , wrote (Vol. I, p. 291): "The very mention of being taken into the interior of New Guinea sounds like being allowed to visit some of the enchanted regions of the
Arabian Nights , so dim an atmosphere of obscurity rests at present on the wonders it probably conceals." An aura of mystery still surrounded the Highlands a century later, when Paul Hasluck (quoted in Downs 1980: 174) assumed his duties as administrator in the territory in 1951: "It was as though [the] north of the great island was a coastal China, and from this the land rose in a Himalaya ruggedness of mountains that tumbled away in the south to a lowlands India . . . and nobody knew that a Tibet lay in between, in the heart of New Guinea."
Like other people, professional anthropologists were attracted by the mystique of the Highlands as they turned their focused attention to this "Middle Kingdom," as Australian Patrol Officer James L. Taylor had called the region (Downs 1980:175). Until his and others' exploratory patrols in the 1930s, little was known of this vast area and its peoples. Arriving within two decades of official discoveries of the densely populated high valleys, the "first generation" of ethnographers had an unparalleled opportunity. Perhaps nowhere else in the world could fieldworkers follow so closely in the tracks of first contact patrols, and while the Highlands were by no means pristine by that time, nowhere else was it possible to experience more immediately the "ethnographic present" of which most anthropologists write: "Here was the chance to study the social, economic and political life of people relatively 'untouched' by the influences which made analyses of Australian Aborigines or the [Nuer], for instance, seem, by comparison, more like reconstructions of the past than accounts based on first-hand observation" (Fell 1987:1).
In fact, the Central Highlands—that portion of the central cordillera bounded by the Strickland River in the west and Kassam Pass in the east (see maps 1 and 2)—was not, strictly speaking, a terra incognita even in the 1930s, when exploration and administration intensified. To be sure, it had not been the scene of major scientific expeditions such as those that had crisscrossed the central ranges of neighboring Netherlands New Guinea (now Irian Jaya) from 1904 to 1922, with resulting voluminous, detailed publications (mostly in Dutch) describing their peoples as well as natural environments (see van Baal et al., 1984). The sponsoring of such large-scale ventures was not the style of the British or Australian administrations of the eastern half of the island, though the Germans, whose domain included most of the Highlands until 1914, had begun to make similar inroads from the northeast coast: H. Zöller had seen and named the Bismarck and Kratke ranges from the Finisterre Mountains in 1888; botanist Carl Lauterbach had climbed the foothills of the Yuat headwaters in 1896, from which he saw and named Mount Hagen; and most of the major peaks of the Hagen and Wahgi Valley regions were probably seen by Walter Behrmann in 1912-13. These early scientific explorers, how-
ever, only skirted or glimpsed the Highlands from a distance, and little information about its inhabitants was included in their published accounts.2
Indeed, prior to World War I the only substantial penetration was in the Territory of Papua, beginning with Donald Mackay's exploration of the Southern Highlands fringe in 1907-08 (see Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991). Seeking exploitable coal deposits, Mackay found Mount Murray (naming it in the process) and traveled through Pawaia, Podopa (Foraba), and Sau (Samberigi) populations. Shortly thereafter, in 1910, the administrator, Miles Staniforth Smith, ascended the Kikori River and explored the Mount Murray-Samberigi Valley region, to be followed by Resident Magistrate Wilfred Beaver (searching for the long-overdue Smith), who sojourned with the Sau and made initial contacts with the Foi people of the Mubi River. Various observations on these "Mountain Papuans" (Weiner ed. 1988) were included in published accounts of the journeys, but little information could be obtained systematically by parties preoccupied with physically making their way through this uncharted limestone country.
Following the great European war, administrative exploration of the Southern Highlands resumed with more patrols to the Samberigi and Kerabi valleys throughout the 1920s.3 The potential existed for ethnographic research in the appointment of Walter M. Strong as government anthropologist for the Territory of Papua (1920-28), with F. E. Williams as his assistant (1922-28) and successor (1928-43). However, Strong never ventured into the Highlands (as here delimited), and Williams did not do so until the late 1930s.
Similarly, in the Mandated Territory of New Guinea an opportunity arose to initiate systematic ethnographic work with the appointment of E. W. P. Chinnery as government anthropologist (1924-32). From the start, Chinnery, who had studied under A. F. C. Haddon at Cambridge (but never completed his degree), was eager to begin the compilation and publication of information otherwise buried in patrol reports, and immediately he began giving "instruction in ethnographical methods" to the territory's district officers (Stocking 1982:4), providing them with handbooks based on Notes and Queries and questions formulated by J. G. Frazer (Commonwealth of Australia 1926:7). In a letter to Haddon in 1926 he indicated delight that research students from Cambridge would be sent to New Guinea, where they could build on his own work of "opening up new country, making an ethnographic survey of its inhabitants and generally preparing the way for intensive workers" (quoted in Stocking 1982:6). He appears not to have been thinking of the Highlands, however, declaring that "intensive work in new districts [was] of course impossible," owing to the "constant risk and worry" faced among newly
contacted peoples (Stocking 1982:6). Over the next several years, Gregory Bateson, Reo Fortune, Margaret Mead, and Hortense Powdermaker would benefit from Chinnery's support as "gatekeeper" for field research in the Mandated Territory, but they confined their work to coastal and lowland regions or adjacent islands, as did Chinnery himself until the 1930s.
If ethnographic fieldwork did not begin in the Highlands as early as it might have done, there nevertheless were numerous Europeans entering the eastern portion throughout the 1920s. Northern fringe populations around Aiome were visited and photographed by a 1921 geological expedition up the Ramu (Stanley 1923), and government botanist W. D. F. Lane-Poole climbed Mount Otto in 1923. The major incursions, however, were made by missionaries, gold prospectors, and administrative pacification patrols (see Radford 1987 for a detailed account).
The German Neuendettelsau Lutherans were the most aggressive mission body during this period, continually expanding their domain from later 1919, when Stephan Lehner left the mission station at Kaiapit in the Upper Markham Valley and made the first European contact with the Binumarien, east of present-day Kainantu. He was followed by Leonhard Flierl and Georg Pilhofer, who thoroughly explored the Arona and Kainantu valleys and continued westward into the territory of the Kamano (Kafe) in the Dunantina Valley. By 1929, Yabem native evangelists from the Finschhafen coast were established in mission stations and villages throughout the Binumarien, Agarabi, Gadsup, Northern Taifora, and Kamano language groups.
In contrast to the missionaries, government patrol officers were slow to enter the Eastern Highlands and made only sporadic visits, which were almost exclusively focused on trying to stop the chronic intervillage fighting in the area. The first such patrols were not conducted until 1924-25, responding to reports of fighting in the Kainantu region. Such efforts at pacification multiplied toward the end of the 1920s as chronic warfare posed threats to the very survival of smaller groups such as the Binumarien and increasingly came to impede missionary and prospecting activity, both of which were accelerating as the decade was coming to a close. Some gold seekers, such as Helmuth Baum, may have penetrated the Eastern Highlands as early as 1918-19, but the area became thick with prospectors a decade later. At about the same time (1929-30) the "Akmana expeditions" were testing the creeks of the Jimi, Baiyer, and Maramuni rivers and making first contacts with Enga populations far to the west (Shepherd 1971), and the Arona and Kainantu valleys became major foci and staging areas for prospectors. From 1928 to 1931, Edward (Ned) Rowlands explored nearly every creek in the area and extended his search to the Fore populations around present-day Okapa.
Despite all of this activity, mainly concentrated in a relatively small part of the Highlands, the European presence was still scattered at the end of the 1920s, and "the paths of missionaries, miners and administration officials rarely crossed. Each group had different objectives and to some degree distrusted the others; they rarely sought each other out so that their encounters usually took place by chance" (Radford 1087:78). Moreover, neither the German missionaries nor the prospectors hoping to find big strikes comparable to those of the Morobe goldfields farther to the southeast were keen to draw the attention of the outside world. Apart from reports of the early Southern Highlands exploration in Papua, no accounts or descriptions of Highlanders were published until 1034.
The isolation of the Highlands from public awareness began to break down in 1930 (J. Watson 1964:1), with Rowlands's discovery of payable gold at Ornapinka and the arrival of more prospectors and missionaries. In early 1930, Edward Ubank and Alex Peadon continued to work claims near Rowlands at Ornapinka, and Michael Leahy and Michael Dwyer made their "epic journey' (Willis 1969). Setting out from the Lutheran mission station at Lihona, they entered the Highlands at the Dunantina Valley, in Kamano territory. From there they explored down the banks of the Asaro River, around Mount Michael, and down to the Asaro/Wahgi junction, eventually rafting down the Tua and Plo rivers in the Karimui area to the Purari and thence to the Papuan coast. At about the same time the Lutherans began to extend their mission field, also using Lihona as a base. Wilhelm Bergmann and W. Flierl made forays into the Bena Bena Valley in 1930 and again in 1931-32 finding, as had the prospectors, huge populations to which, for a brief time, they had exclusive proselytizing access.
Discouraged by their luck in the heart of the Eastern Highlands, Leahy and Dwyer turned their attention in 1931 to the southeastern fringe, making reconnaissance flights and exploring on foot the Watut headwaters and other mountain haunts of the Anga ("Kukukuku") peoples. Other prospectors had encountered the Anga in the Edie Creek region, but now parties were penetrating deep into their territory, and not without conflict. From Papua, Jack Hides made exploratory patrols into the Upper Purari region in 1931 and, like Leahy, was attacked (Hides 1935). For the next two years encounters between Europeans and these fringe Highlanders continued to be violent. Attracted by reports of gold in the Langimar, Tiveri, and Tauri headwaters, prospectors poured into the area, and some, such as Helmuth Baum, Emile Clarius, and William Naylor, would not emerge alive. Repeated clashes finally forced the hand of the administration, which sent Patrol Officer J. K. McCarthy to establish a post at Menyamya in early 1933, only to abandon it by November
of that year because of continual attacks on prospectors who were, in any case, finding no payable gold (Sinclair 1978:205-210).
In ironic contrast, less than 100 kilometers to the north prospector Alex Peadon was settling into the Kainantu Valley in 1932 with his wife, cattle, and horses. In July of that year District Officer Eric Feldt built an airfield at Lapumpa, and a few months later James L. Taylor established the Upper Ramu Police Post (Kainantu) as the first in the Highlands. By November of that year, at least eighteen prospectors were settled near the post (by now a veritable European community), and expansion was beginning as Leahy, returned for another look and backed by the resources of the New Guinea Gold Company (NGG), set up a new base camp in the Bena Bena Valley.
In 1933, prospectors such as James Nason-Jones and Jack O'Neill continued to explore the Kainantu Valley and its southern, more rugged, hinterland as Leahy set his sights on the west. With NGG chief surveyor Charles W. Marshall, Leahy pushed into the western edge of the Goroka region, from which they saw the long, wide Wahgi Valley stretching into the distance—the main source of the numerous bodies Leahy had earlier seen floating down the Wahgi and Asaro rivers. On the previous Christmas Day the first landing had been made at the new Bena Bena airfield, and now the NGG and Leahy used it to launch reconnaissance flights over the Wahgi Valley. With their route planned and full support from the administration, Leahy set out in March with his brother Dan, surveyor Kenneth Spinks, and Assistant District Officer James L. Taylor, on what would be the largest patrol yet conducted in the Highlands—a six-month venture, complete with ad hoc landing strips in the Wahgi Valley and near Mount Hagen to resupply and stage more reconnaissance flights.
Taylor estimated that during this patrol "200,000 previously unknown people" had been discovered as the occupants of this "Middle Kingdom" (Downs 1980:175). According to Downs (1980:175-176):
Up to that time, the Administration at Rabaul considered the Tolai of the Gazelle Peninsula, then numbering roughly 38,000, to be New Guinea's largest concentration of related people. In fact, the 1933 expedition . . . had come in contact for the first time with elements of population groups that probably exceeded 500,000. . . . [Thus in] the space of one month, in 1933, the Government of the then Mandated Territory of New Guinea had its administrative responsibility for people doubled. This was the real significance for all future administrations of what had been discovered.
Of course the expedition was significant in other respects as well: what could be considered the first anthropological reports on (Papua New Guinea) Highlanders was one product. Leahy's makeshift airfields had made it possible for E. W P. Chinnery (by then Director of District Ser-
vices and Native Administration, but still devoted to anthropology) to visit Highlands sites during the expedition and report his own and Taylor's observations on the Kainantu, Bena Bena, Chimbu, Hagen, and Jimi River peoples to a worldwide anthropological audience (Chinnery 1934a , 1934b ). In addition, while the huge, dense populations of the Western Highlands did not in themselves interest Leahy as much as did the gold (which he did find), his curiosity was sufficient to yield a rich harvest of recorded observations, photographs, and films of the Bena Bena, Chimbu, Wahgi, Hagen, Nebilyer, Kaugel, Wabag, Baiyer, and northern fringe peoples, which he eagerly shared with the world (Leahy 1935a , 1935b , 1936; Leahy and Crain 1937).
The Leahy-Taylor expedition was not the only group of Europeans in the Central Highlands at this time, for while they were finding the Highlanders useful as little more than sources of food and labor, missionaries continued in their concern for the peoples' souls. In 1933, Father Alfons Schäfer established the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) Catholic mission at Bundi (where he was joined in 1934 by Father Heinrich Aufenanger), and in October of that year, as Leahy and Taylor abandoned their temporary post at Mount Hagen, Schäfer and two colleagues were just beginning their exploration of the Chimbu and Wahgi valleys (Ulbrich 1960). Within a few months, SVD mission stations were established at Mingende (by Schëfer) and Wilya, among the Mogei people of Mount Hagen (by Father William Ross and Brother Eugene Frank). According to Mary Mennis (1982), the latter station was hurriedly put in place because the Catholics were worried about imminent encroachments by the Lutherans. Ross, Aufenanger, and Schëfer had encountered Bergmann and other Lutherans when exploring the Mingende region, and Ross had asked his bishop for permission to "beat" them to the Hagen area.
The Lutherans were indeed expanding into the central valleys as Seventh-Day Adventist missions started to compete directly in the Kainantu region. By September, 1934, Wilhelm Bergmann had settled into Kundiawa with his compatriots E. P. Helbig and Martin Zimmermann; Herbert Hannemann, and others were ensconced at Kerowagi; and Georg Vicedom and G. Harrolt, despite Ross's efforts, were beginning their long stay at Ogelbeng, near Mount Hagen. Tension was noticeably starting to build as Highlanders, having just seen their first Europeans and airplanes, were now being courted by even greater wonders that carried the price tag of undivided allegiance and faith. The rivalry among missions was increasingly seen by the administration as yet another stimulus to intervillage hostilities, which had not ceased despite the obviously revolutionary changes that were afoot (see Radford 1987:150-152).
Among these changes was one that would transform Highlands eco-
nomic, political, and social organization forever. It warrants at least brief mention here as one of the reasons why the "pioneering generation" of ethnographers was faced with societies that were far from pristine, although only one of them, Richard Salisbury (1962), would make that fact a major focus of his work.
As lan Hughes (1978:311) has characterized it, "It was in the eastern highlands in 1932 that a dramatic change occurred in the economics of Australian exploration in New Guinea, for it was then that the importance of adopting the currency of the land was realized." That "currency," in both the Mandated Territory and Papua, was shell: white egg-cowries, pearlshells, baler shells, dog whelks, or green snail shells, depending on the region. It was James L. Taylor who first realized the value of these commodities, which were infinitely available on the coast but precious in the high mountain valleys. At first, a day's labor could be purchased for less than a half penny's worth of cowries in the Kainantu region, and it was in this way that the airfields, police posts, and mission stations were built, miners' sluice boxes were manned, and food was purchased throughout the 1930s. The demand for shells for use in local bridewealth and compensation payments seemed limitless, and the Leahy brothers, like the government officers, tapped sources as far away as Manus and Torres Strait to meet it. Missions set up their own supply networks, with school children collecting shells on the beaches and the ever-proliferating airfields used to fly them by the ton into the Highlands. As the supply increased, inflation occurred, creating even more demand, in a spiral that lasted well into the 1950s. With incalculable millions of shells distributed by the end of the 1930s, local marriage arrangements, ascendancy to political leadership, and traditional ceremonial exchange and trade networks would never be the same again. Thus Hughes's (1978:316) cautionary note:
Wealth increases of this magnitude and a consequent restructuring of exchange relationships during the 1930s and 1940s must be borne in mind when considering the "ethnographic present" encountered by the first anthropological field workers in the highlands two decades later. Not only had great changes been initiated, but they had had nearly a generation to spread and develop and become part of a pattern generally perceived as "traditional". The post-contact situation had become the norm.
Amid all of this change, one aspect of traditional Highlands life—tribal fighting—remained relatively constant, and for a few years, at least in the Mandated Territory, it looked as if the whole European colonial effort would fall apart (as, indeed, the outside world would appear to do not long thereafter).
The Leahy-Taylor expedition had not been without clashes as High-
landers learned that the men initially perceived as ghosts were in fact mortal and that their shells and other goods might be taken by force. In June, 1933, while that expedition was still in the field, Ian Mack became the first patrol officer to die in the course of duty in the Highlands, killed by Agarabi tribesmen at Aiamontina (Radford 1977b ). Then, in February, 1934, prospector Bernard McGrath was killed by Kamano, who also attacked the subsequent investigative patrol and wounded the district officer as well as others in the party. The administration's response was prompt: "An advanced post was immediately established at Finentegu [sic] near the villages concerned, and close attention was given to the suppression of inter-tribal fighting in the area" (Commonwealth of Australia 1935:28). By the end of the year, peace had been restored, but government influence was not yet so effective "among the Kukukuku jungle-dwellers of the Watut watershed" (p. 29).
The peace was short-lived, however: "The people of Finintegu were peaceful while an officer was located there, but in the beginning of 1935, when the officer was withdrawn for more urgent duty in the Chimbu area, some of the more troublesome tribes began fighting, and the staff at Ramu [Kainantu] had to extend their patrols to Finintegu until the position improved" (Commonwealth of Australia 1936:23). The "more urgent duty" referred to was related to two more killings of Europeans. The Christmas season of 1934-35 was a sad one for the Catholic mission as Father Karl Morschheuser was killed near Kuglkane in December, as was Brother Eugene Frank near Gogolme in January. Again the administrative response was to establish new police posts, this time in the Kundiawa region in March, 1935.
This extension of tenuous "control" followed by only a month the arrival of Reo Fortune in the Finintegu area in February, 1935. As Ann McLean shows in Chapter 2, ethnographic fieldwork under these circumstances was nearly impossible, even for a veteran. Fortune was the very first professional anthropologist to undertake intensive field research in the (Papua New Guinea) Highlands, but he was far from being a novice. After earning his diploma in anthropology under Haddon at Cambridge, six months' work on Dobu in 1927 had already resulted in an ethnographic classic (Fortune 1932), and this was followed almost immediately by other projects, but not in Papua. During his work in the D'Entrecasteaux Islands he had repeatedly clashed with J. H. P. Murray, then administrator of the Territory of Papua, over what Fortune perceived as government interference with native customs. In the view of Deidre Griffiths (1977:174), "Perhaps understandably, when next Reo Fortune returned to the field he chose the Mandated Territory; and there he received every assistance from Chinnery and the Administration."
Such assistance contributed to Fortune's successful fieldwork (with his
wife, Margaret Mead) on Manus in 1928-29 and on the Sepik in 1932-33 (with a venture among the Omaha Indians of the United States sandwiched in between). But neither Chinnery nor the administration could ameliorate the horrendous conditions Fortune faced between Kamano battle lines, and, in this instance, government "interference with native customs" may have saved his life, as he was forced to leave the field in August, 1935.
Whatever may have been the tragic consequences of this experience for Fortune, and perhaps for anthropology, his expulsion was part of a general administrative "closing" of the Highlands. From Kainantu to Mount Hagen, the region was declared an "uncontrolled area," and no new nonadministrative personnel were allowed to enter. The Leahy brothers were permitted to remain at their gold claims, and missionaries already in place could stay; also, at least for a time, native evangelists were free to continue expanding their activities. Thus, by mid 1936, ten mission posts were still staffed by Europeans and another seventy-four were in operation with native mission teachers only (Commonwealth of Australia 1937:25). But the situation had definitely changed. According to Ian Downs (1980:176), the Leahys' and missionaries' activities were severely restricted "within a defined radius of their stations," and concerns about the possible introduction of alien infectious diseases resulted in the repatriation of hundreds of indigenous mission helpers to the coast—concerns that may have been warranted given a pan-Highlands influenza epidemic in 1936 that took uncounted lives and doubtless added to the confusion and uncertainty as to the future of the Highlands and its people, who were by now fully caught up in processes of change that could not be stopped by administrative edict.
The rush to the Highlands in the early 1930s had itself been uncontrolled, and undoubtedly the administration's "closing" of what had been wide-open gates helped bring about a more stable set of conditions. In Downs's (1980:176) view, the restrictions "allowed intensive patrolling and pacification to take place," and by the end of the 1930s, "nearly half a million people between Kainantu and Wabag [had been] brought under a 'Pax Australiana.'" Where only a year previously Reo Fortune had been driven from his fieldwork among the Kamano (Kafe), in August, 1936, the Lutheran-missionized Kafe took part in a public burning of weapons in what Robin Radford (1977a ) has called a "peace movement." And peaceful the region must have seemed, with permanent patrol posts established at Kainantu, Bena Bena, Chimbu (Kundiawa), and Mount Hagen, and 480 kilometers of bridle paths stretching from Gadsup territory in the east to the Chimbu Valley by October, 1937. Also by the late 1930s actual "development" was occurring, beginning with the establish-
ment of the Aiyura Agricultural Experimental Station near Kainantu in 1936, with cinchona, tea, and coffee plantings and its own airstrip by 1937.
Even conditions among the notorious Anga of the Upper Watut River were sufficiently stable for permission to be granted to Beatrice Blackwood to become, in August, 1936, the second professional anthropologist to work in the Highlands (or, at least, on their southeastern fringe). Sent by the Pitt Rivers Museum to collect artifacts and make a thorough study of "a functioning Neolithic technology," her first choice had been the Mount Hagen area, but it was still closed when she began her work (Hallpike 1978:8).
Despite these conditions of relative peace, there were close parallels between Blackwood's and Reo Fortune's circumstances. Like Fortune, Blackwood was a seasoned fieldworker and had already produced her own classic monograph, on Buka (1935). Also, she was constrained by the government's concerns with her safety, being allowed to visit only the "safe" villages near Otibanda Police Post, where somewhat artificial settlements had recently been encouraged by the administration. An epidemic in the region shortly after her arrival was only a harbinger of the conditions she would have to face, and from her surviving fieldnotes C. R. Hallpike (1978:9) has reconstructed a picture reminiscent of McLean's account (this volume) of Fortune's sojourn among the Kamano:
The linguistic difficulties, the absence of useful informants, the tiny settlements with their constantly changing membership, the rigours of the terrain, the dour and suspicious nature of the Kukukuku, constantly afraid of attack from lurking enemies and, in the last months, the frequent necessity to stay in roughly built government "rest houses", prevented from working by the pouring rain, combined to produce a notably depressing experience, and it is a tribute to her resilience that she managed to survive in the field for as long as she did without a period of rest, and remarkable that she succeeded in being well accepted by such a difficult people.
Again like Fortune, Blackwood had to contend with illness herself and finally had to leave the area after less than nine months' work when an assault by the Anga on a local Chinese storekeeper raised the administration's anxiety levels too high to allow her to continue (Hallpike 1978:9). So, viewing her "Kukukuku" fieldwork as incomplete, she made the most of what remained of her leave with brief periods of collecting and research among the Arawe of New Britain and the Bosmun of the Upper Ramu River before returning to England.
In the Mandated Territory, the intensive patrolling of the late 1930s included an expedition on a scale even larger than that of Leahy and Taylor in 1933. Again the leader was James L. Taylor who, with John
Black, was out for over a year, from March, 1938, to June, 1939, opening up the territory from Wabag to Telefomin (which by then had become much better known from the prospecting activities of J. Ward Williams in 1935-37, including airplane reconnaissance and landings at Telefomin). The "Hagen-Sepik Patrol" extended knowledge of the Hageners, Hull, and Enga, and yielded the first accounts (Taylor 1940a , 1940b ) of the Duna people of the far western highlands.
This was also the period of great patrols in the Territory of Papua, with Jack Hides adding tens of thousands of people to its known population on his 1935 journey from the Mount Bosavi area in the far west through the valleys of the Hull, Mendi, Kewa, and Sau peoples (Hides 1936; Schieffelin and Crittenden 199l). Parts of this route were covered again, but much new territory was added, in major patrols of 1936 and 1937, with Ivan Champion and C. J. Adamson adding considerably to our early knowledge of the Hull and Mendi; southern fringe Enga populations; the Kakoli, Imbonggu, Kewa, and Wiru of the Mount Giluwe and Mount Ialibu regions and the Poru Plateau; the Fasu and Foi of Lake Kutubu; and finally, the Podopa, Daribi, and Pawaia of the eastern end of their travels. These patrols were also crucial in laying the groundwork for the establishment of a major police post at Lake Kumbu, which was accomplished following a seaplane landing on the lake in October, 1937. "Development" was still far off in the future for the Southern Highlands, but the stage was now set for intensive ethnographic research, and F. E. Williams, still government anthropologist of Papua, seized the opportunity.
Unlike Chinnery, his counterpart in the Mandated Territory, F. E. Williams was able to engage in several substantial periods of fieldwork, for example, fourteen months with the Orokaiva, and more than twentyone months (albeit over a fourteen-year period) at Orokolo. Doubtless these circumstances helped make it possible for him to produce detailed monographs to an extent Chinnery (or most anthropologists, for that matter) was never able to do, including Orokaiva Society (1930), for which he received his M.A. from Adelaide; Papuans of the Trans-Fly (1936), his B.Sc. thesis (!) at Oxford; and his D.Sc. thesis (Oxon), Drama of Orokolo (1940). His work in eight "major fields" and at least twelve "minor ones" (Griffiths 1977:21, n. 5) established for him a solid reputation in anthropology, but it may have evoked little enthusiasm from his superior, J. H. P. Murray, for whom, in the view of Griffiths (1977:175), "there was a constant battle with anthropologists like Fortune who did not think he should be interfering with Papuan life. Whenever he bad the opportunity he wrote or spoke to their discredit." Murray did not, at least in print, express the same antagonism toward Williams and, as Elkin (1943:99) has noted, Williams "was given a free hand, and the Government published
his reports, whether they were regarded officially as acceptable and useful or not."
Despite Murray's general attitude toward anthropologists and severe limits on resources in the Papuan administration, Williams throve in his post and never wanted for support from the anthropological establishment, with introductions to his books written by R. R. Marett, A. F. C. Haddon, and C. G. Seligman. Contrasts with Chinnery—who seems always to have been overburdened with administrative tasks and never achieved either advanced degrees or his own ethnological goals—could not have been starker, and they apparently extended to the two men's roles as "gatekeepers" of anthropological research in New Guinea. Whereas Chinnery devoted much of his scarce time to recruiting and helping other fieldworkers, Williams seems to have been determined to keep in his sole possession the only key to the Southern Highlands "gate." On this topic, Griffiths's reading of Williams's papers and correspondence (1977:33-34) is worth quoting at length:
Hearing that an Oxford Exploration Club party wished to be the first to enter the uncontrolled area of the recendy discovered Southern Highlands, around Lake Kutubu, Williams wrote [in 1936] to the Administration forestalling the group's request for permission. . . . He was successful, although it was also unlikely that such a party would have been granted access to an uncontrolled area in any case; and it was "arranged that I [Williams] should be the first anthropologist to work in the . . . area". . . . And again, when an anthropologist named Bonington requested permission to work in the same general region, Williams suggested [in 1935] to the Government Secretary that he might find the [coastal] Aroma district "a very profitable one to work in" instead. . . . Referring to Bonington's desire to work on "ground which has been untouched", Williams commented: "I presume he refers to the gende touch of the anthropologist only, not to that of the European in general". . . . It seems probable, however, that in requesting access to the Highlands, Bonington was asking permission to work in an area that Europeans had not yet greatly influenced; it seems equally likely that Williams, as a fellow anthropologist, would have gathered this impression. Instead he made a point of sending the other anthropologist elsewhere, informing the administration as he did so that "I should myself like to be the first anthropologist to go to see the new people discovered by Mr Hides".
And so he was.
Apart from a brief visit to Mount Hagen (Williams 1937), Williams conducted fieldwork in the Southern Highlands from November, 1938, to May, 1939, spending most of his time with the Mubi River Foi, using the new police post at Lake Kutubu as his base. Early in 1939 he visited the neighboring Mendi speakers of the Augu, Wage, and Nembi valleys
for a total of about two months. There the absence of any lingua franca prevented him from following his usual practice of working through interpreters, and he began to learn the local language (Griffiths 1977:40). In his subsequent report on these "Grasslanders" (Williams 1940b ), extensive word lists were given a place of prominence and went considerably beyond the "native vocabularies" often included in Annual Reports . These brief periods of fieldwork would be the only ones conducted by professional anthropologists in the region for over a decade, until D'Arcy Ryan arrived among the Mendi and Robert M. Glasse, the Huli (see their contributions to this volume). It is likely that Williams would have pursued his Highlands investigations further, but he lost his life in World War II, during which virtually all field research in New Guinea was put on hold in any case.
In the view of Downs (1980:176),
The Japanese war was an interlude rather than an event in the history of the New Guinea highlands. The Japanese did not attempt to cross the Bismarcks and the people remained in relative isolation, occasionally entertained by visiting aircraft and VIPS. The highlands served as a rest area, mainly for American and Australian airmen. ANGAU [the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit] had simply carried on when civil administration ceased. Medical services were greatly extended under army administration.
It is difficult, however, to dismiss the war so casually in terms of its impact on Highlanders; consider, for example, the history of the "Bena Force" (Dexter 1961). The Bena Bena and Goroka regions were regarded as strategically critical; by the end of 1942, the Japanese were entrenched in Madang, the Huon Peninsula, and the Finistrerre Mountains, needing only to move up the Ramu and Markham valleys into the Eastern Highlands to mount an effective campaign against Port Moresby and the southern coast. Accordingly, the Sixth Australian Division was sent to Bena Bena in January, 1943, to hold the entire area extending to the Ramu Valley. The operation was closed down in November, 1943, but during its main period of occupation of the Goroka Valley this "rest area" was host to sixty-five officers, over thirteen hundred Australian and American soldiers, and more than two hundred members of the Royal Papuan Constabulary. In addition, up to three to four thousand Chimbu were relocated to Bena Bena and Goroka as a labor force to help construct living quarters and airstrips. By the time of its removal, the force had constructed a permanent airfield at Goroka, established a hospital at Mount Hagen and increased medical services at the Kundiawa Lutheran mission, patrolled and mapped extensively from one end of the High-
lands to the other, and flooded the region with Western goods and influences on a scale far greater than that of the European incursions of the 1930s. As for the visiting aircraft that "occasionally entertained" the Highlanders, in May and June of 1943 the entertainment included bombings and strafing of Asaroka, Goroka, Bena Bena, Chimbu, Kainantu, and Aiyura, with uncounted casualties among the indigenous population.
These wartime events, together with the previously mentioned shell inflation of the 1930s, must be taken into account when a long-overdue history of this early period is written. The received view, expressed, for example, by Peter Lawrence and Mervyn Meggitt (1965:20) is that
the contact situation in the Highlands . . . was less disruptive than on the Seaboard. The people were able to reach a modus vivendi with the Europeans, who treated them with some respect, and left their social and religious systems largely intact. They still found their traditional way of life satisfying.
While the records of early colonialism in other regions of the world, and perhaps in New Guinea, may be filled with more violence and exploitation of native populations, we are now learning of some of the seamier aspects of the "first contact" period in the Highlands (see, e.g., Connolly and Anderson 1987), and, as Andrew Strathern discusses in his concluding essay in this volume, the "first generation" of Highlands ethnographers were, after all, working in and were part of a colonial context.
However benign may have been the treatment of Highlanders by early prospectors, patrol officers, missionaries, and military personnel—and most of it probably was—it is perhaps more the mystique of the Highlands than an appreciation of this historical context that has led to the impression, again to quote Lawrence and Meggitt (1965:20), that
the problems facing the anthropologist in the Highlands were relatively straightforward. He rarely had to deal with antagonism to white men, which was normally expressed elsewhere through the medium of cargo cult. Such cargo cults or other 'revolutionary' movements as he met were usually only marginal and of short duration.
To be sure, the essays in this volume evince few indications of antagonism directed at the "pioneer" ethnographers, but some of the latter in fact found themselves in the middle of ongoing or recently abandoned "cargo cults."
It is still too early to answer fully Mervyn Meggitt's questions (1973:2) regarding the relative paucity of reports in the literature of "cargo" and millenarian cults in the Papua New Guinea Highlands compared to coastal and seaboard Melanesia: were such movements indeed rare, or had they dissipated too quickly and early for fieldworkers to study or be
aware of them, or were they simply placed low on the list of ethnographers' priorities? Meggitt's recent documentation of "Ain's cult," which swept through Enga populations, as well as their Ipili neighbors (Meggitt 1973; see also Gibbs 1977), and Andrew Strathern's (1971b ) account of a widespread cult in the Hagen area, indicate that the wartime period witnessed "adjustment movements" (R. Berndt 1954:274), involving vast numbers of Highlanders. The immediate postwar years, too, were ones of significant cult activity among the Kuma, Siane, Kamano, and Usurufa (Reay 1959; Salisbury 1958b ; R. Berndt 1952-53), which continued in the Fore area during the period of the Berndts' fieldwork (R. Berndt 1954 and this volume).
These movements of the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the cults and "revivals" of the 1960s—including at least the ones described for the Baiyer Valley (Osborne 1970); Hagen (A. Strathern 1979-80); the Southern Highlands (Robin 1982; Clark 1988); the Asaro Valley (Steinbauer 1979:64-65); and Kamano (Steinbauer 1979:65-66)—still await full analysis, but the long-established "contrasts" between Highlanders and coastal and seaboard Melanesians in this regard are doubtless in need of revision. Of course, such an analysis will have to be sensitive not only to diversity among the cults themselves, but also among their antecedent events or conditions, which include enormous infusions of Western goods as well as traditional shell valuables, both human and porcine disease epidemics, the introduction of Christianity, and the devastation—even if limited—of the Second World War itself.
But if the war brought traumatic upheavals to at least some Highlands populations, it was also a stimulus to the extension of services to them. In the immediate postwar period, missions once again expanded their activities, moving into such areas as the Baiyer Valley in 1949, and by that year functioning native hospitals (products of collaborative efforts by missions and the military administration) were in place at Kainantu, Goroka, Kundiawa, Kup, Mount Hagen, and Wabag (Kettle 1979). Also by that time, the agricultural station at Aiyura had been reestablished and the townsite of Goroka had been purchased by the administration from the Gahuku people. If the Highlands were not yet completely prepared for intensive "development," the way had been paved for systematic anthropological research on a large scale.
Highlands Anthropology After The War(S)The "first generation" of professional ethnographers began arriving in the Highlands in 1950, with Paul Wirz in the Wabag region and K. E. Read in the Goroka Valley. Beliefs that the Highlands were uninhabited or only sparsely populated had long been laid to rest by the patrols and
prospecting activities of the 1930s. But with no organized institutional interest in the area, early efforts at fieldwork, such as those by Fortune and Blackwood, had been sporadic and, in the event, doomed to early curtailment by limited logistic support and continual problems related to chronic fighting among the local populations.
By 1950, the disruptions of World War II had ended and those related to tribal wars had been drastically reduced. While all of the Highlands, in the newly formed Territory of Papua and New Guinea, "came under the Restricted Areas Ordinance 1950, . . . pacification in the main valleys between Kainantu and Mt Hagen was regarded as complete" (Downs 1980:176). Thus, even allowing for administrative overgeneralization, fieldworkers such as Bulmer, Read, Salisbury, and the Watsons would find a radically different situation in the Central Highlands than had Fortune and Blackwood only fifteen years previously. On the other hand, the Berndts and Reay, as their contributions to this volume graphically indicate, began their work in areas "still to be brought under control" (Downs 1980:176). According to Nelson (1971), between July, 1951, and June, 1955, all of the Eastern Highlands (including much of the adjacent Anga territory) and the North Wahgi were de-restricted; the rest of the Wahgi and Hagen regions were so reclassified between July, 1955, and June, 1960, as were the Mendi and Huli areas, allowing Glasse and Ryan to begin their research at the beginning of this period; and the remaining parts of the Southern Highlands were finally de-restricted between 1960 and 1965, along with the Enga region, where Wirz and Meggitt had been able to work only within delimited zones or by accompanying official parties of patrol officers and armed police (Wirz 1952b ; Meggitt 1956, 1957).
Administrative classifications applied to very large areas, and conditions were by no means uniform within them, with regard to fighting or anything else; forces of change had widely varying impact on village populations both between and within districts. For example, from 1950 to 1955, the Highlands Labour Scheme continually shifted its recruiting areas, drawing initially on the male populations of the Eastern Highlands District, then the Mount Hagen area, then the Wabag region, and finally the Southern Highlands. Mission expansion also continued, with virgin territories opened up in ever-widening circles from the main administrative posts; in 1950 and 1951 alone, new mission stations representing diverse creeds and denominations were begun at Menyamya, Kompiam (Enga), Kutubu, Mendi, and Telefomin. Nonmission European settlement was variably intensive and initially confined largely to the Eastern Highlands, where about a dozen Europeans resided at Goroka as early as June, 1951, and as many again were scattered on dispersed coffee plantations in the district to the east between 1952 and 1954. The lure of
gold had mainly given way to other ventures, in coffee or cattle or employment within the administrative and economic infrastructures needed to support all of this activity. In the early 1950s Goroka became a major administrative center, the distribution point for shells (which were still pouring into the Western and Southern Highlands by the ton), and a favorite stop for journalists and filmmakers, who began to "tour" the Highlands with increasing frequency.
According to Downs (1980:176), in the reconstruction period immediately following the Second World War "highland development was put aside because there had been little war damage and no disruption in the lives of the people. There was a temptation to leave the people in a primitive illiterate and unclothed state and to postpone the 'culture clash' that would follow further development." Obviously, events soon overtook such a program of "benign neglect," and change, if not "development," dominated the early 1950s. While it bears repeating that the intensity and speed of change varied considerably within the Highlands, general processes were at work on a region-wide basis: missions, afforestation programs, labor recruiting, cash-crop introductions, and the building of roads—constructed so rapidly that by November, 1953, one could drive from Lae on the eastern coast to Mount Hagen—were transforming the physical, social, and cultural landscapes at the same time that many of them were still being charted.
The mystique of "the land that time forgot" (Leahy and Crain 1937) continues to the present day to attract the attention of the outside world, though by 1950 one had to go far off the beaten path to find Highlanders who had not been affected by the events and forces of change reviewed above. And yet, despite the hundreds of Europeans who had by then flown or walked into those high valleys, the Highlands were still poorly known, even where contact had been the earliest. By 1950 administration officers, prospectors, and travelers had published as many as fifty articles and books about the peoples considered in this volume (Hays 1976: 12-35), and many of these reports, which often were illustrated with photographs, are now invaluable documentary sources. But the vast majority of these accounts were the result of superficial observations by parties passing through the territory or otherwise preoccupied, and lacked the necessary contextual information within which an anthropologist could make sense of the customs reported.
Long-term European residents in the Highlands, namely, missionaries, had produced a richer, but diverse, fund of knowledge, and Garry Trompf (1984) is certainly correct in emphasizing how much they have contributed to Highlands anthropology—not only through the hospitality and logistic assistance provided to fieldworkers (as the authors in this
volume attest), but through their own, often insightful, descriptions and analyses. When Louis J. Luzbetak settled into the Banz and Nondugl areas in 1952, contemporaneously with the "pioneers" who are the focus of this collection, he was following a long tradition of missionary anthropology by members of the Society of the Divine Word, and his subsequent publications (1954, 1956a , 1956b , 1958a , 1958b ) would add importantly to our understanding of the societies and cultures of the Wahgi Valley. By 1950, both he and his professional counterparts were in a position to benefit from the already-published work of his predecessors, most notable of whom were Aufenanger, Nilles, Ross, Schëfer, and Vicedom (see Hays 1976 for references).
Father Heinrich Aufenanger entered the Highlands mission field at Bundi (with the Gende people) in 1934, transferred to Nondugl in 1948, and served for many years among lowland and coastal people as well as making short visits to the Chimbu, Duna, Gahuku, Kalam, and Wabag Enga. By the time of his death in the late 1970s, he had received a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Vienna (1955) and published fifty-two articles and three books on Highlands peoples alone. Apart from extensive vocabularies and grammars of Gende and Nondugl and an influential early monograph (Aufenanger and Höltker 1940), most of Aufenanger's publications, six of which appeared before 1950, were what might be called "customs reports," providing little or no analysis, but ahead of their time in reproducing masses of material recorded and translated verbatim from informants.
Father John Nilles also began his work in the 1930s and started publishing reports of Kuman Chimbu customs almost immediately, with six of his eight pre-1950 articles appearing in anthropological journals. While most of his early publications dealt with material culture and settlement patterns, his account (1940) of a Waugla male initiation ceremony observed in 1937 is a classic source for students of Highlands ritual and male cults, and a synthetic ethnography of the Kuman (1950), based on over a decade's residence, won him a Diploma in Anthropology at the University of Sydney.
Among the largely unsung Highlands missionaries (but see Mennis 1982) was Father William A. Ross, who had tried to "beat the Lutherans" to Mount Hagen. His prewar publications nearly all appeared in mission magazines and dealt only superficially with village life among the Mogei, but his early collection of "notes" published in Anthropos (1936) was an invaluable alternative perspective to juxtapose with the highly influential works of his contemporary, Vicedom (see below). While Ross's work was not part of an academic training program, a visiting military officer pumped him for information during a three-week wartime stay at Mount Hagen and produced a doctoral thesis that was published as the first
monograph in English on a Central Highlands people (Gitlow 1947a , 1947b ).
Father Alfons Schëfer was one of the true pioneer missionaries in the Highlands, establishing the Bundi station in 1933 and subsequently spending two decades with the Chimbu in the lower Wahgi Valley. Throughout the 1930s and the war years he published "customs reports" for his mission's magazine, but also in anthropological journals, including an extensive description (1938) of initiation ceremonies which ranks with Nilles's (1940) paper for historical value.
Perhaps the most influential of the prewar missionary-anthropologists was the Lutheran, Rev. Georg F. Vicedom. Although not trained academically as an ethnographer, his early (1938) detailed account of the Hagen moka ceremonial exchange system was an invaluable early source of information on one of the most complex Highlands societies. His collaboration with Herbert Tischner (1943-48) in a comprehensive ethnography of the Mbowamb totaled over a thousand pages and became, deservedly, a classic in Highlands anthropology.
By 1950, then, casual visitors and missionaries had produced a sizeable body of published information about Highlands peoples, but its scope and depth were very uneven. A prospective fieldworker interested in Bundi, Chimbu, or Mount Hagen—assuming facility in reading German—had available a substantial base on which to build, but none of the "pioneering generation" went to those areas. For other regions, one could get a general sense of the surfaces of traditional life, but little more, and sufficient diversity was apparent to caution against easy extrapolation from one area to another.
Nor, with the exception of F. E. Williams, had the prewar anthropologists gone far beyond "customs reports." Chinnery certainly had not had the opportunity to do more than make brief, though useful, observations. Blackwood's objectives had been fairly narrowly conceived, and given her field circumstances it is not surprising that resulting publications (1939a , 1939b , 1940, 1950) were largely contextless data reports. After the brilliance of Fortune's works on Dobu and the Arapesh, much might have been hoped for from his Kamano research but, again, conditions of fieldwork precluded in-depth, rounded studies; preoccupied in the field with the fighting around Finintegu, so too were his only early papers (1947a , 1947b ) deriving from that research. Frustrated, one can only wonder what the impact might have been of his unpublished papers on patrilineal ideology versus actual group composition and "sexual antagonism," only recently discovered in his estate (see McLean, this volume).
As with Fortune, one might have expected more from Williams's Highlands research, considering the depth and sophistication of his earlier analyses of Papuan societies. Of course, a three-day visit at Mount
Hagen could not yield more than superficial descriptions (1937), but little more than that (apart from linguistic materials) came of his work (1940b ) with the Mendi "grasslanders." Somewhat more of a rounded portrait was produced (1940-41, 1941) on the Foi of Lake Kutubu, with topical coverage comparable to that of standard ethnographic monographs of the period. However, the work has a survey quality, and may have reflected Williams's reputed disenchantment with "functionalism." In 1937 he had expressed the view to J. H. P. Murray (quoted in Griffiths 1977: 163) that culture was "only in part a system. It always remains to some extent a hotch-potch and a sorry tangle." According to Elkin (1943:95), Williams's years of Papuan research "had convinced him that the cultures which he knew were far from being fully organized systems, and that they were evolved to some extent by a process of accretion."
Later fieldworkers in both Mendi and Kutubu (e.g., Lederman 1986; Weiner 1988) would argue for more coherence than Williams seems to have found there, just as the intensive fieldwork done by the Berndts and others among Kamano and Fischer's (1965) with the Yagwoia would flesh out in detail the early sketches of Fortune and Blackwood (as would also be the case with groups described by the missionary-anthropologists). In any case, in 1950 it appeared that a good deal remained to be done in the Highlands, and research programs soon arose to address the perceived needs.
Prior to World War II, the Anthropology Department at the University of Sydney had been "the almost exclusive center in Australia for anthropological studies focussed on" the New Guinea region; this did not, however, ensure that it would become "automatically the staging center for students interested in New Guinea," as Keesing (1952:109) asserted. Since the late 1920s, government personnel had been trained in Sydney, but in 1930, then-Head A. R. Radcliffe-Brown clashed with J. H. P. Murray, as had Fortune, and the training stopped. After Radcliffe-Brown's resignation in 1931, an interim period ended with the appointment of A. P. Elkin as head in 1934. He smoothed out the difficulties with Murray, and in 1935 the training of Papuan officers and New Guinea cadets resumed (Wise 1985). According to Tigger Wise (1985:155) Elkin wanted to expand his influence over affairs in Papua and the Mandated Territory, and in 1943 he gave the region top priority in his "ambitious postwar reconstruction program."
But not all would go smoothly; with the end of the war, as with many other matters in Australia, attention shifted to Canberra where, in 1945, the new Military School for Civil Affairs in Duntroon took over the training of officers for New Guinea, and in the following year it became the Australian School of Pacific Administration (ASOPA). Sydney an-
thropologists would give courses there, but Elkin was correct in perceiving formidable competition, both at ASOPA and the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University (ANU), set to open in Canberra in 1951. In Wise's (1985) view, these developments led Elkin to refocus his attention on Australian Aborigines, but he clearly was not done with New Guinea.
As if in preparation for a major research assault on the region, in 1948 Elkin had supported a field survey of the Highlands by his department's linguist, A. Capell. The resulting report (Capell 1948-49) included lexical and grammatical sketches and provided tentative groupings of languages from Gadsup in the east to the central Enga and the Southern Highlands. Then Elkin himself, in 1950, made a five-week tour of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea for the South Pacific Commission. In the published results (Elkin 1953a ), he not only reviewed what was then known anthropologically of the whole region of Melanesia, but articulated a detailed plan for future work, with special attention given to the Papua New Guinea Highlands.
Elkin's main source of disquiet over the state of social anthropology in Melanesia as of 1950 was expressed in his conclusion (1953a :xii) that
our knowledge . . . in most of the total region lacks depth. . . . We can describe social structure, economic activities, magical forms and some myths. . . . But we have not learnt the system of values and of attitudes, nor the philosophy and religion of the peoples studied. Investigators do not seem to have been admitted into, or to have grasped, the meaning of life as held by Papuans and Melanesians.
This kind of "depth," of course, could not be achieved during the brief visits of explorers, travelers, or administrators. Missionaries, however, were singled out as a category of outsiders who, through long-term residence and facility in local languages, had the opportunity for such achievements, and Elkin (1953a :7)praised the work of Nilles and Schëfer as outstanding models of what could be accomplished. By and large, the anthropologists who had worked in New Guinea had not, in Elkin's view, spent enough time in the field (usually six to twelve months) and had not conducted "that longer and deeper research which leads to understanding. It means the devotion of five or six years to a project" (1953a :xiii).
Of course, he did not inroad that a fieldworker would be in in the field for so long at one time; rather, he proposed (1953a : 141-147) a schedule for "new districts," such that the researcher would spend two years in a first session of work, then a third year (including a survey of the total "culture area") after a one-year break, and later return for a review, covering a total span of five to six years. Aware that the number of fieldworkers would always ne limited, Elkin felt (1953a :137) that such
resource-intensive baseline studies had to be balanced with attention to "urgent problems of great consequence, concerned with the development of peoples and with social and cultural changes, for the direction and effects of which we must bear the responsibility" (1953a : 137).
Rejecting as an unaffordable luxury the "individualistic selection of fields" that had been the rule in the past (1953a :137), for both kinds of projects Elkin targeted specific areas where work should be done, and one of these was the Kainantu region:
Obviously there is great and pressing opportunity for research in this area, amongst almost unknown peoples. . . . There is a note of urgency to be struck here, for changes in the native economy may well be fairly rapid in the nearer parts.
. . .Here then, is an opportunity and need to study a people settling down under a contact situation (1953a :76).
While Elkin (1953a :77) thought that either the Gadsup or Tairora "would seem to be the best to work in the first instance," another decade would pass before ethnographic research among the Gadsup (by Brian DuToit) would take place and James B. Watson would become, with Virginia D. Watson, the first ethnographer of the Tairora (see his contribution to this volume). Elkin would, however, play a large part in the Berndts' decision to work in the Kainantu region.
By 1951, Catherine and Ronald Berndt had already spent a decade in fieldwork among Australian Aborigines and, according to their accounts in this volume, they believed that field experience in a second area was desirable for an anthropologist; moreover, Catherine Berndt saw an opportunity to contribute to the filling of a near void, as the lives of women—one of her continuing interests—had received little attention previously in New Guinea ethnography. Advice from Chinnery and K. E. Read (see below) complemented the encouragement they received from Elkin and the linguist A. Capell, and they chose the diverse ethnolinguistic groups to the southwest of Kainantu as their "second area." Their doctoral theses (C. Berndt 1955; R. Berndt 1955a )—submitted to the University of London, with Sydney as yet unable to offer the Ph.D. in anthropology—and numerous Highlands publications would address both of Elkin's main concerns: intensive, in-depth studies of "new districts" and the study of social change and reactions to the contact situation (see, e.g., C. Berndt 1953; R. Berndt 1952-53, 1954).
Until it could establish its own Ph.D. program in anthropology, the University of Sydney was severely limited in the degree of support available for potential Highlands ethnographers, and especially so compared with the resources being assembled in Canberra (see below). But Elkin was resourceful and pursued his plan for the Highlands not only by recruiting
anthropologists who formally took their degrees elsewhere, hut also by turning to ethnographically oriented missionaries. Not only were such men perhaps temperamentally congenial to Elkin the Anglican pastor (Wise 1985), but he viewed them as unusually well-situated for anthropological research, given their long-term residence in an area and facility in the local language; moreover, they were perforce involved deeply in social change and its attendant problems, always one of his major interests. The only complaint he voiced (1953a :7) about the work they had published on the Highlands was that they seemed to view anthropology as little more than the recording of customs. This he could do something about, through training and guidance, as in the case of Father John Nilles in the Chimbu region. Prior to the war, Nilles had published a number of "customs reports" (see Hays 1976:96), but under Elkin's tutelage he produced a general ethnographic description of the Kuman, which won him a Diploma in Anthropology at Sydney and was published (Nilles 1950) in Elkin's journal, Oceania . With no other ethnographer on hand to send to the Chimbu, Elkin (1953a :80) asked Nilles to continue his studies, especially regarding the effects of contact, and Nilles soon produced just such a report (1953).
Elkin was not concerned only with social change, however, and it was in the "new districts" that he wanted to implement his plan of long-term baseline studies. One of the areas he targeted was in the Southern Highlands, among the Mendi people of the Nembi and Wage valleys. "Discovered" by the Papuan prewar patrols and described to some extent by F.E. Williams (see above), these large populations seemed to Elkin (1953a :83) to
have been enjoying, right up to this moment [1950], a self-contained and self-directed life, with only such outside contacts as brought them what they desired. Such a phenomenon is fascinating, and should be studied for the purpose of throwing light on man and his communal relationships.
As D'Arcy Ryan tells us in his contribution to this volume, Elkin did send an ethnographer to Mendi at about the same time as the Berndts were in the field, but the project was aborted. Ryan, previously an undergraduate at Sydney, had gone on to Oxford and received a bachelor of letters in anthropology, returning to Sydney in 1952. By 1954, Elkin had research grants available and at last the possibility of Ph.D. students of his own; perhaps by then feeling rite pressure of competition from the new program at the Australian National University, he sent Ryan off to the Mendi in May of that yearn Ryan had done no fieldwork previously and began with "no clear programme," according to his own report (chap. 7), but he soon produced important pioneering papers (e.g., 1955, 1959)
on Mendi social organization and a doctoral thesis (1962) that was one of the first systematic analyses of Highlands ceremonial exchange systems.
In July, 1950, on his study trip for the South Pacific Commission, Elkin had observed in operation at Wabag in the far western highlands another exchange system, of which he subsequently published (1953b ) an account. Intrigued by what he saw there, he (1953a :84) ranked Wabag "as a first priority for research amongst what is, almost everywhere in the sub-district, an untouched culture and people. . . . This is an ideal area for the five year intensive type of project."
As with the Berndts, Elkin found in Mervyn J. Meggitt a seasoned fieldworker keen to do ethnographic research in a new area. Meggitt had previously completed two extended periods of work with the Walbiri of Central Australia, where he realized the "advantages accruing from a second visit to the same people" (Meggitt 1979:108); thus he was prepared to spend more than one period of field research on his next project, and this was exactly what Elkin seemed to have in mind for the Wabag study. (In the event, Meggitt's revisits to the Mae Enga and their neighbors would continue over more than thirty years, beginning in 1955.) As a Research Fellow in the department at Sydney, Meggitt was tapped by Elkin to be the social anthropologist/advisor to the Nuffield Expedition—a physical anthropological survey of the Western and Southern Highlands, organized by Elkin, and an extraordinary opportunity for an ethnographer to gain a regional perspective at first hand. Meggitt was Elkin's second Ph.D. student to work in the Highlands, but the first to complete a thesis at Sydney (1959). That thesis, on the Mae Enga lineage system, was published in 1965, by which time it was possible to incorporate the results of the work of the rest of the "pioneers" on a comparative basis, building on a foundation hardly conceivable at the end of the war and creditable, in large part, to the determination and efforts of A. P. Elkin.
But he was not the only person with a plan for Highlands anthropology in the 1950s; the other major force during the period was S. F. Nadel, who was building a program in Canberra that would compete directly with Elkin at Sydney in more respects than the training of administrative officers.
According to a departmental history (Australian National University 1977), the formation of the Research School of Pacific Studies and the Department of Anthropology at the new ANU began in 1948, under the advisement of Raymond Firth. In that year, Peter Lawrence was awarded the first Research Scholarship in Anthropology, but in the absence of a working department, Lawrence went to Cambridge for his formal degree. In 1949, W. E. H. Stanner was appointed reader in comparative
social institutions, and in the following year Cyril Belshaw and Kenneth E. Read were awarded the first research fellowships. By 1951 the program needed only a director, and S. F. Nadel arrived in Canberra in February of 1951 to become the Foundation Professor of Anthropology, with K. O. L. Burridge and Peter Worsley as the first resident research scholars (Ph.D. students).
Nadel began planning a research program immediately, and within a few weeks of his arrival had recommended research projects on "the societies of the New Guinea Highlands, social change (especially the problem of cargo cults) in Melanesia, village communities in Indonesia and India, and the process of assimilation among recent European immigrants to Australia" (Freeman 1956:7). Nadel's report ( 1951:1) is clear about his priorities:
The first research project is concerned with the analysis of the social organisation and, generally speaking, the types of society occurring in the Highlands of New Guinea. . . . From the point of view of modern social anthropology this part of New Guinea is virgin ground; furthermore, it offers the attractive possibility of a geographically sharply defined and almost closed area, within which we can hope to obtain, in the course of time, an exhaustive "social typology".
Nadel's plans included the establishment of a field station in the Highlands to serve as a center for research and training, and collaboration with other institutions—not, it may be noted, with the University of Sydney, but the University of California at Los Angeles, whose anthropologists "are interested in research in the same area and are very keen on joining in my scheme (with funds of their own), thus increasing the number of field workers available for this study" (Nadel 1951:1).
While neither the Highlands field station nor the collaboration with UCLA would eventuate before Naders death in 1956, such intentions are characteristic of the organized manner in which he began his project. Like Elkin, he "declined to allow an inevitably small number of research workers to spend themselves on piecemeal studies throughout Melanesia: research was to have a strategic aim, not become a scatter of raids and forays" (Stanner 1962:v). He would, in the few years left to him, send five of the "pioneer" ethnographers to the Gahuku, Siane, Kuma, Kyaka Enga, and Huli, but these studies were tobe "no more than a beginning, for he had hoped that such field work organized by his own and other Departments of Anthropology would go on until there was a collection of materials sufficient for a comparative study of all the main societies of the New Guinea Highlands" (Freeman 1956:8).
It is not clear from available sources why the Sydney department was not more explicitly or formally drawn into collaboration with the ANU
Highlands program. Relations between Elkin and Nadel may have been strained by competition for students and resources, but apparently this did not preclude collegial efforts such as a series of seminars at Sydney given by Nadel at Elkin's invitation (M. Meggitt, pers. com., 1989). In any case, in effect if not by design, Nadel and Elkin "carved up New Guinea research between them" (Wise 1985:209), and the first of the 1950s Highlands ethnographers was sent to the field by the ANU program, if not by Nadel himself.
In his survey of Highlands areas warranting particular attention, Elkin (1953a :77) noted that Pastor E. P. Helbig had been stationed at Asaloka (Asaroka) in the Goroka Valley since 1932, among the "Gafuguk" and "Gama, and he saw there an "opportunity for studying peoples, stillliving almost, and in many cases completely, in their traditional manner; but beginning to change." Kenneth E. Read was precisely the sort of person Elkin would have likely sent there had he been able to do so. Read had already conducted wartime research in the Markham Valley, which had led to several early publications (1946a , 1947, 1950), a master's thesis (1946b ) at the University of Sydney, and, since a Ph.D was not yet offered there, his final degree at the University of London (1948). Following his Ph.D., Read was appointed lecturer in anthropology at ASOPA in Canberra, and in 1950 he found further support there in the new ANU department as a research fellow; soon he was off to the field for a two-year stay, as Elkin would have preferred.
As Elkin had noted, by 1950 the Goroka Valley was "beginning to change," and with a field site near the township, Read found the Gahuku poised precariously between the past and the future. In his recent memoirs (1986:129), Read recalls that
intimations of change . . . in 1950 . . . were really no more than a surface vibration, an intermittent but premonitory flurry of wind across the deep waters of a lake. . . . Underneath the surface disturbance, everything continued to be as it had always been, that is for as long as any memory or experience could muster.
Such recollections, while consistent with Elkin's assessment that changes there were just beginning, may also have been colored to some extent by the mystique of the Highlands; elsewhere (1986:124-125) Read acknowledges that "the final initiation of males into the nama cult, was . . . on the brink of extinction in 1950," "the domestic separation of men and women was also breaking down," and there were, by then, "indications of a different economic future for men who sought it." This complex, dynamic situation allowed Read to speak to diverse interests and demonstrate with fresh data that the Highlands was, indeed, a new area with rich potential for any research program. For the ASOPA journal, South
Pacific , he sent papers from the field on development prospects for the Gahuku (1951b ), missions and social change (1952a ), and—in an area that was increasingly attracting European farmers and planters—issues related to land (1952b ), all of which doubtless pleased Elkin, who felt strongly that anthropologists had moral obligations to guide administrators and other change agents toward humane approaches based on understanding of and respect for local beliefs and traditions. At the same time, both Elkin and Nadel would surely have been satisfied with Read's rich analyses of Gahuku religion and moral systems (1952c , 1955), marriage (1954b ), and political leadership (1959), and his early delineation of regional patterns in the Central Highlands (1954a ) was an auspicious beginning for the comparative studies to which Nadel was dedicated.
Perhaps to get another perspective on such institutions in a context of rapid change, Nadel sent his first Ph.D. student, Richard F. Salisbury, to the Siane neighbors of the Gahuku, specifically to study "social structure and religion" (Stanner 1962:v). In Canberra, Salisbury had the benefit of learning about field conditions directly from Read, and he was also "stimulated to collect economic statistics by Dr Cyril Belshaw," also a research fellow in the department at that time (Salisbury 1962:xiii). As matters would develop, this latter influence would turn out to be a crucial one.
Siane territory had been traversed in 1938 by Michael Leahy in his prospecting exploration, and by the time Salisbury arrived in November, 1952, stone tools and the precontact economy were living memories, but little more. Nevertheless, Salisbury recorded those memories and dutifully collected statistical information on economic change and its social ramifications. After a year in the field, he returned to Canberra and prepared a general monograph on the Siane, but left without submitting it as a thesis. Subsequently, at Harvard and then at Berkeley, contacts with Parsonian sociologists convinced him of the special value of his economic data (Salisbury 1962:xiii). With this new stimulus, a dissertation topic emerged and Salisbury wrote what would be a landmark study of economics and technological change, first as a doctoral thesis (1958a ) and then as a book (1962). While Nadel did not live to see the work completed, W. E. H. Stanner (Salisbury's new supervisor) welcomed the shift in focus and later (1962:v) speculated that Nadel "would have thought the metamorphosis a good example of how to take up the challenge of unfolding facts."
It must be emphasized that Nadel's program for the Highlands was not rigidly conceived; as an experienced fieldworker himself (in Africa), Nadel knew that exigencies of the field situation would play a major role in final selections of sites and topical foci. However, he seems to have been determined not to let serendipity alone rule the field enterprise. Ac-
cording to Stanner (1962:v), Nadel's "ruling passion was a rigorous conception of research," and he "impressed on all his students that facts have to be collected for theroretical significance, not empirical interest, and that it is a moral as well as an intellectual duty to give inquiry as sharp a Problemstellung as knowledge and theory allow."
It was this insistence on "theory" as a guiding force behind fieldwork that resulted in the clash reported by Nadel's next Ph.D. student, Marie Reay, in her contribution to this volume. Reay had had considerable previous field experience, with Australian Aborigines and among the Orokaiva of Papua, and had been trained at Sydney under Elkin and Ian Hogbin. With a major interest in social change and the dynamic nature of social relations, an assignment to study "social structure" in British social anthropology terms may have seemed to her an inadequate way to capture the dynamics of Minj society in 1953 through 1955. In the event, she returned to Canberra with rich data on power and authority as they actually existed "on the ground," but which fit awkwardly, according to her account (chap. 5), Naders and Stanner's "preconceived notion of New Guinea society derived from Malinowski's account of the Trobriands." Reay would not be the last of the pioneer ethnographers to have difficulty with the "African models" that would be repudiated openly a few years later (see Andrew Strathern's discussion in this volume), but her thesis (1957), later published (1959) as the first English-language general monograph on a Highlands society, reflected the tension increasingly being felt between social anthropological models and the "facts" as they were unfolding in the Highlands.
Nadel's final two Highlands students would not return from the field until he had died, but the orientation of the ANU program had not changed by 1955, when both Ralph N. H. Bulmer and Robert M. Glasse became research scholars there. Indeed, in 1952, the department had been redesignated the Department of Anthropology and Sociology to reflect more accurately the predilections of Nadel and the other staff, all of whom had taken their Ph.D.s at the London School of Economics. In a concerted effort to map the social structure of the large and dense populations of the Western Highlands, Bulmer was sent to the Kyaka Enga of the Baiyer Valley in January, and Glasse followed soon after, with Nadel preferring that he work among the Sau Enga but leaving his final choice (Taft, as matters turned out) to him.
Bulmer's first field report (1955) suggests that he adhered to Naders choice of focus—social structure and political leadership—as did his thesis and first major Kyaka publication (Bulmer 1960a , 1960b ), both of which were written under the supervision of John Barnes who, in 1958, declared the continuing interests of the department to center on twelve specified topics, all of which dealt with social organization, politics, eco-
nomics, and exchange (Australian National University 1977:4). It may be that the Kyaka Enga, like the Mae Enga as Meggitt (1959) would portray them at about the same time, provided a congenial case for the application of "African models." And yet Glasse, in his contribution to this volume, indicates that Bulmer was "struggling with nonagnates" when he visited him in the field in March, 1955; for Glasse, such a struggle would become his overriding concern among the Huli.
Unlike Bulmer, who had conducted fieldwork among the Sami Lapps in 1950-51 prior to receiving his undergraduate degree in anthropology at Cambridge in 1953, Robert M. Glasse entered Nadel's program with little formal training in the discipline and no previous fieldwork experience. Arriving in Tari in April, 1955, he found it a restricted area and was physically confined to the station environs, but this was not his only constraint. As he tells us (chap. 8), Glasse continually had difficulties with the segmentary unilineal models provided him in Canberra, concluding by late 1955 that "Huli reality" could be captured only in a "cognatic" model. Returning to Canberra in mid 1956, he came under the supervision of J. D. Freeman in an atmosphere that he judged was increasingly conducive to departures from "African models," especially in Sydney, where he exchanged ideas and frustrations with lan Hogbin, M.J. Meggitt, and D'Arcy Ryan. After a subsequent field trip in 1959-60, Glasse felt he had the quantitative data necessary to portray Huli society with all its "anomalies," which he did in a thesis (1962), written in Sydney but supervised from Canberra by Barnes, who would later that same year give public voice (Barnes 1962) to the concerns that had been plaguing many.
From 1950 to 1955, Elkin at Sydney and Nadel at Canberra had sent nine ethnographers to the Highlands, all of whom conducted intensive fieldwork where none had been done before. But they were not the only anthropologists turning their attention to this "virgin" (if not quite pristine) territory. Vying with K. E. Read for temporal priority was Paul Wirz, who spent most of 1950 in the Kundiawa and Mount Hagen regions. Wirz had already distinguished himself with extensive fieldwork and publications on the Marind-anim, Lake Sentani, and Swart Valley Highlands peoples of Dutch New Guinea, and the Gogodala of Papua. As an indefatigable fieldworker, his purpose in going to the Highlands appears to have been the collection and documentation of artifacts for museums in Europe, and most of his resulting publications (1952a , 1952c , 1952d ) were of a "salvage" nature, describing the material culture that was rapidly disappearing, particularly in the Chimbu area. Taking more time—and faced with much less obvious change—he was able to pursue general ethnographic research: in the Wabag area, but even there his interest
seems to have been greatest in material culture (1952b )and the ceremonies he was able to observe but did not explore in any depth (1952e ).
This was not the case with the other non-Australian-sponsored pioneers, James B. and Virginia D. Watson, who spent eighteen months in 1953 through 1955 with the Agarabi and Tairora of the Kainantu region. V. D. Watson was a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, and her eventual thesis (1965) would comprise the first in-depth study of Highlands women and female roles in the midst of social and cultural change. It was this context of rapid but uneven change that attracted J. B. Watson to the Kainantu area. Having done his doctoral fieldwork, on culture change in Brazil, he was intrigued by the contrasting potential of acculturation studies in the New Guinea Highlands, where one could see the change processes at work "at the beginning." For him, the Agarabi and Tairora promised almost a laboratory situation, allowing comparative studies of villages matched for intensity of contact but differing in culture, and vice versa. However, the very units of comparison soon became problematic. In the "crowded fields" around Kainantu, complex relationships between and among villages—both historical and ongoing—made systems , rather than "societies" or "cultures" the inevitable objects of analysis. Watson's essay here exemplifies well the profound impact Highlands "cases" continue to have as we advance beyond earlier naive hopes for neat social typologies and straightforward "before and after" studies of change.
The Watsons' work may be regarded as a second "opening" of the Highlands so far as fieldwork there is concerned. Neither Elkin nor Nadel, whatever may have been their own competitive situations, acted in any way to limit the Highlands to Australian-based researchers. But it was not until after the "pioneering" generation that the floodgates opened, and soon—especially in the early 1960s—new waves of ethnographers and new programs engulfed the area with fieldworkers. The University of Sydney and the Australian National University would continue to send students and staff to the Highlands, but the 1960s saw increasing numbers of British and American researchers and such team efforts as J. B. Watson's Micro-Evolution Project from the University of Washington, and Andrew P. Vayda's Human Ecology of the New Guinea Rain Forest group from Columbia University.
All of these investigators would have advantages unavailable to their predecessors: they could build upon not only a much broader and deeper information base but also on sophisticated analyses of a wide range of Highlands societies and cultures, exhibiting both the depth sought by Elkin and the comparative potential that so interested Nadel. Moreover, models had been tested and proven in need of revision, a state of affairs
that made for a dynamic period of new agendas and problems, as Andrew Strathern discusses in his concluding piece to this collection.
Yet some aspects of fieldwork seem forever to remain the same, and I have been personally struck, in the papers collected here, by the many resonances with my own field experience as the 1970s began a third decade of Highlands anthropology. In my own part of the Eastern Highlands—the extreme southeastern corner—missions were, in 1971, a recently established force for change, as were the infrequent census patrols, and with the nearest trade store a day's walk away, my wife and I were almost the only sources of Western goods, for which a keen appetite had arisen. Fieldwork then, as always, was an exciting and bewildering experience and always full of surprises no matter how well prepared one might be. Still, while all of the chapters in this volume describe situations and societies that are in many respects comparable, amid the commonalities the uniqueness of peoples and fieldworkers emerges with the clarity of a mountain stream.
Continues...
Excerpted from Ethnographic Presents: Pioneering Anthropologists in the Papua New Guinea Highlandsby Terence Hays, editor Copyright © 1992 by Terence Hays, editor. Excerpted by permission.
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Hardback. Condition: New. Until the middle of this century, the Western world knew little about the peoples of the Central Highlands of what is now Papua New Guinea, and vice versa. Only in 1930 was the curtain abruptly lifted on those valleys and mountain ridges, with their tens of thousands of inhabitants whose mineral resources, service as laborers, fealty as colonial subjects, and souls became objects of intense interest on the part of gold prospectors, Australian administrative officers, and missionaries. For the most part, these early interlopers were mere sojourners, and all were too preoccupied with their immediate objectives to learn or report much about the lives of people whose very existence had only recently been suspected. Within the general framework of how and why they conducted their early Highlands fieldwork, but with the freedom to develop their essays as they chose, potential contributors were asked to reflect on a range of interrelated topics: Before the Highlands: training and theoretical orientation prior to the experience; previous fieldwork; why the Highlands and a particular region were chosen; expectations and preparation.Arrival: first impressions of the region and the people; the colonial encounter; selecting and establishing a field base; hosts' reactions and expectations; hosts' understandings of the fieldworker's objectives. Fieldwork: logistics of living in the field; relationships with administrators and/or missionaries; the role of the anthropologists in the community; what the community gained from the ethnographer's presence; methods employed. Analysis: how the anthropological climate of the times shaped or influenced analyses; how the Highlands experience may have changed the author's theoretical orientation. After the Highlands: how return visits or later work has been influenced by the first encounter; how the early work relates to issues subsequently prominent in Highlands ethnography or anthropology in general. Seller Inventory # LU-9780520077454
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