Big Men, Large and Small? Towards a Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The incidence and cultural elaboration of the so-called man complex varies within Highland Papua New Guinea. A comparison of styles of big manship within the Highlands may appear trivial in the context of longstanding--now pervasively contested--Pacific-wide and typological distinctions observers have made between men and chiefs (Sahlins 1963; Valentine 1963; Douglas 1979), or even in view of recently drawn, local contrasts (e.g., between Melanesian men and Great Men; cf. Godelier 1986; also Feil 1987).l Nonetheless, an understanding of variations among man societies may help us better to account for the course of contemporary socioeconomic change. Moreover, it may enable us to integrate anthropological investigations of leadership with a rather wider field of questions about forms of sociality and indigenous cultural constructions of agency and inequality. In the anthropologically better known societies of the northwestern Highlands?particularly Mae-Enga (Meggitt 1965, 1967, 1977) and Melpa (A. Strathern 1971, 1972; M. Strathern 1972)?political and economic differences between prominent men and ordinary people are clear, even striking. Big men stand out with respect to the roles they adopt in group policy-making and in organizing collective events of various sorts; with respect to their access to wealth (whether in the form of locally produced pigs or of valuables like pearlshells or money typically obtained in exchange); and perhaps especially with respect to their direct control over labor (e.g., through polygamous marriages with women who are not themselves active in their own names in exchange, and through coteries of fellow clansmen who act as their supporters during clan prestations, or even, in the Melpa case, as their household retainers). While elsewhere in the Highlands (eastward and southward) large-scale prestations typically take the form of periodic distributions of pork, these northwestern Highlands communities are distinctive for co-ordinating their large-scale prestations into sequences: limited ones in the case of the Melpa moka ceremonial exchange system (Strathern 1971), and widely ramified chains in the Enga tee (Meggitt 1974; Feil 1984). In these sequences, live pigs are passed along from one set of participating communities to the next, in anticipation of a return gift months or years later. While there are important differences between the moka and tee systems, moka and tee do articulate with one another and, in both systems, men are central co-ordinators and participants. In the anthropologically less well-known Highlands societies to the south? like Wiru, Kewa, Imbonggu, Mendi, Wola, Huli and Duna (most of which have been described extensively in published works only in the last ten years)2--