Names as Markers and Makers of Contested Identity: on Social Groups in the New Guinea Islands

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between naming practices and social groups in the context of a land dispute at Matupit village, Papua New Guinea. Roy Wagner's famous paper on the nature of social groups in the New Guinea Highlands is taken as a starting point for analysis. In Wagner's didactic exposition a stark contrast is drawn between Daribi people for whom names elicit distinctions and outsiders who imagine names describe fixed social groups. At Matupit however, the contrast is more clearly between different groups of villagers who have an interest in different kinds of presentation of the relationship between names and social group formation. Some have a greater interest than others in asserting a more descriptive relationship of names to groups and it is argued that this is, at least in part, related to wider political economic tendencies, in particular a tendency to view land as an economic resource, mirrored in other contexts throughout Papua New Guinea.