"Ol I Skulim Mipela": Contemporary Warfare in the Papua New Guinea Eastern Highlands

Abstract

Anthropological research has made significant contributions to our general understanding of how warfare has affected human societies. Careful ethnographic accounts of intergroup violence from a number of culture areas have been used to develop ecological and social-structural theories of war (e.g., Vayda 1976; Koch 1974). Most anthropological research, however, has focused on the effects of warfare in tribal societies, with far less attention devoted to the internal wars prevalent within many nation-states during the post-World War II era. The growing emphasis in political anthropology toward understanding political action within regional as well as local contexts should lead to increased anthropological concern for these contemporary conflicts. This paper argues that anthropologists can continue to contribute to the growth of knowledge on warfare through the observation and comparison of intergroup conflicts at a variety of societal levels. The Papua New Guinea Highlands have been one of the important areas for the development of anthropological thinking on war (e.g., Vayda 1971; Koch 1974; Meggitt 1977; Sillitoe 1977). Because in the Highlands anthropologists often conducted research with peoples who had recently experienced traditional intergroup conflict, the ethnography of the region has added immensely to our information on tribal warfare. Pacification of the Highlands by the Australian government, however, led to cessation of fighting between the 1930s and 1950s. The subject of this paper is the resurgence in intergroup violence that has occurred there since the 1970s, and, in particular, the variation in the prevalence of this fighthing within the Highlands region. My focus is on the pattern of involvement of Eastern Highlands peoples in the current Highlands fighting. Although all districts in the Eastern Highlands Province have now reported outbreaks of intergroup violence, this fighting only became serious in the late 1970s, and is still relatively inconsequential when compared with the fighting of the more western Highland provinces. I suggest here that the minor and late involvement of Eastern Highlanders in intergroup fighting resulted from a combination of diffusion and divisiveness: the western Highland example encouraged a resort to violence, while intergroup divisions discouraged its extensive use. Although reports in the national press and government records indicate that beginning in 1979 Eastern Highland intergroup hostilities became both more frequent and more widespread, little detailed information on intergroup fighting for the various districts of the Eastern Highlands has yet been published.' I therefore rely primarily on my own research in the Kainantu District of that province between 1977-79, and especially upon evidence from the Agarabi people with whom I lived.2 A comparison with the more western Highland provinces is possible because studies of contemporary warfare have been published for Enga Province (Meggitt 1977; Gordon 1983), Simbu Province (Brown 1982 a, b; Podolefsky 1984), and Western Highlands Province (Strathern 1977).3 In the first section I provide a brief overview of the research on contemporary Highlands warfare. In the next section, I describe the changing pattern of Agarabi intergroup conflicts from the pre-colonial period to the 1970s. The following section explores three instances of Agarabi intergroup disputes that highlight the pressures that have encouraged intergroup violence, but that also highlight the constraints that have limited its extent. Finally, I conclude by comparing the fighting found in the Eastern Highlands with that experienced elsewhere in the Highland