THE GAGAI IN TANGU

Abstract

THIS essay examines briefly some of the ways in which Tangu,1 a New Guinea people, differentiate and group themselves according to kin criteria, and is especially concerned to present the gagai, an institution which has ceased to have any real significance for Tangu themselves but which has its interests for social anthropologists . Tangu are a hunting, gathering, and gardening people settled in a knot of steep ridges some fifteen miles inland from Bogia Bay on the north coast of New Guinea in the Madang district. Today2 the total population of approximately two thousand souls is distributed through about thirty settlements grouped in four neighbourhoods, Wanitzir, Biampitzir, Mangigumitzir, and Riekitzir,3 each of which contains one or more major, and several smaller settlements. Tangu have cultural features in common with their neighbours and though from settlement to settlement and neighbourhood to neighbourhood within Tangu one may light upon a variety of cultural differences, very few in any one neighbourhood cannot find kinsfolk in each of the remaining three, and, in a context including their neighbours, Tangu form a distinct unity.4 Formerly, the peoples of the four neighbourhoods were concentrated in fewer and larger aggregations.6 Shortly before the turn of the century Riekitzir consisted of many severally named and proximate groups of homesteads known collectively as Randam together with the (geographically) separate and smaller settlements of Zorkei, Igam, and Bwongeram (see map). The three last named seem to have been offshoots from the main settlement cluster of Randam which was itself, according to legend, founded by colonizers who came south across the valley from Biampitzir. The latter, perhaps always the social centre of Tangu certainly has the most interior connexions today. Its homesteads were poised around the flanks and on the summit of the highest feature in the region,6 and, as in Randam, they were grouped together