Continuity and change in Mekeo society, 1890-1971

Abstract

This study describes the response of the Mekeo, a Papuan people numbering approximately six and a half thousand, to eighty years of European control. It combines three different types of evidence - documentary material (mainly government records), ethnographic data collected during the author's field work and oral history collected in the same manner. Chapter One briefly describes contemporary Mekeo society and then works back, identifying points of comparison and contrast with the society at the time of first contact in 1890. It demonstrates the strong continuity between past and present observable in local grouping, leadership, family life and kin relationships, and social values. Chapters Two to Eight trace the history of contact from 1890 to the present. The Mekeo's first reception of mission and government, and their attempts to reconcile the new regime with the traditional structure of authority, are described in Chapter Two. The effect of the pre-war administration's policies of enforced labour and compulsory cash cropping are discussed in Chapter Three. Chapter Four outlines the background of social stability in the pre-war period. The effects of the Second World War - the breaking down of the former isolation of the village community and the arousing of new desires for economic and social advancement - are discussed in Chapter Five. Chapter Six argues that the failure of the administration's post-war developmental schemes resulted from its inability to provide the necessary economic infrastructure of transport and marketing facilities. Though discouraged by these failures, villagers were not deterred from experimenting with their own business ventures in the late 1950s. The struggles of the Mekeo Local Government council, and the opposition encountered by aspiring political and business leaders from their own communities, are outlined in Chapter Seven. Chapter Eight analyses the present obstacles to development in terms of the traditional social ethic and the ambivalence underlying social relationships, the direction of change since the war which has weakened the society's capacity to deal with the new developments, and the history of relations with the white regime. It is suggested that the present social values, which are only just beginning to be questioned, will continue to influence the immediate future and that villagers may have to chose between their desire for advancement and the social values which, up to the present, have given dignity and purpose to life.