Following Buai : the highlands betel nut trade, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

This thesis is the first detailed geographic and ethnographic study of Papua New Guinea's thriving betel nut trade. It tells the story of the trade of betel nut into the highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG), and examines the daily lives and interactions of the diverse collection of participants involved in the trade - the 'betel people' - and how they have contributed to the making of a flourishing, contemporary and indigenous market. Betel nut is a stimulant that has long been produced, exchanged and consumed throughout lowland PNG, but was absent from the pre-colonial highlands. Since the 1960s increasing numbers of highlanders have started chewing betel nut which has given rise to a long-distance wholesale trade that connects rural lowland producers to the highland consumers. Betel nut is now the country's most important domestic cash crop, and its sale and resale is a prominent, and potentially lucrative, livelihood activity for rural and urban people in both the lowlands and the highlands. This thesis is based on thirteen months nomadic ethnographic fieldwork in which betel nut, and the actors that shape its trajectory, was followed from the lowland production areas into the highland marketplaces and beyond. I document the considerable scale and complexity of the trade, the efflorescence of intermediaries within it, and the high level of specialisation amongst its actors. 'Following' betel nut and betel people also foregrounds the importance of social relationships, and the associated processes of inclusion and exclusion, to shaping the structure and the dynamics of the trade. The highly competitive and opportunistic nature of the trade leads betel people to transact in the same places and often with the same people, and it encourages them to cultivate and nurture those relationships which provide security and enable access in new places. Betel people trade to make money, but I suggest that trade relationships regularly overflow the marketplace. Further, the transactions within the trade are routinely conceptualised as more than simple commodity transfers. I also seek to frame the trade in relation to the power asymmetries between different actors, and emphasise the diverse manifestations of cooperation and competition in trade negot1at1ons. Drawing on the growing literature within geography and anthropology concerned with the social embeddedness of 'economic' activity, this research emphasises that the making of markets is a dynamic and contested process, one that is always spatial, grounded in particular places. In doing so it contributes to better understanding marketplaces, livelihoods, and the creation of alternative modernities in contemporary PNG. The betel nut trade is full of contradictions and tensions, but also the aspirations of a great number of 'grassroot' Papua New Guineans. Show more