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.