Gardens of Basima : land tenure and mortuary feasting in a matrilineal society

Abstract

Gardens of Basima is an anthropological study of a previously undescribed village society in eastern Fergusson Island, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. The thesis is therefore a contribution to the ethnographic map of the Massim. It focuses particularly on the social organisation, land tenure, and complex mortuary exchanges of Basima, a matrilineal society with many social and cultural institutions in common with its more famous and powerful Dobuan neighbours. The people of Basima are locally renown for their betelnut, their pigs, and the products of their yam gardens, for which traders from other islands come to barter. However, despite their location on an important Kula trade route between the Amphletts Islands and the Dobu area, Basima people are only very marginally involved in ceremonial Kula exchanges. The main contention of this thesis is that, being a society composed largely of immigrant matrilineal descent groups, Basima displays a less 'uncompromising' form of matriliny than had been described for other societies in the region. Structurally, it is highly adaptable. As manifested in clan and matrilineage membership, in patterns of settlement, in marriage and post-marital residence, and not least, as manifested in the man-land relationships of land tenure, the flexibility of Basima society is evident. This is by no means a recent phenomenon indicating a 'breakdown' of some ideal system, but rather an integral property of an adaptive system which loosely unifies a diverse collection of immigrant groups. An important focus of the thesis is the obligatory and optional mortuary feasts and exchanges (principally bwabwale and sagali) so common in the matrilineal Massim. While Basima variants of these feasts show structural similarities to those of their neighbours they also reveal some significant differences. Notwithstanding an ostensible sequential ordering of such feasts, Basima people see them as discrete events motivated and staged by their performers to achieve primarily secular objectives. Sagali in particular, while nominally a feast that honours the collective dead, is sponsored principally by men to achieve renown. In other words, the main premise of sagali is political not eschatological. Likewise, the principles of Basima of customary land tenure are ultimately subject to political manipulation. Show more