Culture change and ex-change : syncretism and anti-syncretism in Bena, Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea /Regina Anne-Marie Knapp.

Abstract

This thesis draws upon existing bodies of work on 'culture change', 'exchange' and 'person' in Melanesia but brings them together in a new way. In the anthropological debate, culture change has often been discussed in relation to understandings of 'development' involving the reproduction and transformation of cultural categories according to an indigenous understanding of exchange and agency. My research suggests that culture change as it is taking place in Bena, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea, can best be understood when the model of agentive culture change, first proposed by Sahlins, is conjoined with the theoretical approach of the 'new Melanesian ethnography', especially with Marilyn Strathern's work on agency and personhood. Here, agency is understood in terms of dividuality, partible personhood, composite persons and the decomposition or deconception of persons in exchange. In Bena, the partibility of person is reflected in the perception that every exchange involves personal de- and attachments of an 'essence' called 'nogoya'a' (nurturance). Phillip Newman who worked among a neighbouring group, the Gururumba, found a strikingly similar concept. Unfortunately, his findings have so far been neglected in anthropological literature on Melanesia. This thesis attempts to fill this gap. It reveals how Newman's ethnographic data on 'vital essence' in Gururumba help to clarify the Bena idea of personal partibility expressed in the concept of exchanging personal parts of 'nogoya'a'. In doing so, it provides an insight into the way in which the particular notion of interpersonal exchange in Bena ties in with agentive forms of culture change and explains how the process of merging (or rejecting) elements from other cultures is shaped by the specific Bena understanding of exchange and person. This thesis suggests that culture change in Bena can best be understood as culture ex-change, with exchange being grasped in Bena terms as an ideally reciprocal, nurturing and strengthening flow of vital essence between partible exchange partners. Show more