Fratricide and inequality: things fall apart in eastern New Guinea

Abstract

This paper contrasts models of increasing social integration in the central valleys of the New Guinea highlands advanced by Watson, Modjeska and Golson with that of a society constructed entirely differently at the eastern end of the central mountain chain, that of the Upper Watut of Morobe Province. Watut settlements were traditionally locked into a cycle of fission, foundation and accretion caused by the inability of lineage mates to live together without conflict. At a point in the recent past, population growth transformed the system into one of expansion and the conquest of new land until this was arrested by the advent of the colonial period.