Contemprany warfare in the New Guinea highlands

Abstract

After decades of pacification and relative peace, intergroup warfare re-emerged in the Papua New Guinea highlands during the late 1960s and early 1970s, only a few years before national independence in 1975. Death and destruction, martial law, and delay in highlands development schemes have been the outcome. Most explanations of this resurgence posit either new causes (such as psycho? logical insecurity surrounding political independence from Australian rule or disappointment at the slow speed of development) or attribute the increased fighting to relaxation of government controls which suppressed fighting since the pacification process began. None of the explanations thus far advanced have looked at changes in the structure or infrastructure of highlands societies themselves which could account for behavioral changes in the management of conflict. This paper employs a cultural materialist strategy. From a macrosociological perspective, infrastructural changes unintentionally induced during the colonial era resulted in changes in the structural relations between groups reducing existing (albeit weak) indigenous mechanisms constraining conflict. Traditionally, groups maintained differential access to resources such as stone used for axes and salt. Axe heads and salt were produced in local areas and traded for valuables available elsewhere. I argue that the introduction and distribution of items such as salt and steel axes reduced the necessity for trade thereby altering the need for (function of) intertribal marriage as well as reducing extratribal contacts of a type which facilitated marriage between persons of different tribes. The reduction of intertribal marriage, over time, resulted in a decay of the web of affinal and nonagnatic kin ties which had provided linkages between otherwise autonomous tribal political units. Thus, the resurgence of tribal fighting is, in part, a result of the reduction of constraints which might otherwise have facilitated the contain? ment of conflict rather than its expansion into warfare. This view sees warfare as one possible end result of a process of conflict management (Moore 1972). An advantage of this strategy is that it suggests a testable hypothesis which runs counter to conventional wisdom and informed opinion, namely, that the rate of intertribal marriage would increase after pacification. In his discussion of marriage among the Maring, Rappaport (1969:121) reports that "there are unmistakable indications that pacification, completed in 1958, will extend the marriage relations of Maring local groups." Speaking of young Simbu men, Whiteman (1973:35) states that "with pacification they are able to wander further afield than in the past, and may develop various relationships with single teenage girls over a wide area." Pacification, then, might reasonably be expected to result in an increase in intertribal marriage. An increase or lack of change in the rate of