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Trobriand Islanders adopted card gambling from Europeans in colonial times alongside a growing familiarity with introduced money and commodities. Most ethnographic reports of gambling elsewhere in PNG have concentrated on its secular aspects. Here I focus on its ritual dimension summarized by the notion of laki ('lucky') as expressed in the agentive capacities of a new player, the 'divine dividual', who synthesizes elements of Sahlins's 'divine king' and the 'dividual' of the New Melanesian Ethnography. In accord with the local understandings of spiritual agency, many Trobriand men have adapted pre-existing magical practices for courting, kula, fishing, sorcery etc. to gambling by seeking to encompass the perceived powers of exogenous Europeans, acknowledged as the sources of laki, money and commodities, into their own persons in ways analogous to traditional magicians' reliance upon baloma spirits. Trobriand gambling thus exemplifies how change following from the introduction of novel Western practices can be effectively accommodated to preexisting religious and cultural practices through indigenous modes of personhood and agency. Keywords: card gambling, personhood, agency, magic and the sacred, cosmology, Trobriand Islands., While gambling with playing cards has been adopted widely across Papua New Guinea since early colonial times, there have been relatively few published ethnographic analyses devoted to it (see Brandewie [...]

Abstract: Notions and practices known by the Tok Pisin term laki ('lucky' or 'luck') have for long been widespread across Melanesia. Previous studies have tended to concentrate on laki as [...]

Abstract Anthropologists and others have recently argued that Papua New Guineans' contemporary patterns of consumption including Western clothing fashions have become critical components of commodification, modernization, globalization, and the creation [...]

Most recent treatments of Melanesian post-contact change have presumed that objectifications of 'culture' and 'tradition' have intensified and proliferated in response to the forces of colonialism and the penetration of the nation-state. Harrison (2000) has recently argued, however, that in pre-colonial times too Melanesians characteristically objectified their cultural practices and identities as 'possessions' that could be readily exchanged or transacted. Supposedly, the key difference between the two eras has accorded with different formulations of 'property': 'private property' and the logic of 'possessive individualism' in the post-contact era; and 'trading and gift-exchange systems or 'prestige economies in precontact times. In this article I examine Harrison's portrayal of Melanesian cultural practices as 'possessions' and the notions of 'property' that he sees as key to the cultural objectification in both pre- and post-colonial settings with reference to ethnographic and historical information regard ing the North Mekeo peoples of Papua New Guinea. I argue from the perspective of the New Melanesian Ethnography that Harrison's view of pre-contact prestige economies and trade and gift exchange systems retains several misleading a priori assumptions about 'commodity exchange'; and, illustrating the potential of the New Melanesian Ethnography for historical applications, that he overemphasizes the extent to which post-contact changes in cultural objectification have involved individualised and commodified forms of property. Consequently, in the case of North Mekeo, both the continuities and the changes between pre- and post-contact cultural objectifications may have proceeded differently from the ways Harrison has outlined for Melanesia generally., Much of the recent discussion over post-contact change in Melanesia and the Pacific has focussed on the processes by which cultural practices considered to be 'traditional' have been historically objectified [...]

Issues discussed concern the culture and social structure of the Mekeo peoples of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the ethnographic research of S. Bergendorff on the Mekeo's hierarchy system. A critical evaluation of 'Faingu City: A Modern Mekeo Clan in Papua New Guinea' is presented.

Michelle Stephen's portrayal of the concept of 'men of sorrow' of the Mekeo society and culture seems to be inappropriate although she has presented the concept as a cultural construct of that society. Such inappropriate depiction of a culturally loaded concept can be attributed to the author's failure to consult recent ethnographic studies. Readers can easily distinguish the inadequacy of Stephen's portrayal of the idea.

This article develops a new perspective on Trobriand chieftainship and local leadership in light of recently developed theories of personhood, sociality and historical agency for the Pacific. The first section surveys the diverse and contradictory ways in which the Trobriand case has been incorporated in anthropological models of Pacific sociopolitical and taxonomic variation, historical change and evolution. The second section reinterprets classic and contemporary ethnographic accounts and posits that Trobriand leaders and chiefs, and the knowledge and agency on which they rely, have been constituted in historical times quite differently from the ways they have been ultimately represented in anthropologists' models. It is argued that chiefs and hamlet leaders stand as metaphorical fathers to their constituencies; specifically that their agency is analogous to the 'feeding' and 'forming' contributions by fathers in procreation, infant care, the provision of food, the bestowal of magic, annual yam exchange ('urigubu') and mortuary de-conception, among other contexts., Chieftainship remains an important and controversial feature in many Pacific islanders' lives. Its varying implications for political, ritual and economic efficacy are no less salient and problematic in contemporary analyses [...]

Responding to a number of developing critiques, Sahlins (1991) has recently adapted his 'structural history' model to accommodate endogenous change in pre-colonial conditions. His reformulation, however, critically restricts the model's applicability to mythopraxis of a specific sort, viz. the historical actions of divine heroes in societies structured along Dumontian lines of 'hierarchy' as supposedly exemplified in Fiji and Polynesia generally. This article examines certain implications of this new structural history - particularly Sahlins's revision of the 'structure of the conjuncture' notion - by analyzing a case of relatively late historical contact and change involving exogenous Europeans as well as Melanesians (i.e. the later phases of the so-called Yali movements of post-World War II Papua New Guinea). Here, neither 'heroic history' nor 'hierarchy' as Sahlins has incorporated them into his new model are evident. What is apparent instead is a dialectical interplay of articulated messages and enacted missions on the part of a complex and shifting multiplicity of both expatriate as well as indigenous constituencies.

Levi-Strauss's canonic formula for the structure of myth, [f.sub.x.(a)] : [f.sub.y.(b)] [is congruent with] [f.sub.x.(b)] : [f.sub.a] - 1(y), was boldly intended to bring a 'kind of order to what was previously chaos' (1963a [1955]:202, 228). Rarely, however, has Levi-Strauss or have others systematically examined the formula's suitability for interpreting authentic mythic texts or--more puzzling, perhaps, given myth's centrality--seriously considered the potentially homologous structuring of nonmythical ethnographic data. In this article I attempt a detailed reinterpretation of the canonic formula and, after appropriately modifying it for the analysis of nonmythical materials, illustrate its empirical suitability with respect to diverse sociocultural contexts of North Mekeo (Papua New Guinea) tradition: notions and practices regarding the human body (eating, excretion, health, illness, sexuality, reproduction), space and time, social classification, political organization, and, finally, myth. By means of these controlled comparisons of nonmyth and myth internal to a single sociocultural system, I show that the revised canonic formula increases the empirical and methodological precision of Levi-Straussian structural analyses. The structure of myth, therefore, is not restricted to myths. [dualism (recursion/inversion), myth, social classification, structural analysis, ethnographic method, Melanesia]

In Inalienable possessions, Annette Weiner (1992) focuses on the paradox of 'keeping-while-giving' rather than the 'norm of reciprocity' as the central issue of social life, drawing heavily on Trobriand examples. [...]