Saltwater Sociality by Katharina Schneider

Author:Katharina Schneider [Schneider, Katharina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, General
ISBN: 9780857453020
Google: ov3opsdvteYC
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2012-02-01T02:51:42+00:00

Pinaposa Relations across Buka

‘The clans do not stop here. They do not stop on Pororan’, I was often told, and ‘all of us [here in Buka] come from Punein’. Punein is a mountain in the Solos language area. It is uninhabited, and no one I spoke to had ever been there or had even considered going there. From the mountain, the ancestors migrated downward-outward to their present-day location along different ‘roads’ [maror]. They settled across Buka Island, on the Western Islands and later on the Carteret Islands, an atoll to the east. Northern Bougainville, although separate from Buka Island only by a narrow passage of deep sea, was settled by ‘entirely different people’ from another point of origin.5

In most cases, the tsunon of two ngorer decided to migrate together and form one pinaposa. They made settlements along their ‘road’, at which some people stayed behind while others moved on. Ancestral migration is not imagined as a walk across a fully formed landscape. Instead, people brought particular plant species along as they migrated, and places acquired their physical shape and significance through events that occurred as people settled the mainland. Elsewhere in Melanesia, ancestral stories describe the movement of the land itself, as it ‘gave birth’ to an island, incidentally in a circular motion that resembles the hand movements of Pororan Islanders when they speak of relations between mothers and children (Bonnemaison 1994: 115). Similarly, though not in terms of birth, the Pororans speak of a land in motion when they talk about ‘rubbish’ drifting across the lagoon, getting stuck on the reef and forming their island (see introduction).

Pororan is at the far end of Buka accounts of ancestral migration ‘from mountain top to golden sea’, as the Bougainvillean anthem has it. Its first, non-permanent settlers were men who had been sent out to catch fish for their group. They made small fishing camps only. Their relatives on the mainland supplied them with starch food in return for their catch. The fishing camps became permanent over time. Nevertheless, people on Pororan continue to return inward-upward every now and then, in order to obtain sweet potatoes for their fish, and in order to learn of their migration history from relatives along their road. They ‘trace the footsteps of the ancestors’, as they say. Most immediately responsible for doing so are the tsunon and hahini of a group. On behalf of their relatives, they maintain connections across the area that are vital for subsistence purposes and give people a highly valued sense of far-flung connections.

Two aspects of the Pororans’ ‘tracing the footsteps’ are interesting and will be discussed separately below. The first is the particular processes of creating relations of value in the present, island style, out of relations to people on the mainland that are said to date back to the distant past. As we shall see, relations to mainland relatives are created and made to appear valuable just like relations among islanders. However, this time, the islanders are dealing with people

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