Artigo 1

Luck in the double focus:
ritualized hospitality
in Melanesia
Roy Wagner University of Virginia
This paper argues that the relevance of hospitality in Melanesia has been under-theorized. It does so
by examining four cases of the hospitality motif: the idea of guests of the land among the Daribi;
the ritualized feasting and dispensation of containment among the Usen Barok named lak mamaran
Godspeed, literally meaning luck in the double focus (though the Barok language, lacking a
word for luck, had to borrow one from English); the non-reciprocal character of the imbatekas
sorcerer among the Tangu of Madang province; and the consumptive and predatory hospitality of
the Kiwai of the Fly River estuary. I shall conclude with a consideration of the North American
potlatch, a generic anthropological quasi-institution that has been distorted out of all ethnographic
proportion by what I shall call the reciprocity speculation bubble.
By luck or chance, I had the good fortune to audit Julian Pitt-Riverss Field Methods
course at the University of Chicago in the semester just prior to my departure for Papua
New Guinea. It was taken as axiomatic in those days (the mid-I,oos) that eld methods
cannot be taught, so I made up my mind to learn instead, take the lesson offered gratis
at its best advantage, and what I learned stayed uppermost in my mind during that
whole agonizing year and a half. I had had the most generous host in all of anthropol-
ogy, the prodigy whose The law of hospitality (Pitt-Rivers I,,,) set up the threshold
for all those with the temerity to study their own and thereby turn the eldworkers
keen self-consciousness inside-out. It goes without saying that hospitality is the rst
thing one has to think about upon arrival in the eld, and the last thing one knows
upon departure.
In one important sense, everything about Melanesia concerns hospitality, the
control or domestication of the strange, the foreign, the potential estrangement of
familiar values. None the less, the very ubiquity of these dangers renders them
hegemonic in ordinary discourse, and it is no surprise to nd that very little in the
Melanesian literature addresses the concept directly after Fortunes (I,,:) paranoid
monograph on Dobuans sorcerers and neighbours. Signicant exceptions include
Nancy Munns fulsome treatment of Kula Ring hospitality in The fame of Gawa (I,8o)
as a mechanism for expanding the spatiotemporal value of a person. Rupert Staschs
magnicent study of guesthood and ownership among the Korowai of West Papua
bs_bs_banner
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), SIoI-SI,
Royal Anthropological Institute 2012
(:oo,: ,ff.) achieves something more than another treatment of the much-abused
concept of relationships; it is an incisive overview of the inherent subjectivity of the
over-related individual in an otherwise objectied social surround.
In the following, I shall examine four cases of the hospitality motif, writ large upon
the landscape, for the most part of Papua New Guinea, including: (I) the Daribi of Mt
Karimui, the subject of my rst eldwork experience (I,oos); (:) the Usen Barok of
New Ireland province, subjects of my second eldwork experience (I,,os-I,8os); (,)
the Tangu of northern Madang province, subjects of the exemplary research of K.O.L.
Burridge (I,o,); and () the Kiwai Papuans of the Fly River estuary, subjects of the
pioneering Finnish ethnographer Gunnar Landtman (I,:,). I shall followthese up with
a nal consideration of the North American Northwest Coast potlatch, a generic
anthropological quasi-institution that has been distorted out of all ethnographic pro-
portion by what I shall call the reciprocity speculation bubble.
In these cases, as in most, hospitality takes the form of social boundary maintenance,
the scrupulous cozening of the stranger or outsider in what Pitt-Rivers called the
Mediterranean defence, or defence in depth. In the Mediterranean defence, according
to Pitt-Riverss explicationinhis class (pers. comm., Chicago, I,o,), the visitor is isolated
and made acutely aware of him- or herself as a stranger, while at the same time being
treated with the utmost consideration and carefully buffered from all the self-
incriminating secrets of the local community. Accounts of the Melanesian defence in
depth run the whole gamut from nave How the Bongo Bongo made me feel at home
confessions to serious studies of boundary maintenance and ritual, though the theme
itself is a humanuniversal. Virtually every major ethnographic statement inNewGuinea
carries a few lines on the topic, and many, such as Reads The high valley (I,o,), Marilyn
Stratherns Women in between (I,,:), Crooks Exchanging skin (:oo,), and Kirschs
Reverse anthropology (:ooo), manage successfully tobuildtheir major arguments around
the premise. Very seldom, however, and never in monograph-length treatments, is the
issue of hospitality addressedfull on. It is impersonated, shall we say, but not expersonated,
and this distinction, not a commonplace one, bears a bit of clarication.
Animpersonationis a mere copyingof its subject, anact of mimesis inAristotles terms,
and thus necessarily an exaggeration of some features and consequent omission or
downgrading of others, the very mtier of the learning curve in everyday social life.
Animals, andevenplants, havebeencaught at this sort of thing. What themathematicians
call abstractionis a case inpoint, whereinschoolroomvalues like quantities, regularities,
andshapes are importunedat the expense of all others (inother words we never askabout
the odour or skill of a number, or whether it has recently had a bath). An expersonation
reversesthisprocess,andregistersmoreconcreteparticularitythanisfoundintheoriginal
(Wagner :oIo), so that the original becomes a de facto impersonation of it. Sort of like a
Van Gogh painting (at least until the sunowers got him!). Hence an impersonation
involves all those actions in which the subject mimes him- or herself as an individual
character or personality, whereas an expersonation is something like a professional
monograph, in which the authors selfness is devoted to a totally objective personality
prole in which they imitate the predilections of others. Example: Abraham Lincoln
expersonated the United States of America as emancipation.
Guests of the land: the Daribi
For perhaps centuries, the expiatory ritual called the habu has served the Daribi people
of Mt Karimui as a generic, all-purpose control mechanismfor boundary maintenance,
Roy Wagner S162
though it was much more than that. In hindsight it was an expression of what I should
now want to call land shamanism. The express purpose of the habu ritual (cf. Wagner
I,,:), the central focus of Daribi ritual life, was to bring the ghost to the house: that
is, domesticate the angry spirit of someone who had died in the bush without proper
mourning and burial and was vengefully attacking pigs and children of its erstwhile
community. Now there is no such thing as a ghost in the standard Daribi lexicon; the
term normally used in this contingency is izibidi, literally die-person (not dead
person), and its distinguishing characteristic is that one can never be sure as to whether
it is there or not. Mounting a full-scale habu to control what amounts to a neurotic
symptom would be like swatting a y with a sledge-hammer. As I learned upon my
return to Karimui in the year :ooo, the agency controlled in the habu was not a ghost,
and did not have anything to do with something of so epistemologically quizzical a
nature.
In the event, the lesson was very dramatic. For some reason, or perhaps no reason at
all, my return to Karimui coincided with the death of Yapenugiai, the man who had
initiated me long ago into the secret world of Daribi shamanism. As the events
unfolded, my Daribi friends lled me in on the back-story of place-value shamanism,
something they assumed I had known all along. In fact I had not; all I had at the time
of my participant observation study of the habu ritual in I,o8 was a vague notion of the
spirit who controls the landscape on which the hunting takes place and who takes the
form of a rainstorm to follow the habu men back to the community. Place-value
shamanism is predicated on a hoa-bidi, or soul-person, not really an impersonation of
the deceased but what I called an expersonation, an overdetermination of their whole
knowledge and expertise, of the stamp of their character, wit, folly, and biases (their
taste in women, brandy, horses, and, in the Daribi case, ratty clothing), and more
specically a buru-hoa or place-soul. Now this is a feature not before reported in New
Guinea, with the possible exception of Schieffelins (I,,o) and Felds (I,8:) work at
Bosavi, where the dead reproject intogone people, a kind of shamanic parallel universe,
but it is found widely in the Amazon, according to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and his
co-workers (pers. comm., December :ooo). The Daribi put it this way: You see that
mountain peak over there, the one we call Kebinugiai? Well that was once a hunter of
that name, and when he died he became the territory his habits knew so well, and over
which he used to hunt. In other words it was his knowledge of the land, in an over-
particular, concrete, and almost carnal sense, that became the fulcrum for his miracu-
lous transformation a kind of sleight-of-hand ip-over in which metaphors come
true. Furthermore, by virtue of this very gure-ground reversal, such a shamanic
shape-changer acquires control over world-in-person and person-in-world: that is,
the power of extending his control to include the presences of game birds and animals
living in his terraformation. Now that his waynding abilities have become the way
itself, he becomes Master of the Game, with the ability to bestow; he acquires the ability
to estrange the self-orientation body-images (a navigational necessity for all motile
creatures) of game animals and birds from their rightful owners and deliver them to
living hunters in their dreams at night. Startled out of their sleep by what amounts to
a lucid dream, the hunters will grab their weapons and take off immediately for the
territory in question, where they nd the creatures wandering about aimlessly and easy
to dispatch.
In many respects this appears to be a Melanesian variant of the North American
adage that the game must give itself to the hunter if there is to be any success in the
Luck in the double focus S163
chase. In the habu, however, the normal polarities of this land hospitality are reversed,
and it is the hunters themselves whose souls are taken by the rogue hoabidi, who
deploys them in what amounts to a possession state (hostages, if you will) to hunt over
its charmed landscape for a period of a month or two, accumulating a hoard of smoke
dried game, which is then taken to the house by the enchanted hunters (habu men).
What is achieved in a rite that is far too complicated to describe here, and involves a
potentially life-endangering tension between the genders, is that the game animals
themselves are scapegoated, blamed as surrogates for the depredations that the rogue
buruhoa (topographic hoabidi) had inicted upon the community, and this serves to
requite the omitted burial feast denied to the one who had died in the bush. In effect,
the habu furnishes hospitality to sociopathic lost souls. The hospitality metaphor
comes true in a roundabout sense, for it is the people of the community itself who are
feasted as guests of the land. In the end it is the landscape itself that becomes the
expersonation of the Daribi people, the imprint of their experiences upon the sur-
rounding environment. There is a very interesting analogue to this in the game of chess,
in which the traditional roles of the king and queen expersonate one another; in chess
it is the king, not the queen, who holds the strategic place-value, whereas the queen
becomes a kick-ass warrior by virtue of her isolation from her otherwise domestic
connement (cf. Wagner :oII).
Stranger kings in Melanesia
Sahlins (I,8,) has written persuasively on what we might call the domestication of the
stranger-king in Hawaii, using the plight of Captain Cook as a dramatic example (cf.
also Candea & da Col, this volume). One would have to ask, however, whether the more
general case of this form of assimilative hospitality has not been overlooked elsewhere
in the Pacic, particularly among Austronesian-speaking peoples (but see Fox :oo,).
Appropriate as it may seem in the Polynesian case, the idiom of royalty has a less
fortunate application in smaller-scaled Melanesian societies, even where, as among the
Barok of New Ireland, the adjective imperial might suggest itself.
I have written elsewhere (Wagner I,8o; :ooI) on the curious articulation of social
authority and hierarchical ascendancy among the Usen (Southern) Barok. I have
argued (Wagner :ooI) that this is one of the few instances in world ethnography of a
holographic world perspective. The Barok programmatically perform a series of demon-
strative tableaux to realize the symbolic identication of part and whole in all aspects
of social life. This is what I mean by holography.
Holography in this sense refers to a ritual or representational (e.g. symbolic) format
in which some totality (e.g. the world, as in a world-view) is impeccably reconstructed
in miniature, in its procedural generation as well as its nished result, in every detail
with exact delity, and in every relation between such details, however those details may
be dened. It is, so to speak, all of a piece, no matter the angle from which it may be
contemplated or analysed. It is to this internal integrity that Barok refer when they
speak of feasting protocol, and they mean something that cannot be articulated in any
but its own terms. What appears as a problem for anthropological thinkers in integrat-
ing so ne-grained a feat of auto-representational appositiveness into any social, politi-
cal, or epistemological context appears as a solution to Barok thinkers like Tadi Gar, the
resident ritual expert in Bakan Village. When I returned to Bakan in I,8, to check out
my (holographic) ndings, Tadi said to me: It is only because you have paid such close
attention to the details, Roy, that power allowed you to reach such conclusions. Indeed,
Roy Wagner S164
this comment is echoed in the indigenous term Barok use for a self-exemplifying rite of
this sort: they call it iri lolos, which means nished or already completed power (cf.
Wagner I,8o), held during the ultimate feast of successorship, the Una Ya Kaba, the
cornerstone of Barok social order. Informants stressed repeatedly that the feasting
sequence of the iri lolos was as much about moral and legal entitlement as it is about the
revelation of otherwise secret knowledge. They have a point, in other words, and that
point involves the double focus achieved in the nal Una Ya Kaba revelation between
two abstract but highly tangible concepts called kolume, or containment, and gala, or
penetration. Kolume is dened in metaphorical terms as the child in the womb and the
corpse in the ground and gala as the cutting that nurtures, compounding a single
trope, as it were, of the penetration of the penis in the sexual engenderment and the
cutting of pig (bet lulut) at a feasting event. The point, then, is the revelation, witnessed
in the Una Ya Kaba via the arboreal inversion of its centrepiece, that gala and kolume are
one and the same thing, and that, parenthetically, there is no real difference between the
destiny of the individual and that of the larger community. If you died while you were
here with us, they used to tell me, we would bury you in our mens house enclosure.
And indeed they had a perfect right to do so. How is that for a Mediterranean defence?
None the less, the iri lolos is predicated upon an unusual adumbration of self-
restraint (taboo) and rigidly dened social protocol, a social topology, as it were, that
recalls nothing so much as the North American potlatch. Like the potlatch, the iri
lolos is primarily intended for the adjudication of property, legal entitlement, and
political successorship, and in that respect it represents the positive cynosure of what
we might call social power, in this case without benet of the state: not stranger but
estranger-kings.
Luck in the double focus
Lest we forget, our very rst conception of a sui generis, independently existing secular
state was represented in the mid-seventeenth century by Thomas Hobbes, in his book
Leviathan, as a Mortal Godde, a hierarchical and articially constructed social mon-
strosity. Subsequently rened, in Rousseaus notion of a social contract, the American
ideal of a Constitution, a Marxian, Durkheimian, or else entrepreneurial manifest of
the will of the people, it never lost the sinister aura of a kind of false hospitality imposed
from above, or the touch of barbarity imparted in Hobbess initial formulation. The
stranger-kings keep getting stranger and stranger!
We are its guests. Perhaps the most insidious trap awaiting the eld ethnographer is
to nd rationalizations to force his or her subject into analogical compliance with this
all too familiar form of institutionalization. It is, generations of social scientists have
assured us, compelled by necessity or else historical inevitability; it is sanctioned by
God, or else a whole lot of people, many of them highly educated, most of them dead;
it is the source of law and order, and its opposite is chaos. By contrast, the Una Ya Kaba
is held only because the big man wants it to be, and for no other reason. In effect it is
neither social nor personal, neither publicized nor privatized, neither imposed from
above nor impugned from below; it just is.
Domesticity and the proffered hospitality of feasting is the case in point, for it is not
determined in any of the ways a modern person might think of determination, but
underdetermined. The feast is offered freely to all comers, who are its guests, and
guarantees security, good fellowship, and the choicest array of refreshers and comes-
tibles, served briskly and smartly as though by waiters in the nest restaurants to
everyone in equal portions, and presented in such plenitude that everyone has more
than enough to take home afterwards. This is what we might call the chaos half of a
double-encompassment hospitality chiasmus, in which the house itself becomes the
metonym of the order half. By the illustrative logic of the feasting complex, the open,
stone-walled enclosure of the feasting area, or taun, is bisected, front to back, by a large
prone tree-trunk that serves as the threshold log for the small hospitality house
(gunun) erected at the rear centre. This is the tree that cuts the ground in half ,
separating the rear, or burial, half of the enclosure (cemetery) from the forepart, or
feasting space. Burial, offering the hospitality of the earth itself to the deceased, is in this
received sense the opposite form of containment (kolume) to that of feasting, which
replenishes the empty bodies of living human beings with foodstuffs, so that the
chiasmatic double-entendre between the fore and rear apportionments of the taun
corresponds symbolically to a double encompassment of obverse containments, each
simultaneously causing the effect and effecting the cause of the other (hence the
denition of kolume as the child in the womb and the corpse in the ground).
Normally, Barok confrres would say, it is the ground that cuts the tree in half, in a
vertical sense, for in the case of a standing tree it is the ground level, or surface of the
earth that separates the buried (rootstock) half of the tree from the contrasting feast-
ing (photosynthesizing, offering fruit as nourishment) branch, limb, and foliage struc-
ture that stands above ground. Symbolically, Our ancestors are like the roots of the tree
of life, buried in its native sod, and our descendants fan upward and outward, prefer-
ring nourishment and offspring to those of other lineages.
However, in a feast of successorship, in which the standing, ancestral order of things
is inverted, and a new generation takes over from the old as a guest might from the
host the image of the standing, upright tree just will not do. The apical shift from host
to guest, as it were, takes a new turn in the Una Ya Kaba, or base of the tree retroex
feast, in which the double encompassment of tree and ground is itself inverted, basi-
cally transforming a linear, temporal order into a spatial and synchronistic one. A huge
rainforest tree is carefully dug out of the ground, rootstock and all, and upended,
bottom to top, and the erstwhile top of its sawed-off trunk is planted in a cleared, open
space of ground necessarily outside of the walled taun, so that the feast will be held
around an arboreal inversion instead of within one. Atop the upended rootstock,
fashioned into a table (butom) for the display of the pigs, the successor (winawu)
1
in the
exact position of the (excised) taproot
2
stands, ourishing (with necessary gusto) the
authority of the apical ancestress of the matrilineage, of whom the taproot is under-
stood to be an exact image.
Whether the resultant public tableau, with its guarantee of an underdetermined
existential hierarchy, represents itself in terms of kin relations, political or legal agendas,
host and guests, cause and effect, order and chaos, or some more rened elevation of
the human condition is entirely beside the point of the holography through which it is
expressed. For that expression itself is an event in and of itself, an absolute mutual
occlusion of part and whole in any conceivable contingency, and thus a condensation
in both literal and metaphorical terms of all possible abstractions or particulars
through which human life might sustain, extend, or comprehend itself.
3
Just exactly what is going on here, and what does it have to do with our main subject,
hospitality? Barok experts cherish a ne logic of perspectival illusionism the trickery
of the eye in which what Gestalt psychologists might identify as gure-ground
reversal is known as pire wuo, literally the reciprocity of perspectives. As such it is very
Roy Wagner S166
general, lacking the special emphasis we might put on psychological exercises per se,
and is part of the phenomenal description of vision itself, which Barok call mara. Mara
might best be dened in our terms as the absolute identity achieved in normal vision
between the focal point formed within the eye itself and the one upon which its gaze is
xed in the outside world. It is indeed a linear, bifocal conception of eyesight with the
two components, subject and object, collapsed into one, a reduplicative expression of
unity like the favourite Barok good wishes benison lak mamaran, luck in the double
focus.
In the light of our main subject, however, it betokens an essentially perspectivist
approach to the general problem faced in the treatment of hospitality that of the
incorporation of the stranger, the liminal, alien, and dangerous. Its socio-political
aspect, that of the upstaging of the host by the guest (or, as we have seen, the old by the
young), is enacted in the Barok feasting complex as the contingency of the big man
(orong): that is, a supplanting of (the normative) matrilineal propriety via the hierar-
chical aspirations of (subversive, but none the less highly valorized) patriliation.
4
Conceptually, and also practically, it is no easy gure-ground reversal, but rather
approaches the dissimulative logic of the sleight-of-hand performance, wherein the
attention of the audience is xated by a decoy or distractive element, whilst behind
the scenes a deft transformation is effected that upstages the original expectations of
the viewer.
In the event, the familiar cant of the sleight-of-hand performer, watch the hand, the
hand is quicker than the eye, is traduced, one might say, by something much more
formidable, especially when the trick involves the security circle of the social order
itself. This brings us back to our earlier concern with the hospitality of the social state,
since what is threatened, hazarded, thrown open to doubt, involves the all-too-familiar
sequentiality of cause and effect. The effect, in other words, is that of making the social
state a magician.
Is the cause-effect relation, with its necessary play of illusionism, in some way related
to the archetypal patterning of hospitality? Consequentiality, a single principle shared
rather navely between propositional logic and engineering, is based on an arbitrary
scission made within a single event (a double focus, so to speak), wherein the anterior
portion is imagined to have produced or generated the posterior. Hence what amounts
to a foolhardy casuistry (Sahlins would call it a working misunderstanding) assumes
credit and credibility for both theage of reason and the industrial revolution. The other
side of the coin (or focus, as is were) is that a culture-historical sequence set up in this
waybecomesincreasinglyvulnerabletoself-inversion(revolution,innovation),andsets
the stage for ironical insights into the historical process, underdeterminations of its
working model such as those of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Spengler.
In the telling of a joke, for instance, the effect precedes the cause: the effect is given
prematurely, as in the visual picture or set-up scenario at the beginning of the joke,
whereas the ostensible cause is made provocative and produced afterward as the
punchline. In a conventional reciprocating engine, the mechanism contains the explo-
sion, but in a jet engine the explosion contains the mechanism. Likewise, in traditional
historical thinking, institutional continuity contains the cycles (Rome rises, falls, etc.),
but in Spenglers Decline of the West the cycles contain the institutions (the Apollonian
High Culture contains Greece as well as Rome).
Here, however, is where the historical debate gets interesting, for iri lolos, the
Barok nished or completed power, is neither institutional nor cyclical, and neither
linear-sequential nor synchronistic, for it works upon an interference-patterning set up
between the two sides of the double focus that is manifested in such ways. Luck in the
double focus: the cause of the effect is the effect of the cause generates a paradigmatic
security circle that is liminal to the realms of the domestic and the wild, eluding both
nature and culture.
Imbatekas: sorcery and the hospitality of self-alienation
Viewed as a contest or counter-emulative social strategy, the host-guest relation can
easily turn into a form of self-denial. What the Tangu people of northern Madang
province, Papua New Guinea, call a ranguma sorcerer is one who engages in what we
should call socially incommensurable behaviour: for example, that which falls into their
conceptual category of imbatekas (the uncanny). This is a much broader category than
what is normally thought of as criminal or even paranoid schizophrenic, for it is also
something of a studied art, reminiscent of the holy idiots of Dostoevskys Russia.
In the words of K.O.L. Burridge,
The ranguma is the epitome of the non-reciprocal man, the man who will not engage his reciprocities
as do others ... A ranguma is imbatekas because he is essentially non-reciprocal, because he is a bad
man doing wicked things in an evil way; because more often than not he is, or is expected or
considered to be, an outsider, a stranger, one who does not in any full sense of the termbelong to the
moral community ... (I,o,: :,o-I).
5
In other words, imbatekas eludes the parameters of what we think of as social control
or law enforcement, and handling it becomes something like handling radioactive
material dangerous stuff with invisible powers. In that sense it becomes a test-case for
the epistemological or cosmological dimension of the kind of social border-wars that
we group under the rubric of hospitality, like the Tibetan parasite-poisoner described
by da Col (this volume). No one can deal with the imbatekas but the imbatekas itself.
Hence one needs not a sheriff nor a psychiatrist to counter this threat, but what I would
have to call an usher (someone to escort us personally). For that purpose one needs a
superhero more the Batman than the Superman of the comic strips one in whose
personal make-up the machineries of good and evil are inextricably intertwined.
Such an agency strains the dynamics of hospitality from the inside rather than the
outside, and for the Tangu people it is nothing more or less than a socially self-
confessed ranguma, a double agent, heretic turned honest, a grifter in the language of
the con-artist, that serves to redress the contamination. What really matters is conniv-
ance with the dark side on the part of the good guys. What Burridge terms a ranguma-
killer deals in a self-similar way with the source, as Africans might put it, of the
witchcraft. This is an underclass of imbatekas beings called puoker (quasi-human
scoundrels): Their disembodied penises and vulvae move and copulate by themselves,
they marry their sisters, kill their wives, eat stones, feast without working, grow up in a
trice, travel great distances ... (Burridge I,o,: :I). Through his erstwhile participant
observation of these deviant beings, his ability to keep puoker-faces, to call bluffs, the
Tangu ranguma-killer spells the difference between hospitality and hospitalization.
Consumptive, predatory hospitality
What happens when the traditional safeguard parameters of the hospitality relation
invert their ends and means? That would make the domicile itself the repository of the
Roy Wagner S168
threatening, alien, or dangerous, and put the stranger at risk, the virtual opposite of
the Daribi ritual domestication of the spirit in the habu. Reverse hospitality is exactly
what happened, according to Gunnar Landtman, when a new darimo, or mens house,
was completed among the Kiwai Papuans of the Fly River estuary in Papua New
Guinea. In his words:
The medicines used in building a darimo have made the house too hot, so that the blood of somebody
is needed to cool it down to its normal state. A new darimo is not quite complete and t for normal
use until somebody has been killed for it ... If visitors happen to come into a new darimo, they may
be chosen for the victims required (Landtman I,:,: I:).
Finishing the house and nishing the spirit are at opposite ends of the same
continuum, and this goes much beyond a house society (Lvi-Strauss I,8: [I,,:]).
Although there is no evidence for either historical or linguistic connections between the
Daribi and the Kiwai, who live almost :oo miles to the southwest across some of the
most difcult terrain on the island, the two peoples share some interesting correspon-
dences. In particular the Kiwai have ABO, P, and MNS gene frequencies strikingly
similar to Karimui ... (Russell et al. I,,I: 8,). In addition, the basic framework, building
materials, and mode of construction of the respective Daribi and Kiwai structures are
identical (though darimo are immense, going up to ,oo feet long and resembling
dirigible hangars on the inside), and the two peoples have virtually opposite versions of
the same origin myth, whose plot is distinctly related to the Gilgamesh Epic and
concerns the origins of human mortality. What must be called the victimage of the
darimo begins before the erection of the structure itself. An old couple are selected to
be the parents of the longhouse.
The old couple, darimo-abera and eraeraoto, have fullled their task when the house is completed, and
now pay the price of it with their lives. They are expected to die shortly after the rst captured heads
have been brought into the new darimo ... They are not killed, and the actual cause of their death is
unclear to the people, but there seems to be an understanding that the endowment of the house with
its various magical properties has consumed their vitality (Landtman I,:,: ::).
Nonetheless,
Strangers visiting a darimo and remaining there some time ran a great risk of being killed by the
people, who gradually become incited by the war-like implications of the house.
6
The people say that
they could not be blamed for killing visitors in a darimo, it was the house that compelled them to do
so (Landtman I,:,: :I).
Dare we say that the unwary visitors lay down their lives for the privilege of guesting
the inadvertent quietus of the old couple, that this is the exception that proves the rule
of an ancient truth put into wisdom by Benjamin Franklin: Fish and visitors stink after
three days? The anthropologist Barbara A. Jones once wrote a study of Faiwol called
Consuming society (I,8o), and we have evidence to suggest that she really meant it.
The potlatch
If all perception of truth is the detection of an analogy (Walens I,8I: :I), as per
Thoreaus maxim, then the Barok exemplar of a double comparison divided by itself
(see above) is the integral axis, the corpus callosum, of hospitality. The North American
Northwest Coast potlatch, the institution described by Franz Boas, has lent its analogi-
cal authority to all manner of legitimate and illegitimate cross-comparisons, become a
buzzword for unrestrained, competitive hospitality. The Kwakiutl version, the type case
of the institution, is a hospitality feast virtually identical with the Barok example
discussed previously, an agency of entitlement. In the words of Helen Codere,
The Kwakiutl potlatch is the ostentatious and dramatic distribution of property by the holder of a
xed, ranked, and named social position to other position holders. The purpose is to validate the
hereditary claim to the position and live up to it by maintaining its relative glory and rank against the
rivalrous claims of the others (I,,:: o,).
What is at stake in the potlatch, in other words, though it does resemble a wager or
the hazarding of a bet (luck in the double forecast), is not quite the same thing as a
staggering win or loss on the stock exchange, though it does approximate what John
Cassidy (:oo:) terms aspeculation bubble. Like the Melanesian Kula trade, it is pulsed
(the trade moves in waves): The ... property distributed ... at the peak of the cycle
increased yearly at a geometric rate because of the Ioo per cent interest rate (Codere
I,,:: ,). Hence the recorded rapid ination of the potlatch over the nineteenth
century owing to the vast quantity of trade blankets ooding the market in conse-
quence of the fur trade only served to magnify the institution in the eyes of the outside
observer. For
[t]he reason a collapse did not occur and that potlatching as a nancial system remained meaningful
and tied to reality was that the system had as well developed a means for the destruction of credit as
it had for its phenomenal growth. In this the coppers had the outstanding part (Codere I,,:: ,,).
In other words the copper, a Keynesianprestige object, or artefact of what Veblen (I8,,)
calledconspicuous consumption, something with no utilitarian value whatsoever (but
plenty of symbolic panache
7
) played the part of the bubble itself, or perhaps that of
pork-belly futures in a collapsing stock market. Once the bubble had burst, all credit
was wiped out, and the initial purpose of the undertaking, for all its accumulation of
interest, which is that of credibility itself, was laid bare. Hence Walenss conclusion that
[d]espite the apparent economic motives of the potlatch, which ethnographers are
careful to mention, the giving of a potlatch should in no way be seen as a prot making
activity (Walens I,8I: ,,).
The end of reciprocity and the speculative bubble
The net long-term result of Mausss Essai sur le don (I,, [I,:,-]) has been to xate
theorists permanently on the ideal of exact, symmetrical exchange, if only as an expec-
tation. Hence Lvi-Strausss commitment to elementary structures, and a whole set of
diatribes involving relationships and the connection of exchange to gender. This sort of
fatuous, self-indulgent reading ignores what is certainly the vast majority of the earths
peoples, including major civilizations, who rely on the indenite postponement of
return for their sense of what exchange is all about; not only a vital ow of human
potential across unit boundaries, but also such apparently unrelated qualities as prot,
loan interest, and the Wall Street futures market.
There are more serious charges than this to attribute to Mauss,
8
of course, especially
those having to do with motion and symmetry. In the early I,,os, subsequent to their
Roy Wagner S170
impromptudiscovery of the area, Michael Leahy and his congenors used aircraft to y
thousands of gold lip pearl shells to the Mt Hagen region of highland New Guinea to
pay off indigenous workers for their hard labour in clearing airstrips and the like. The
Hageners had never seen such wealth before, and its inationary use in their traditional
moka exchange-systen touched off a veritable Ponzi scheme, a ruse for the unwary, that
backlashed upon the ambitions of the ethnographers who came to study them. What
is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Who was displaying whom, the indig-
enous folk or the ethnographers? The return on Leahys investment was a wave of
reciprocity hysteria in the anthropological literature that bid fair to take over our whole
sense of Melanesian society before its Wall Street-like crash in the desolate air of
postmodernism. Basically, the essential motile or rhythmic dynamic that holds any
reciprocal system in situ of its describable context cannot be isolated, even analytically,
from that context without destroying its raison dtre. Likewise, the whole marital,
reproductive, and compensatory exchange circulation of the Daribi could neither be
managed nor understood, according to the Daribi themselves, from any position other
than that of asymmetry, or uneven exchange. Even exchanges are normally forbidden,
or are permitted only under unusual circumstances at the hazard of the very motion
and vitality of the ow that makes life worthwhile. Besides, an even exchange would
leave them with nothing to talk about afterwards; verbal hospitality is the most com-
forting in the whole Daribi world.
The potlatch by contrast is about the ability to hold a potlatch, transcending the order
of social values by dening a novel conception of generic value (value for its own sake,
like an expersonation), so that the coin (a copper one in this case) is no longer ipped
but existentially annihilated. It is as though John Cassidy, upon completing his shrewd
evaluation of the speculation bubble phenomenon, should nd himself accounted
King of Bubbles, thereby validating his family crest.
This brings us to a denitive resolution of the double comparison between hos-
pitality and the social order, witnessed in so many disparate ways in Melanesian
ethnography, and thrown into high relief by the Barok and Kwakiutl hospitality-
feasting complexes: societies that domesticate themselves. (Barok say that societies that
do not self-domesticate in their way merely want to have a roof over their heads, and
live like dogs.) Thus we have: the social order as a creditable microcosm of order of
any kind, versus the necessary opposite of whatever is represented in that way, or, in
hospitality terms, the proper and the alien. Once this is known, by whatever means
it is known, one is then able to treat the unknown as a factorable variable, like the x
in an algebra equation, and make a double comparison of the result, as in the chi-
asmatic expression The order of chaos is the chaos of order. (However unlikely, the
two are alike in their means of representation, in an x = y sort of way.) Once this
double comparison is divided again by itself, as in the overturned tree of the Barok
(Una Ya Kaba), or the debit-cutting artice of the copper in the Kwakiutl potlatch, the
cynosure of social valuation is re-established once and for all, not as a virtue of either
order or chaos taken as a value in itself, but as that of a fractal, combined divisibility
being established between them. This is a unity of the known and the unknown
being divided by each other, or an interference-patterning disposed as a complete
self-image, like a Mandelbrot set, from which each may be deciphered out of the
other with equal dexterity.
However, such abstract formulations rarely cut it in a world that is really too
concrete and particularized for its own good; otherwise mathematicians should be
leaders of our world instead of academic charity-cases. So in respect of the particulars,
we might consider a context-dependent formulation of our common topic here. Here
again, what is paramount is not the exchange itself, nor the goods, services, titles, rights,
or intentions that may be exchanged, but the ulterior relation gure-ground reversal
or whatever between the exchange itself and the context in which it occurs. When the
copper is destroyed and thrown into the sea, or the speculation bubble bursts, the
double comparison approaches zero as a limit, and only the credibility of ones having
achieved it remains the validation of a clan ofce or crest, the perduring value (if
indeed it has any) of the Internet. Usually someone goes to prison as the result of an
intense court trial, but usually that someone is not a lawyer.
There is much about the traditional potlatch that recommends itself to the current
nancial crisis, with its all too familiar ination of monetary standards and deation
of socio-cultural ones. None the less, insofar as an economy never gets to be an
economy (or a history a history or a culture a culture) until disembedded from its
original context and redened by alien critical interests, our whole knowledge of
what a potlatch is or is supposed to be has been taken hostage. This would have to
include Marcel Mausss iconic treatment of it in his classic Essai sur le don (I,,
[I,:,-]) as the denitive external limit approached by any competitive regime of
reciprocal exchange. The root of Mausss misunderstanding may be traced to his
arbitrary subdivision of the exchange process into the obligations respectively to give,
receive, and reciprocate.
Redened by analogy in terms of hospitality, this would have to mean a kind of
obligatory code for conduct in which we might distinguish respective obligations to
offer hospitality, to receive it, and then stand ready to reciprocate it (cf. also Candea &
da Col, this volume). In other words, like Mauss, we would achieve a step-by-step
rationalization (anoverstanding, close to the original meaning of superstition) of the
phenomenon in terms so simple that even a social scientist might comprehend them
(in the dusk with the light behind him), rather than the resolution we would be
entitled to expect. For when we realize that what is offered in hospitality is the gift of
reception, and that what is received is the possibility of reciprocation, the ostensibly
separate ofces of host and guest turn out to be opposite sides of the same coin. And it
transpires that all Mauss was doing was ipping that coin over and over again and
calling it a different thing each time.
NOTES
I should very much like to thank Giovanni da Col for the critical inspiration and much of the ne tuning
of this paper, Justin Shaffner for the midwing of its nal form, and James Leach for his wisdom and very
comprehensive sense of humour.
1
Winawu (un-na-wuo) quite literally means the base of the change in Barok, but bears a totally acci-
dental but none the less compelling phonetic and semantic resemblance to the Chesapeake Bay Powhatan
term weowance, used for sorcerer-chieftains in that equally matrilineal and hegemonic society. In the
light of these resemblances, Chief Powhatans capital, Werowicomico, might be fancifully translated as
Winawu City.
2
The taproot is so closely identied with the apical ancestress of the matrilineage holding the Kaba that it
might be excavated in its entirety and cut off in full public view before the person of the Winawu may be
substituted for it.
3
The all-inclusive, universal hologram (holography of the universe) is the precise, mathematical opposite
of the zero term, since it represents absolutely everything instead of absolutely nothing.
4
The Usen Barok orong who would not wish to supplant the authority of his natal matrilineage and deed
over his taun to his begotten children has yet to be born.
Roy Wagner S172
5
Notice that Burridge has not included wrong in his string of imbatekas attributions; a ranguma is never
wrong, any more than a serial killer is, or a government agent. He just has what my elementary school
teachers would call an attitude problem.
6
Now this could not properly be called a housewarming owing to its rather chilling effect.
7
The closest analogy to the copper that I can think of is the culinary coup that might be called currying
favour in India (or else favouring curry), in which a delectable entre is served with a covering of gold foil,
which the diner is obliged to ingest.
8
I have not yet begun to ght an American admiral to a British man o war.
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La chance sous une double focale : hospitalit ritualise en Mlansie
Rsum
Le prsent article avance que la pertinence de lhospitalit en Mlansie nest pas sufsamment thorise.
Pour le dmontrer, il examine quatre dclinaisons du motif de lhospitalit : lide des invits de la terre
chez les Daribi, les festins ritualiss et la distribution chez les Usen Barok de contenance , appele lak
mamaran ( bonne chance , littralement la chance sous deux aspects , mais la langue barok nayant
pas de mot pour chance , il a fallu emprunter lak langlais), la non rciprocit du sorcier imbatekas
chez les Tangu de la province de Madang, et lhospitalit consommatrice et prdatrice des Kiwai de
lestuaire de la Fly River. Lauteur conclut par une considration sur le potlatch nord-amricain, quasi-
institution anthropologique gnrique, dforme jusqu en perdre toute proportion ethnographique
par ce quil appelle la bulle spculative sur la rciprocit .
Roy Wagner received a BA in Medieval History from Harvard University (I,oI), and a Ph.D. in Anthropology
from the University of Chicago (I,oo). He conducted eldwork among the Daribi in the Simbu province of
Papua New Guinea, as well as the Usen Barok of New Ireland. Wagner taught at Southern Illinois University
and Northwestern University before accepting the chairmanship of the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Virginia, where he currently teaches. He lives alone with three cats, and entertains some very
unorthodox views about the superiority of cats to human beings.
Department of Anthropology, PO Box , Brooks Hall, , University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA ,
USA. rw@cms.mail.virginia.edu
Roy Wagner S174

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