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Oceania, Vol. 83, Issue 1 (2013): 31–48

DOI:10.1002/ocea.5006

Fenced In: Intimacy and Mobility in Highlands

Papua New Guinea

Neil Maclean
University of Sydney

ABSTRACT
This paper is organised around the analysis of an ‘event’; a truck trip from Kwima, a Maring speaking
settlement in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, to Banz in the Wahgi Valley and an evening
spent on the road. The event forms a standpoint from which to assess the impact of the decline of civic
space, and faltering legacy of colonial governmentality, in the Jimi since 1980. I describe the emergence
of new forms of mobility based around the nexus between local forms of business and trucks. In
particular I focus on new and anxious forms of masculine inside relationships, understood as a
transformation of a habitus of intimacy, round which such mobility is built. I argue that this transfor-
mation should be understood in terms of the dialectical relationship between business as an expansive
profit oriented project on the one hand, and its anchoring in clan defined space on the other. At the same
time the event provides a vantage point to reflect on the nature of long-term fieldwork, the methodologi-
cal significance of the subjectivity of the ethnographer, and the nature of ethnographic error.
Keywords: Maring, Papua New Guinea, modernity, ethnographic method, habitus, governmentality,
intimacy.

This paper examines the dialectical relationship between business as an expansive profit
oriented project on the one hand, and its anchoring in clan defined space on the other. I will
argue that the shared capacity of the entrepreneurial subjects of business for a domestically
grounded intimacy mediates the intersubjective (Jackson 1996, 1998) dynamics of this con-
tradictory relationship. Business leaders manage the political aspects of this tension through
the control they exercise over mobility within the Jimi Valley and between the Jimi and the
economic core areas of the Wahgi Valley and Mt. Hagen. In part they are able to do this
because of the aspirations and desires associated with this mobility (See Maclean 1994). I
focus in this article, however, on the unfolding dynamic of a particular truck trip in 1991, from
the Jimi to the Wahgi, to demonstrate the mutual implication of such control over mobility and
a masculine capacity for intimacy. Wardlow has noted in her influential study of imminent
possessive individualism among Huli women that pasinja meri are considered unimportant in
that they are ‘merely passengers not the driver’ (Wardlow 2006: 141). This paper takes up the
other side of this equation, examining the self-conscious and often defensive masculinity of
Jimi ‘drivers’ as a transformation of an established ethic of mutuality, rather than its elision.
I have taken the view in this paper that an argument focussing on a specific event needs
to be explicitly historically and methodologically framed. Historically I have situated the
distinctively anxious quality of this trip within a description of the evacuation of a coherent
state presence from the Jimi Valley over the 1980s and an appreciation of the failure of the
would-be civil-society legacy of Australian colonialism. I argue that the peculiar mix of the
expansionary and defensive dynamics of business have to be understood in relation to this
void.

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Methodologically I treat the question that provoked this paper as arising from two aspects
of the experience of long-term fieldwork. On the one hand the question was put to me because
of my integration into the ‘insider’ dynamics of the truck trip, built in turn on my own
socialisation into Maring intimacy (see also Maclean 2012). On the other hand, the question
had its impact because of the radical disruption of my relationship to the Jimi Valley as ‘civic’
space. In analysing the intersubjective dynamics of the event I draw on Schutz’s critical
appreciation of the imperative towards the synchronisation of streams of consciousness in
face-to-face relationships, and of its limits (Schutz 1972: 164–172). In appreciating the
sedimenting effects of long-term fieldwork I draw on Schutz’s discussion of ‘meaning
context’ (Schutz 1972: 75). I take this as an opportunity to reflect, not just on long-term
fieldwork, but on error in fieldwork.

THE QUESTION
In October 1991 I returned to Kwima in the Jimi Valley after an absence of four years to find
the landscape of modernity rearranged.1 On the one hand, what had been a small but promising
enterprise, had grown into a diverse business through which its majority owner, Clement,
dominated public life in Kwima, and played a key role in the regional economy of the valley
(see Maclean 1994). On the other, the range of services available in the District Office at
Tabibuga had become increasingly unpredictable, or disappeared entirely. Having to do some
banking, I cadged a lift from Clement who was sending a truck to sell coffee and buy stock in
the Wahgi Valley, the ‘metropole’ to the Jimi periphery. We had left late anyway, had to refill
an overheated radiator at a creek, and then it started raining on the bags of parchment coffee
as we drove into Tabibuga. The rain threatened to ruin the coffee and it also looked like it
might be getting dark driving over the Sepik-Wahgi Divide that separates the Jimi and Wahgi
Valleys. As this is an area chronically subject to banditry, we decided to stay the night above
the Tabibuga station at Lopme, a fenced trade-store compound that Clement had a major share
in. At dusk the gates to the compound were locked.
The evening culminated in the dim but fluorescent-lit store office with a conversation that
fixed the events of the day in my imagination. My travelling companions were fascinated with
the, then, new two Kina (K2) note.2 I was asked if local people might possibly have made these
new notes. A little stunned, I asked for more information. My companions told of Jimi based
Maring speakers, travelling in the Kumbruf (see Fig. 4) area, who claimed to have come across
a decaying ritual/men’s house in which both K2 notes and K1 coins were stored. The travellers
stole some of the money and made their way back to the Jimi as fast as possible, but were
followed by a wild storm that destroyed gardens as it pursued them. The theft was discovered
and the men were forced to return the stolen money and pay K1000 and 5 pigs in compen-
sation for the destruction caused by the storm. My companions claimed that a Kwima
storekeeper had some of the K1 coins passed off on him, which he only later noticed were
different. They also told me that, when I used one of the new K2 notes with the ‘clear window’
insert at a Kwima store, people speculated this might be one of the Kobana (Jimi name for
those living on the Kumbruf side of the Bismarck Range) notes. The theme of ancestral
magical power runs through this story. For my companions such magic protects the ritual
house and the souls of the clan that made it and was almost certainly the cause of the storm
that pursued the men. The question was, could such power enable people to make money?
I was stunned because my experience until then had been of remarkably pragmatic public
development rhetoric and of highly instrumental questions put to myself. This ‘question’3
broke with that pragmatic search for a connection to a development that lay elsewhere in two
ways. Firstly it proposed that ancestral knowledge (nomane, Maring) might be drawn on to

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make wealth, providing an autochthonous foundation for development.4 Secondly, it reversed

the geography of modernity. Even as we were on our way to the metropole on business the
story proposed that a new capacity to make money lay on the periphery.5

CIVIC SPACE
One cause of this rhetorical reversal of the geography of modernity lies with the dismantling
during the 1980s of the nexus between business and the state that was produced by the initial
energy of independence and which the Maring apprehended as development (Maclean 1985a).
I have elsewhere argued (Maclean 1994, 2010) that, by the 1960s, the Australian colonial
administration sought to cultivate civic space, even as it remained profoundly anxious about
movement within that space. I use the term civic, more commonly associated with an urban
imaginary and with a civil society ‘outside the direct, regular control of governments or large
corporations’ (Lewinson 2007: 200), because the forms of hope implied directly reflect those
colonial ambitions:

Cities and their geographical spaces carry the promise of open access, of commu-
nity, of cultural enrichment, and ultimately of democracy, for if all people have
access to those spaces and can participate in urban society through presence in
common terrain, then those spaces are realms for democracy. (Lewinson 2007:
199–200)

The colonial administration planned to make such a space through the construction of roads
(Maclean 1994, 2010) and to both encourage and compel a sense of citizenship through
instituting taxation (Maclean 2010). From the beginning, corvée labour was the basis of the
development of colonial infrastructure. In 1966, this power was linked to that of the head tax
with the institution of Jimi Local Government Council. Each functioned as a ‘point of
application’ (Scott 2005: 30) of colonial governmentality intended to both extend the admin-
istrative penetration of local society and to have a civic impact on ‘colonial conduct’ (2005:
35) through the ‘systematic redefinition and transformation of the terrain on which the life of
the colonized was lived’ (2005: 36). The administration intended to both compel and enable
the mobility of people and things that underpins participation in a cash economy. Roads
were the arteries of this civic body, but it was the district office at Tabibuga, and its ‘station’,
at the heart of the Jimi, that came to stand for the mutuality of administration on the one hand
and market society on the other.
While the terrain on which life is lived has been significantly transformed, the failure of
this civic project is a recurrent theme of the recent ethnography and politics of Papua New
Guinea.6 The ‘question’ with which I opened this paper speaks to that faltering legacy of
colonial governance. However, it is important to embed that event in a history that recognizes
the magnetic significance of Tabibuga as the local instantiation of civic and development hope
during my first period of fieldwork in 1979/80.7 Only from that perspective can we interpret
the force of the evacuation of that centre by the end of 1991.
Below is a list (see them mapped in Fig. 1) of the facilities available in Tabibuga in 1979,
well before the Lopme store was built:

• A functioning airstrip.
• Namasu store – a PNG wide trading company founded by the Lutheran Church.
• Ted Kennedy store – White Australian entrepreneur with interests in the Wahgi and the
Jimi, married to a Tabibuga woman.

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Figure 1: Tabibuga District Office Station 1979.

• Jimi Earthmoving, a joint venture of Ted Kennedy and the Local Government Council,
with substantial contracts in the Wahgi Valley.
• The Local Government Council (LGC) Offices – still the forum of regular meetings and
with substantial tax resources that gave control over decisions about road building and
maintenance in the Jimi.
• A store identified with the prominent local Member of Parliament Thomas Kavali.
• A District Office with a still functioning Bank agency.
• An occasionally functioning Public Servants Club.
• A regular Saturday market.
• A store owned by a Morokai business group.
• A coffee factory joint venture between local landowners, Ted Kennedy and Thomas
Kavali (outside the boundaries of the station).

1979 was probably the height of the importance of Tabibuga as a centre, and even then there
were signs of many of these businesses falling apart. Nevertheless, in the coffee flush it was
a hive of activity. Groups of men and women walked from the northern wall of the Jimi Valley
into Tabibuga with coffee to sell, and returned laden with stock for trade stores and goods to
provision feasts and bridewealth exchanges. The varied profile of store-ownership, the coffee
factory and the earth-moving company all convey a strong sense of a national market economy
with a presence, and interest, in the Jimi. The Local Government Council, in turn, stood for
that intersection of participation in the market economy and government that people under-
stood as ‘development’.
The contrast with 1991 is stark (see Fig. 2):
Every single business operational in 1979 had closed and none opened in their place.
While still technically operational, the LGC had no tax revenues to disperse and had lost any
control over road decision-making. The bank agency at the District Office was long since
closed and the airstrip given over to grass.8 As a consequence commerce and access to services
had become increasingly dependent on truck (or foot for the brave or desperate) trips to the
Wahgi Valley. Rather than being a site of development, the Jimi Valley had become a terrain
that had to be negotiated to reach it.

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Figure 2: Tabibuga District Office Station, 1991.

In the opening vignette I described Lopme, where we stayed overnight, as fenced, gated,
and locked at dusk. The two-metre pit-pit fence that surrounded Lopme was concrete evidence
of the changing micro-politics of stores that mirrored this broader evacuation of the civic.
Such pit-pit walls are not characteristic of hamlet fences in the Jimi. Generally they are built
with horizontal planks and uprights, are about one metre high, are primarily designed to keep
in/out pigs; humans climb in and out using stiles. I saw no pit-pit walls in 1979/80 and only
around business compounds in 1991/92. In 1979/80, stores lay in the public domain. They
were certainly locked at night, and subject to theft, but were rarely incorporated into hamlets.
Rather, they faced directly on to roads or were built on the central political and public space
of clan and clan cluster ceremonial grounds. Then I analysed stores as spatial instantiations of
an ideology of development that conflated the business and civic dimensions of development
with an explicit commitment to a public space (Maclean 1985a).9 At the time, such a com-
mitment by store-owners only made sense in relationship to the broader civic potential
represented in Tabibuga itself. By 1991, the security fence and the locked gate represented a
new kind of continuity with a national context in which the cyclone fence, razor wire and
security guards have come to define urban space. In the next section I unpack the inside of
Lopme, and the intersubjective dynamics of my evening there, as a perspective on this
evacuation of the civic and the spatial practices (see Lefebvre 1991: 38) of mobility that
correspond to it.

POLICING THE INSIDE

As civic space was evacuated, the kinship based forms of insider sociality that the colonial
administration attempted to render private emerged as a new basis for mobility. The distinction
between inside and outside is a thread that runs through Maring political rhetoric, situational
definitions of identity, and the intersubjective contexts of the self that I will be treating in terms
of a habitus (Bourdieu 1990) of intimacy.10 The distinction can operate across a wide range of

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social scale: as a loose metaphor for the regional interests of the Jimi Valley within the nation
of Papua New Guinea; as a compelling rhetoric of the moral and political unity of the
clan-cluster, the highest stable level of Maring social structure; as a recognition of the relative
autonomy of the domestic interests of the hamlet.11 For the purposes of this article the best
indication of the quality of insiderness I am referring to would be at the level of a sub-clan,
typically of some 30 – 50 people, maybe ten of whom would be adult men. These men expect
to share food and talk, and discuss common interests such as bridewealth and compensation
claims. They make a clear distinction between the kind of talk that goes on ‘inside’ and the
public presentation of self. The fence (ka in Maring) is a key symbol of this insiderness and the
primary referent is the hamlet fence. Maring hamlets are domestic spaces in which the key
differentiation is between a single men’s house and as many women’s houses as there are
married women. In 1979 45% of hamlets were occupied by a single married man and his
wife/wives and children, and in some cases his widowed mother. A further 20% contained the
families of two married men. Hamlets with only women’s houses made up a further 25%. The
Maring phrase ka amangke (lit. inside the fence) both references the relative autonomy of
the domestic group (see Maclean 1985b) and is most commonly used to make claims on the
moral unity of the sub-clan, the clan and the clan-cluster. The extension of this claim is not
simply rhetorical. Maring show a recurrent tendency to consolidate sub-clan, and even clan,
settlements within a continuous fence, with internal fences and stiles marking out domestic
space. Where sub-clan hamlets are separated by bush any sense of isolation, or that the
separation is too great, may be subject to moral commentary as a threat to the unity of those
who should be inside. Equally sub-clan members visited each other in their hamlets as a matter
of obligation; they don’t wait to be invited but rather proactively claim the right (see Maclean
2012: 580–582). For the Maring, then, the fence that surrounds the hamlet and the garden
serves to foreground a specific domestic identity against the assumed background of the
ancestral whole.
In the following discussion I will be treating both the truck, and the walled compound at
Lopme, as instantiations of an insider sociality, that draw on this kinship habitus, but which
are now reconstituted on the basis of business. I have already introduced the uninhabited areas
on the top of the Sepik-Wahgi divide, the range dividing the Jimi and Wahgi valleys, as places
where trucks (and those on foot) were peculiarly vulnerable to bandit attack. As a consequence
truck trips had become dependent on three systems of relationships: a group of inside men
travelling in the back of the truck (often with axes and bows and arrows discreetly available);
a network of relationships between owners/drivers as a basis for the organization of convoys;
a network of connections to homesteads or compounds at strategic points on the road and in
the Wahgi Valley where the truck might stay in the event of breakdown, darkness or rain.
The truck I was travelling in was owned by Clement, the leading business figure in
Kwima. He was also a major player in a network of business relationships that spanned the
Jimi valley with connections south to Banz in the Wahgi and north over the Bismarcks into
the Simbai. Buka, the driver of the truck on this occasion, ran a business in a settlement
neighbouring Kwima (Dega), and was part of that network. The inside men of the truck were
Eric, Jim, and Justin. Eric was employed by Clement as a driver after a return to the Jimi from
many years working on the coast. He was originally from Kwima’s other neighbours (and
sometime enemies) the Manamban (Kupeng). Jim was the eldest son of the Kwima Council-
lor, a resident of my hamlet, and had spent four years at High School in Mt. Hagen. Justin is
a classificatory cross-cousin of Clement’s.
Lopme is a walled compound of some 11 buildings and a garden area (see Fig. 3). It is
home to a joint venture between Clement’s Kwima based business group, Yaraka, and
Matthew Tsaina, a Morokai. Yaraka is an acronym formed from the first two letters of three of
the eight clans making up the clan-cluster settled around Kwima, Yamakai, Raweng, and

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Figure 3: Lopme Store Compound.

Kandakai.12 The Morokai own the land on which Lopme, and the Tabibuga station below it, are
built. Matthew links the business network to the land on which Lopme is built and validates
its claim to be there.13 Within the compound both major managing partners in the business
have houses as well as close relatives of Matthew and one senior employee (Karabus).
Clement’s house acts as a waystation for Kwima men travelling back and forth between Banz
and Kwima. The security of the compound supports a core business operation, the store, the
trucks vital to the viability of the business, and a number of smaller, individually owned
businesses such as the second hand store and the cigarette store.
It was late afternoon when Clement’s truck arrived at Lopme. The store was still open for
business and a number of local Morokai women were sitting in the cleared area immediately
inside the gate. In the Jimi people take their time making purchases, are inclined to buy things
one at a time, and like to hang around the store watching the comings and goings and
purchases of others. Over time I have formed the view that three factors contribute to this
distinctive stasis: purchasers like to maximise the satisfaction of the transaction itself; it allows
for an implied framing of the monetary transaction by the social relationship between store
owner and customer; it implies a claim on the place on which the store is built. Store-owners
characteristically cut across the implied claims on person and place with signs announcing that
no purchases can be made on credit (dinau). On this occasion my fellow passengers were more
abrasive. As dusk approached they announced loudly that it was time to close the gate and
made insistent calls for the women to be hustled out. Particularly striking to me, they asserted
a number of times that this was a Kwima place and that it was time for those who did not
belong to leave. A sign in the store office, displaying the Yaraka Business Group logo and an
explanation, reinforced the claim that Lopme is a Kwima place:

Mining bilong Yaraka em I as [origin/ground] bilong wanem samting. Husat man

meri I no save long mining bilong Yaraka bisnis grup em I tripela lain haus man
bung wantaim (Yaraka), Yamakai, Raweng, Kandkai. Em I mining bilong Yaraka I
stap ples klina [sic] wan. Em Yarak i stap 100 yias plen.

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[Yaraka is the origin many things. Whoever doesn’t understand the significance of
Yaraka business group it is three clans joined together, Yamakai, Raweng, Kandkai.
That is the significance of Yaraka for all to see. Yaraka is on a 100-year plan.]

If the Lopme compound is a Kwima place, then it is a very peculiar one and much turns on the
meaning of the word ‘as’ (origin/ground) in the notice above. Only two of my fellow
passengers (Jim and Justin) were Kwima men and only Justin identified with a Yaraka clan
(see Fig. 4). Eric’s clan-cluster of origin (Manamban) has a long-standing history of enmity
with the Yaraka clans in particular. Buka, the driver, comes from a clan-cluster with a sporadic
history of raiding and warfare in relation to Jim’s clan, the Bomagai. Clement himself is a
refugee from a Simbai Valley cluster having spent time in jail for murdering his brother. It was
in jail that he learnt the trade (carpentry) that enabled him to build the social network and save
the capital that underpin his business. All of these men had spent a considerable time away
from their homes working or in school.
Yaraka, then, does not circumscribe the network that is the organisational basis of the
day-to-day operations of the business, of which the group I was travelling with was one
instantiation. Rather, Yaraka provides a secure claim to place from which the business as
network, and as extension out into the world, can be built.
If the composition of this contingent grouping, so energetically claiming insider status to
their ‘as’ [origin/ground], is distinctive, so is the relationship of the Lopme compound as a
spatial inside to its immediate outside. In one sense the internal constitution of the Lopme
compound is that of a hamlet. The juxtaposition of men’s houses and ‘family’ houses, which
would function primarily as women’s houses, is characteristic of hamlet domestic organiza-

Figure 4: Inside Yaraka.

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tion in the area. But, whereas a hamlet’s fence is porous, a claim on space within an
encompassing kinship continuum, Lopme is at odds with its Morokai outside. Whereas
hamlets, for all their variation, are replications of domesticity, Lopme is a business, and its
domestic organisation is derivative of that fact. This makes it a potential target of envy and
attack by its immediate neighbours. So, if Lopme is a Kwima place, then a potentially hostile
terrain encompasses it. It is the residential analog of the truck: an inside whose boundaries
require continual policing.
A warning here: it would be easy to slip into reading this tension as a contradiction
between the privatising tendencies of a market economy versus the relational properties of the
kinship domain. Understood in this way, Maring insiderness loses its specificity to simply
become one instance of a relational kinship geography; an example of the reduction of kinship
to Gemeinschaft that Stasch (2009) has subjected to sustained critique.14 As if to dramatise the
specific continuity of Maring clan space Stasch describes the Korowai house as a concrete
image of his argument for ‘patterns of separation’ (2009: 4):

Most Korowai houses stand with their floors about fifteen feet above the ground,
supported by topped tree trunks. This remarkable architecture is itself a gesture of
separation, dramatically setting domestic space apart from the surrounding world
. . . Even more impressive than houses’ height, though, is the distance between
them. (2009: 4)

It is a straightforward matter to add specific instantiations of this dialectic of intimacy and

alterity (Stasch 2009) in the Melanesian context. Stürzenhofecker (1998) links the patterns of
Duna sorcery accusation to the territorial interdigitation of diverse agnatic identities that she
characterises as ‘internal externality’ (1994: 77). Wassman (1993: 120–1) describes Yupno
settlements as domestic compounds enclosed within a clan fence that might be compared to
the most consolidated of Maring settlements. However, both clan settlements and domestic
compounds are enclosed by a 2 metre high fence of precisely the kind that I have described as
alien to the Jimi. The fence around Lopme is not, then, inherently modern. Rather it is modern
by virtue of its violation of locally specific relationships between spatiality and morality. I
continue the account of the evening at Lopme below, with the aim of describing the
intersubjective dynamics inside the business that correspond to this violation.
The claims on insider status at Lopme that began with the closing of the gate, established
a discursive theme that ran throughout the evening. Below I examine one strand of this
discourse in which these moral and political claims were made particularly explicit. Karabus
is a permanent resident of the Lopme hamlet, but joined us for the evening demonstrating the
double role played by Clement’s house as both Kwima way-station and hamlet men’s house.
Karabus is originally from Kol in the Eastern end of the Valley, and thus has no direct claim
on either Kwima or Morokai ground.15 His overt claim on Lopme is as truck mechanic to the
business but I can’t speak to his affinal or maternal connections. During the evening he
launched into a sustained piece of moralising about a komiti (lowest level Local Government
Council elected representative) from Togban. The Togban people are former major enemies
and neighbours of the Kwima people on the northern side of the Jimi, a fact almost certainly
not lost on Karabus. Like Kwima people, they are always in need of a waystation in Tabibuga
to make the connection to the central Wahgi Valley. The komiti had come to Lopme after dark,
when the gates were already closed, claiming a place to sleep.
Karabus asserted that the komiti had behaved badly and had been guilty of making claims
to which he had no right. His characteristically masculine moralising combined proclamations
on the proper way to act, with detailed commentaries on the actual behaviour of the offender.
He condemned the komiti’s behaviour in arriving after dark but added the careful proviso that,

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if he had come during the day and simply hung around until no one could throw him out, that
would have been acceptable (if slightly contemptible). As I understood it, such behaviour
would have served to make his face known, and would also have acknowledged the need to
police the hamlet, in other words an understanding of business. Karabus was then scathing
about the basis of his claim to a connection to the hamlet: that he was related by marriage to
people staying there on ‘pig’ (a metaphor for bridewealth) business. I took it that the speci-
fication of an affinal claim marked it as tenuous, but largely because ‘pig business’ was already
external to the proper nature of Lopme, which is money business. Once again, the moralising
was marked by an ‘if’ statement about the proper way to behave. As a komiti, in so far as he
was part of a wider contemporary valley network, it was not a business but a government
network and so he should have sought shelter down at the Tabibuga government station. As we
have already seen, this was not a real option and the statement served more to highlight the
contemporary decline of government power.
For Maring, the proper action in a context is always linked to an understanding (nomani)
of the specificity and history of the social relationships that govern that context. Knowledge of
how to act as a member of a clan has in the past been the dominant referent for this quality of
the person. Karabus’ discourse now marks business as an analogous moral and social domain.
To add rhetorical finality to this claim Karabus told how he lay in wait for the komiti at the gate
in the morning to tell him off, but he had already left at dawn.
With this ‘story’ Karabus articulates an etiquette of mobility which sociologically fore-
grounds the business as network. But he also makes apparent his claim to speak for the hamlet,
contrasted with the silence, and thus shame, of the Togban komiti. This shame marks both a
lack of a claim to place but also a lack of understanding of business. In the end the komiti was
not excluded from the shelter of the hamlet, but he was from the status of insider.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF INSIDER SOCIALITY

Karabus’ rhetoric gained significance, not just from its content, but from the fact that it formed
one strand in an aggressively anxious closure of the hamlet as insider space. I have already
mentioned the insistence on Lopme as Kwima place, the hustling of women out of the
compound and locking of the gate. Karabus’ claims also found their audience in a particular
kind of intimate mutuality that accompanied this closure. Karabus both affirms and produces
that closure through his rhetoric. At the same time, his rhetoric takes effect because his
listeners share a distinctive local imperative toward the synchronisation of intersubjective
relationships. In a parallel treatment of this event (Maclean 2012) I have analysed the
distinctive synchronisation of streams of consciousness (Schutz 1972: 164–172) that arise
from the intentional coordination surrounding fire, food, and talk in a Maring men’s house
context. I argued that in contexts such as this truck trip men drew on a subjective capacity
grounded in that everyday experience – in Schutz’s terms intimacy as a meaning context
(Schutz 1972: 75). In doing so they also brought into play the distinctive political charge of
such intimacy in a context defined by continual shifts in the political registers of the inside
outside distinction. This was manifest in the claims to knowledge discussed above.
At the same time, I also argued that contexts such as this truck trip represented a
transformation of this everyday intimacy, and expanding on that argument is one of the
purposes of this article. The break between Lopme and its surrounding environment, repre-
sented by the fence, is one index of that transformation. The social heterogeneity of passengers
on the truck is another. I have already described the diverse clan and clan-cluster identity of
my consociates. These are not men who, within the lifelong time frames of kinship based
social systems, have grown old together. This fact gave a particular edge to the sharing of food

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cooked over a common fire that drew us all into an inward mutual orientation with the closing
of the gate. Forty years after the last round of warfare, social relationships in the Jimi are still
frequently classified in terms of alliance and enmity, and commensality continues to carry
political connotations. Rappaport reported taboos against ‘eating food cooked over the same
fire or grown in the same garden as that of one’s enemy’ (1984: 111). He explicitly traced one
consequence of such taboos:

If natal groups of the wives of brothers become enemies, either the brothers must
choose between eating with each other or with their respective wives, or one or both
of the wives must refuse to adopt the interdining taboos of her natal group. If a
woman refuses to adopt the taboos of her natal group she may no longer dine with
them. In any case, dyadic relations, which are heavily loaded both economically and
with sentiment, are subjected to rather serious symbolic and behavioural impedi-
ments . . . (Rappaport 1984: 111)

These days suspicions of sorcery continue to inflect the sharing of food, and the accompanying
often intractable court cases keep the matter at the forefront of consciousness. For these men
to eat together in this way was both a risky business – the kind of risk that big men
characteristically take – and a statement about a new kind of insider sociality.
Nor had my consociates simply grown old in the Jimi Valley – indeed the life experience
they bring to the business is diverse. Jim was a schoolboy of maybe 10 years of age during my
first period of fieldwork and spent a significant part of the intervening 10 years at High School
in Mt. Hagen. Eric and Buka, while much older, had spent much of the period of the high point
of civic and business development in Tabibuga working elsewhere in Papua New Guinea,
developing the skills and capital that were the foundation for their current careers in business.
Karabus’ home was in Kol, administered from Tabibuga, but with nothing like the same
dependence on it as a centre of business and resources. In summary, my fellow passengers
came from different clan-cluster backgrounds, some previously enemies, and brought very
different perspectives on the relationship of the local social field of the Jimi to the broader
national context.
In counterpoint to this diversity, what they all brought to this new inside of business, and
I count myself into this, was a capacity for intimacy as a sedimented aspect of self: ‘embodied
history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history’ (Bourdieu 1990: 56). In
Schutz’s language this is a meaning context in which the replication of specific structures of
domestic and men’s house based intimacy over time is ‘constituted into a synthesis of a higher
order, becoming thereby unified objects of monothetic attention’ (Schutz 1972: 75). The
advantage of Bourdieu’s language for an exploration of the domestic ground of insider
sociality is that its intention is to link a set of habits and spatial dispositions to a specific
cultural/cosmological field conceived in explicitly historical and political terms.16 Both Schutz
and Bourdieu allow us to attend to the replicability of specific types of experience over time
in the formation of the self. Bourdieu also enables us to attend to their replicability across
space: the fundamental similarity in the dynamic and context of this kind of insider sociality
throughout the Jimi Valley – in a different language, one aspect of what we commonly call
culture.
The advantage of Schutz, however, is that he allows us to return to the diversity of those
who share this habitus and to the fact that ‘far from being homogeneous, the social world is
given to us in a complex system of perspectives’ (1972: 8). Stasch, for instance, draws on
Schutz in his critique of ‘Gemeinschaft stereotypy’ precisely because Schutz ‘emphasizes that
subjectivity and intersubjectivity are allochronic as a matter of course’ (Stasch 2009: 10). A
key feature of the truck trip was the heightened tension between this common capacity for a

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politically inflected mutuality and the diversity of background and life-experience that had to
be coordinated in this instantiation of the habitus. This tension manifests itself in the anxiously
aggressive assertion of insider status, and in the explicit policing of that boundary.
Such events suggest two different aspects of a broader social transformation. One can be
stated in Schutz’s (1972: 176–186) language: the shared capacity for a particular kind of
intimacy enables those who in the past would have remained contemporaries, those existing in
the same social field but not in face-to-face relationships, to be drawn into new kinds of
face-to-face dynamic. Such transformations may, in turn, form the basis of new kinds of social
agency. Bourdieu recognizes this double nature of the habitus:

The habitus is precisely this immanent law, lex insita, inscribed in bodies by
identical histories, which is the precondition not only for the co-ordination of
practices but also for practices of coordination’ (1990: 59).

This speaks directly to my sense that Karabus’ policing discourse was both making an inside
relation even as it was grounded in his audience’s established capacity for such relationships.
It allows a more precise account of the coordination of intersubjective relationships in an
unstable entrepreneurial context as the emergence of a new kind of business inside. Viewed in
this way, the habitus is not simply the product of history but the ground from which historical
agency operates. Within the fuller framework of Bourdieu’s sociology this transformative
potential would most likely be explored in terms of a disjunction between habitus and field
(Sweetman 2003: 536; Mouzelis 2007). Such an argument would, however, require the
recognition that the ‘field’ in this case is not uniformly modern. Global markets have certainly
had their effect, but the specific politicisation of the habitus I am describing speaks to a very
uncertain presence of the modernist legal, political and ethical counterparts to the market.
Schutz in turn describes one key aspect in the ontology of this politicisation of the
emergent order of the habitus. He draws a distinction between the ‘pure We-relationship’ as a
‘limiting concept’ (Schutz 1972: 163–72; see also Zahavi 2010: 298) and the concrete
specificities of any particular ‘face-to-face’ relationship. His interest in the ontological priority
of the We-relationship (it ‘is already given to me by the mere fact that I am born into the world
of directly experienced social reality’ [Schutz 1972: 165]) is as a means of grasping the
concrete variety of face to-face relationships – in their intimacy, duration, frequency and
multivalence. While the We-relationship remains a moment in any face-to-face relationship,

one cannot become aware of this basic connection between the pure We-relationship
and the face-to-face relationship while still a participant in the We-relationship. One
must step out of it and examine it [emphasis in original]. (Schutz 1972: 168)

This inherent reflexivity enables the relationship itself to become an intentional object of the
kind of rhetorical strategies employed by Karabus. While the disjunction between habitus and
field may provide an explanation for the politicisation of that reflexive potential, Schutz allows
a recognition that reflexivity is ontologically prior to that disjunction.
My reflexive relationship to the event was, of course, different. My insistent socialisation,
over three periods of fieldwork, into various forms of house-based sociality was certainly what
allowed my incorporation into this somewhat self-conscious insiderness. What was subjec-
tively salient for me, however, was the closed and defensive quality of the evening that made
it unlike previous experiences – the difficulty of assimilating this event to my established
‘meaning context’ of intimacy. In ordinary hamlet contexts the boundaries of houses are
porous, and the inward intentional focus on fire and food is always likely to be cut across by
talk with those in other houses and passers by. Even if men and women are in separate houses

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their chat, arguments and instructions unite the hamlet. On this evening, the synchronisation
of fire, food, and talk was sustained and uninflected.17
My argument describes a process by which a new kind of inside was defined, not in terms
of its origins, but in terms of the twin projects of profit and mobility. In two influential
contributions to contemporary debate Wardlow (2006) and Robbins (2004) both explore the
dialectics of the individualising effects of modernity (possessive individualism in Wardlow’s
case, sin in Robbins’) within the relational ground of local sociality and identity. Given the
focus on business and mobility, my argument resonates most directly with Wardlow’s explo-
ration of the figure of the pasinja meri as the embodiment of that dialectic. My focus on
masculinity is made particularly clear in the contrasting ways in which my and Wardlow’s
arguments converge on the image of the fence. I keep returning to the policing of the fence and
the inside, Wardlow to the image of brukim banis (jumping the fence, breaking out) (2006: 24,
90, 140) as a metaphor of the modern form of women’s negative agency (Wardlow 2006: 72).
In breaking the fence Huli pasinja meri experiment with individualism; in policing the fence
Jimi business henchmen rework their relational capacities. It may be that, in terms of mod-
ernist tropes, it is abstraction rather than individualism that is the unifying process here, as
relational capacities become (relatively) detached from a concrete kinship ground.

CIVIC SPACE AND METHODOLOGICAL ERROR

My participation in this truck trip was not a matter of choice or happenstance; if my fieldwork
was to be provisioned I had to be part of such trips. In 1979/80, just as stores encoded a public
domain so, as fieldworker, I was able to move around the valley as a relatively autonomous
agent. In 1991 I was in the process of discovering that, just as stores were overtly ‘inside’, so
was being part of an ‘inside’ a condition of my own movement. The structure of my argument
so far spells out this connection. I have interpreted the changed status of bisnis as a relation-
ship between three processes: the radical evacuation of civic space, and the development
project in the Jimi Valley itself; the development of trans-valley business networks that have
come to dominate the pragmatics of mobility in the valley; the elaboration of a more
generalisable, masculine, and anxious insiderness. From my point of view there were, in turn,
five aspects of the trip that brought those connections into focus: the fence around the
compound and the locking of the gate; the quality of participation in the insiderness; the
sensation of sitting on the edge of a socio-political vacuum; the complete dependence of
the provisioning of my fieldwork on the Yaraka business project; the inversion of the appar-
ently given spatialisation of development in the ‘question’ with which I opened this paper.
I focus on the intimate relationship between these last two points in the final section of
this article. In 1979/80 all provisioning trips required walking to Tabibuga. Then, either I
collected mail, used the banking agency and bought provisions at the stores and walked back
to Kwima, or I negotiated a ride on to Mt. Hagen, usually with the Council truck. The road
above the District Office station, the site of the Lopme store in 1991, was associated with the
sensation of being on my way, having negotiated the site of power in Tabibuga.18 On this truck
trip we drove through Tabibuga – it was now simply on the way. And while my companions
claimed Lopme as a Kwima place, we were confined within that fence until the truck trip
resumed. It was a node rather than a centre.
This is one way that change is registered in the context of recurrent field trips. On
returning one slips back into relationships and modes of everyday practice with deceptive
ease, only to be confronted by disjunctions of one’s established meaning contexts with
contemporary practice. This is productive because the temporal discontinuity of fieldwork
highlights the contrasts. The issue here, however, is not simply that things have changed.

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Rather, the impact of this truck-trip forced me to retrospectively reconsider the meaning
context of civic space that was integral to my interpretation of my first period of fieldwork.
A few remarks about meaning contexts are in order as a guide to the discussion below. As
a means of organising access to one’s own stream of experience, meaning contexts synthesize
a series of specific experiences into a ‘unified’ object of ‘monothetic attention’(Schutz 1972:
75). They do not simply organize experience, but are linked to projects and to the
intersubjective space of pragmatic action involving intentional and emotional orientation to
others.19 As such, they are also part of the way in which we learn about others. The replication
of my trips to Tabibuga over the period of my 1979 fieldwork, under the pragmatic imperative
of the provisioning of my fieldwork, was fundamental to the organization of my knowledge of
the space I traversed. The question I am considering now, however, is of the intersubjective
implication of that meaning context in the intentions and emotions of others, and thus of its
dual function as both a pragmatic and a learning context.
As I developed this sense of civic space throughout 1979 there was an intimate relation-
ship between its utility and truth-value (for me) as a perspective on the contemporary politics
of the Jimi Valley. I was sustained in this view by a recurrent rhetoric of civic objectives as
both a legacy of a colonial past and as an anticipated future of government services and
development. Government officials, politicians, local and church leaders, all agreed in describ-
ing a new space defined by a generalized access to government services and to a developing
domain of business, even as they competed for position within it and for the kudos attached to
it. Ordinary people, however, also sought to exploit that new space through elaborating
strategies based on kin, affinal and other personalized networks. As walking to Tabibuga
became routine, they sought to consolidate kin relationships as labour for carrying coffee for
sale and trade store goods. They also sought to consolidate networks that included maternal or
affinal connections to strategic locations on the road network; most commonly these were
important as places to store goods or to sleep in the event of rain or a breakdown in carrying
arrangements. Big men and entrepreneurs were key players in these more localized strategies
but were also more active in developing the range and directness of their personal networks
along the road. Mobility, then, combined the quality of routine movement along the (narrowly)
defined civic space of roads, on which people might simply be met as citizens of the Valley,
with a careful calculation of the accessibility of nodes of security.
If I privilege the perspective of such practices, the island hopping quality I have described
for road travel in 1991 was already incipient in the more overtly civic mobility of 1979/80. By
1991, however, these discursively muted strategies of linking mobility to inside relationships
had become the open rhetorical form of a definitely post-colonial development (see also
Maclean 1994, 2010). Furthermore, this rhetoric was linked to new forms of distinctively
masculine power that were predicated on the evacuation of the civic.
The error, then, of my first period of fieldwork, lay in too simply translating the utility of
the civic into its facticity. Because it worked for me it was easy to overestimate the sedimen-
tation of a civic ethos in both the organisation of space and everyday practices of movement.
What worked for me was rather a function of the civic as aspirational, perhaps more accurately
experimental,20 and thus fundamentally provisional in quality. This brings me back to the issue
of the methodological ground of this error. The experience of 1991 forced me to look beyond
the utility of meaning contexts to the specific intersubjective dynamics of their development.
Precisely because of the (then) provisional utility of the roads and the Tabibuga station as
civic spaces, I was not compelled to coordinate my provisioning strategies with the practices
of my Kwima consociates. While I often did so because that is, after all, fieldwork, the
coordination was not driven by the kind of intimate dependence that governed travel in 1991.
I depended on the moral economy of the hamlet (of which the sociality of fire and food was
one vital part) in my everyday life, but it did not seem that I was equally dependent on such

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a moral economy to move. I argue that the status one gives to this choice is what inflects the
interpretation. If one assumes that the choice is embedded in a convergence of specific forms
of power and meaning in the Jimi road system, then the practices of mobility of my
consociates assume the character of an ethnic strategy in civic space. It would be tempting,
then, to treat those strategies in terms of Lefebvre’s (1991) powerful conceptual triad of spatial
practice, representations of space and representational spaces. A closer examination of that
triad, however, reveals the coordinating assumption that ‘conceptualised space, the space of
scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers . . . is the domi-
nant space in any society’ (Lefebvre 1991: 38–39). Clearly I do not believe that such an
assumption holds for 1991, and this in turn has lead me to reconsider the implications of acting
as if it were true in 1979/80.
It is important to re-emphasize that this contingent relationship between my strategies
and those of my consociates spoke a certain truth because that, after all, was the point of the
Jimi experiment with the civic. The Kwima Councillor, and patriarch of my hamlet, used to
openly fantasize of a world without pigs in which one was free to pursue business. But, in the
end, being white, an outsider, and male, and having an ingrained civic disposition, I was able
to realise this mode of mobility unlike anyone else. By the very nature of the experiment, I was
unhitched from the discipline of the intersubjective coordination of my mobility.
If we are to draw on Lefebvre’s seminal work it is more his warning against the ‘illusion
of transparency’ in which ‘space appears as luminous, as intelligible, as giving action free
rein’ (Lefebvre 1991: 38–39) that is to the point. The relative autonomy with which I
provisioned my fieldwork became a poor guide to the unravelling of the post-colonial experi-
ment and the implosion of government in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s. Because I was not
routinely implicated in the pragmatic reserve with which Maring treated this civic space I
mistook the sociological status of the correspondence between local and Government forms of
spatial rhetoric. As this spatial rhetoric collapsed it was the pragmatic reserve that emerged as
the logic of a new kind of business. In turn, methodologically, the revelation of the full
implications of this new kind of business in 1991 compelled my retrospective recognition of
the thread of evidence for that pragmatic reserve.

AFTERWORD
Ridler’s compelling (1996) essay on friendship in the field is built around the tension between
the empathic quality of a shared ‘way of being’ in the mountains with his friend Pier Paolo
(1996: 252), first experienced some 8 years after the beginning of their friendship, and the
‘epistemological violence’ of the relationship between his representational project and Pier
Paolo’s narratives of self. Ridler draws attention to the fact that the textual reductions of
anthropologists are driven in part by ‘the necessity of shaping experience toward representa-
tion . . . both retrospectively (s/he shapes the account of that experience narratively) but also,
and prior to this, projectively (the ethnographer lives experience toward a text)’ (1996: 243).
This brings me back to my companions’ question about money. It was unsettling for the
disjunctions it revealed, not just between our perspectives on space, but also between our
projects. The question was not one I could answer. I could talk of the manufacture of money,
of forgery, of the durability and circulation life of notes. All this was interesting but it did not
address the underlying problem of the narrative – the where of wealth and power and of the
kind of social agent who might be able to exploit it. For me, the point of the coordination of
our streams of consciousness was to be able to write an inside for an outside audience; to take
the question and turn it into an interpretive perspective on the history of space in the Jimi. For
my companions the point of my difference was to find the ‘line of power’ (Strathern, A. 1984)

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to an outside – a line of power that, ultimately, I do not believe can be found by those so
peripheral to the global economy.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This article covers material collected during three different periods of fieldwork with Maring
speakers in Kwima, Western Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. The first period of
fieldwork of 15 months in 1979/80 was funded by a Commonwealth Postgraduate Research
Award and by a travel grant from the University of Adelaide. This was followed by two further
periods of one month in 1987 and three months in 1991/2, funded by small grants from the
University of Sydney. My thanks go to the residents of Dwend who allowed me to share in the
life of the hamlet. My particular thanks go to Ronold Ti who so patiently assisted with my
work. Thanks also to Tom Ernst who first introduced me to Schutz’s work, although it has
been a long time bearing fruit. Finally my thanks to Martin Forsey and Rosita Henry who
convened the session Revelatory Moments in Fieldwork at the 2009 Australian Anthropologi-
cal Society Conference at Macquarie University for which the first version of this article was
written.

NOTES
1. Until Recently the Jimi Valley was a District of the Western Highlands Province (WHP). The WHP has now
been divided in two and Jimi is part of the new Jiwaka Province.
2. Details can be found at: http://www.bankpng.gov.pg/notes-a-coins/notes-mainmenu-115/66.html?task=view
The notes were distinctive for people because of the new material (polymer) and the ‘Complex clear window
incorporating a vignette of the Bank of Papua New Guinea logo’.
3. In the local usage of Melanesian Pidgin kwesten has connotations of a challenge to power and knowledge.
4. See Lipuma (2001: 1–2) for a 1980 story about the flight of the cassowary that picks up on many of these
‘cargo’ like themes. Lipuma presents it as a‘ “new myth,” nothing more than a fabricated and amusing tale by
Maring lights.’ By 1990 stories with these themes were proposing serious questions about the real source of
wealth.
5. Kumbruf was the site of the first gold mine in the area established by an Australian prospector in the very early
1950s. The Kobana learned the techniques of alluvial mining from him and have continued to mine the site ever
since. This raises a range of questions about the relationship between gold as product of the land, local labour
and magical knowledge on the one hand and money on the other that I cannot pursue here.
6. See Knauft (2005), Strathern and Stewart (2003) and Goddard (2002) for three different histories.
7. Wardlow confirms the magnetic potential of such a small-scale modernity remarking that when she first arrived
in Tari ‘it did not seem a place that would inspire unmanageable feelings of desire’ and yet ‘the longer I was
there . . . the more I myself was intoxicated by the one big store in town’ (2006: 31). In Tabibuga the lure of the
resources of government and Local Government Council was equally compelling.
8. The absolute decline in the civic was reversed with the opening of a Jimi Valley High School. I met graduates
of the High School at the University of Papua New Guinea in 2000. More recently Digicel has built commu-
nication towers in the Jimi to enable mobile phone coverage. Nevertheless people in the Jimi remain at one with
many parts of rural Papua New Guinea in their sense of remoteness from Government and the lack of ‘services’.
See ‘Villagers Cry Out for Services’ Post Courier, Thursday August 5th, 2010. Accessed at: http://
www.postcourier.com.pg/20100805/ruralindustry.htm
Tabibuga has continued to decline as a centre. Recent information sheets from the National Research Institute
(2010) have Kol named as the Jimi District Headquarters and the High School was until recently located at Kol.
The latest news is that even that gain will disappear with the school being relocated to Banz due to decrepit
infrastructure and violence sparked by the election: http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20121016/news12.htm. It
is unclear whether there is now any permanent police presence in the Valley.
9. See Lipuma (2001) for a detailed exploration of the variability of Maring engagements with modernity across
different sites in the social field.
10. See Maclean (2010) for an analysis of the specificity of Maring forms of social closure in terms of the dynamics
of bridewealth, and Maclean (2012) for an analysis of the intersubjective dynamics of intimacy. Lipuma (2001)
has also discussed the more general cosmological and cultural implications of the inside/outside distinction.
11. Merlan and Rumsey (1991) have recuperated the term segmentary to describe these shifting levels of identity
for Highlands Papua New Guinea.
12. See Maclean (1990) for a more detailed account of relations between these clans.
13. The choice of language to describe these businesses is not straightforward. I use the term network to emphasise
the routine goal-directed nature of the arrangements to guarantee mobility and security in pursuit of profit.
However, if one were to emphasise the social basis on which the networks were built and the forms of status

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that attach to them then, in Wagner’s (1991) terms, I could describe Clement as a fractal person bent on
extending his name out across the Valley and beyond, but grounded in the local coalition that is the Yaraka
business group. Matthew Tsaina would be the ‘elbow’ (Strathern, M. 1988: 268–274) that links Clement to
Morokai land. Describing Matthew in these terms does not preclude the fact that Matthew is an entrepreneur
with extensive connections in his own right.
14. I disagree with Stasch’s view that the anthropological study of kinship is an ‘area of ongoing Gemeinschaft-
leaning theoretical sensibilities’ (2009: 12) but agree that the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft binary is a ‘dominant
strand of Western thought’ (2009: 1) that persistently threatens to subsume the analysis of kinship.
15. From the perspective of Kwima people Kol has a long-standing association with development due to its
proximity to the Chimbu District (Simbu Province) and the early development of coffee there. Coffee seedlings
first came into the Jimi through Kol.
16. Bourdieu frames his theorising as a critique of a phenomenology as a ‘subjectivist’ perspective that ‘excludes
the question of the conditions of possibility of . . . experience, namely the coincidence of the objective
structures and internalized structures which provides the illusion of immediate understanding, characteristic of
practical experience of the familiar universe’ (1990: 25–6). Jackson (1996: 20–21) has correctly diagnosed both
Bourdieu’s debt to phenomenology and some of the double-binds inherent in his attempt to escape it. See also
Throop and Murphy (2002), (but also Bourdieu’s 2002 reply), for a similar treatment of Bourdieu’s debt to
phenomenology. Nevertheless two features of Bourdieu’s formulation of the habitus remain important to this
argument: the embeddedness within a specific history and wider politico-economic context; the seeds of
‘habitus’ as concept in Bourdieu’s analysis on the ‘Kabyle House’ (first published in 1970), analysed as a
conjunction of spatial dispositions and microcosmological order. I suspect that the issue of Bourdieu’s debt to
phenomenology takes on an immediate salience in kinship based societies in which lifelong relationships of
consociality are so existentially and structurally significant.
17. See Maclean (2012) for a more sustained treatment of this difference.
18. I walked along that stretch of road once when accompanying a party carrying bridewealth to their Morokai
affines. On a brief fieldtrip in 1987 I flew in and out through the still functioning airstrip at the Anglican Mission
station in Koinambe, further west along the northern face of the Valley from Kwima.
19. Here I am interpreting Schutz drawing on Jackson’s (1998) exploration of intersubjectivity. See also Maclean
(2012).
20. Burridge’s description of cargo as an ‘experimental point of departure from the self’ (1960: 260) captures this
quality.

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