The fractal yam: botanical

imagery and human agency in

the Trobriands
Ma rk S. M osko Australian National University

Anthropologists have long appreciated that animals are ‘good to think’. In this essay I ponder
whether plants might be good to think too, and particularly whether there is any sense in asking if
plants (along with animals) might also be ‘good to act’. The botanical metaphor of ‘base’, ‘body’,
and ‘tip’ animates the origin structures of many if not most societies of the Austronesian world. Less
attention has been directed at indigenous elaborations in other socio-cultural domains of the region.
Based on recent fieldwork, I outline such ramifications in Trobriand culture, drawing upon the
notions of fractal recursion and self-similarity from chaos theory wherein emergent ‘tips’ yield ‘fruit’
which become the condition or ‘base’ for further production and transformation. Accordingly, the
base-body-tip-fruit metaphor serves as a cultural template or scenario for social action, shedding new
interpretative light on many topics of long-standing anthropological interest (e.g. yam propagation,
display, and exchange, kula, mortuary celebration, age categories, fame) as well as more recent
theoretical interests.

Anthropologists have long appreciated that animals are ‘good to think’ (Lévi-Strauss
1966; Tambiah 1968). In this essay I ponder whether plants are good to think too, and
particularly whether there is any sense in asking if plants (along with animals) might
also be ‘good to act’. Distinguished researchers have recently provided affirmative
answers to the first question in The social life of trees (Rival 1998). My second query and
any credible answers to it probably seem more opaque. If ‘good to think’ means
something like ‘indigenous cultural classifications of plants are good for humans to
think with about themselves and the universes in which they live’, then what might it
mean to consider whether plants are ‘good for people to act with in respect of them-
selves, their relations, and their cosmos’?
In his contribution to the aforementioned volume, Maurice Bloch touches on this
issue when, citing Turner, he reminds us that ‘ritual symbols are part of a process ... of
substitution, where one thing “becomes” another’ (1998: 39). I therefore take ‘to act’ to
involve enactments in and with the botanical world which become or affect transfor-
mations in the human world. Specifically, I outline certain action scenarios of Trobriand
Islanders which rely systematically on plant imagery – on the recursive succession of

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u’ula, ‘base’ (also ‘root’, ‘foundation’, ‘origin’, ‘cause’, ‘reason’), tapwala, ‘body’ (‘trunk’,
‘branch’, ‘main part’, ‘back’, ‘middle part’), and doginala, ‘tip’ (‘end’, ‘final part’, ‘head’,
‘peak’, sometimes substituted by dabwala, ‘head’, or matala, ‘eye’).1 Traces of these
scenarios are evident in Malinowski’s and subsequent ethnographers’ writings, but
their systemic pervasiveness and enchainment as substitutions or transformations across
multiple spheres of Trobriand human endeavour have yet to be documented. Also, I
report here that the complete metaphor in the Trobriands typically includes
a fourth element – keyuwela, ‘fruit’ or ‘offspring’ – which emerges from plants’
and other similarly constituted entities’ tips, wherein the capacity for reproduction is
concentrated.
The wide distribution of cognate plant metaphors across the Austronesian world has
been amply demonstrated by James Fox and his collaborators (Fox 1995; Fox & Sather
1996). Those investigations have tended to focus, however, on the spatial inferences of
base, body, and tip for clarifying the nature of island Southeast Asia ‘origin structures’
rather than their temporal implications in semantic and social domains additional to
rank, hierarchy, and precedence.
Based on recent fieldwork at Omarakana village in Northern Kiriwina, the site of
Malinowski’s pioneering ethnography, I describe the ramifications of base-body-tip-
fruit across numerous cultural contexts, concentrating on their sequential enactments
and transformations. I argue that these recursions constitute a key template of and for
meaningful Trobriand social action. In this respect, I conjoin two sophisticated but
seemingly disparate theoretical perspectives on the Trobriands and their immediate
neighbours: Damon’s (1990; 2005) structuralist treatment of Northern Massim cultural
variation in terms of fractal self-similarity or holography, and Munn’s (1977; 1986; 1990)
phenomenological handling of Gawan transformations of value. Despite their differ-
ences, the two are suggestively complementary. Damon’s synchronic analyses provide
abundant evidence of recurrent cultural patterning across the Northern Massim, but he
falls short of identifying possible temporal enchainments amongst them. Munn cap-
tures something of the diachronic linkages between various contexts of action and
thought and the sense in which sequential transformations predicate enhancements of
value, but she elides the sorts of symbolic congruencies which Damon emphasizes. Of
direct relevance to my purposes here, fragments of base, body, tip, and/or fruit appear
sporadically in both Damon’s and Munn’s accounts but these are tangential to their
analyses. By charting the fuller recursive sequencing and inclusive nesting of base-
body-tip-fruit across numerous interconnected contexts, I seek to build upon and ally
Damon’s and Munn’s approaches, thereby enabling new light to be shed on a wide
variety of familiar ethnographic materials while introducing as-yet-unreported indig-
enous conceptualizations of personal agency. A preliminary digression into Damon’s
and Munn’s theoretical viewpoints is therefore necessary.

Fractal holography and phenomenology

Damon’s (2005) ‘fractal’ concept, borrowed from chaos theory in the natural sciences,
refers to relations of holographic self-similarity across phenomena of different scales
(Gleick 1987). The basic point is that every part of some larger, encompassing whole
embodies a small-scale version of that totality, and vice versa. However, fractal-like
relations have already played prominent roles in much anthropological modelling and
have been put to new service by a number of contemporary practitioners (e.g. Mosko
& Damon 2005; Strathern 1991; Wagner 1991).

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Among Melanesianists, Damon’s (1990; 2005) deployments of the fractal notion have
been the most ambitious, aiming to explain synchronic differences within Muyuw
(Woodlark) cultural spheres and across the Northern Massim – e.g. spatial directions,
seasonality, garden and village layouts, spheres of exchange, fishing nets – as self-similar
across numerous differences of scale. Several of his descriptions involve base-body-tip
cognates (see below). Most recently, he (2005) draws on an additional aspect of chaos
theory – non-linearity, as represented by Lévi-Strauss’s (1963) canonic formula for myth
– to account for the regional differences as well as the similarities. My analysis below of
Trobriand self-similarity partly overlaps with Damon’s for Muyuw but exploits an aspect
of fractal relationship that remains undeveloped in his handling, namely the notion that
self-scaling typically involves temporal recursion or enchainment or, in Munn’s terms,
sequentially expansive value transformations (see below) rather than merely synchronic
structuralrepetitionsandencompassments.Replicationsof Trobriandbase,body,tip,and
fruit which I retrace do not simply recur across cultural contexts, they bring forth the
regeneration and/or transformation of other self-similar superordinate entities and
relations. None the less, at one juncture Damon (2005: 83-4) briefly concedes that the
synchronic variations which interest him consciously model the social action of Massim
actors, intimating his view that ‘good to act’ follows from ‘good to think’.
Munn’s (1986) phenomenological treatment of the ‘spacetime’ within which Gawan
Islanders live makes no reference to fractal self-similarity per se. Her notions of ‘differ-
ential levels of spatiotemporal transformation’ and ‘relative capacity to expand or
extend ... intersubjective spacetime’ approximate the idea of processurally recursive
enchainments just introduced, but the possibility that the successive levels or spa-
tiotemporal transforms that she identifies might be, following Damon, formally self-
similar is only dimly hinted. The Gawan notion of wouwura, ‘foundation’, cognate with
Trobriand u’ula, ‘base’, for example, figures in several of her levels (see below), but other
botanical elements (‘body’, ‘tip’, and ‘fruit’) are largely absent.
In further contrast to Damon’s structuralism, Munn’s (1990) phenomenology pre-
supposes that ‘good to think’ follows from ‘good to act’, thus meriting careful scrutiny.
Gawans are island neighbours to Trobrianders and Damon’s Muyuwans with a closely
related culture, language, and social order. For Munn, Gawan sociality consists in
extensions or expansions of spacetime, the spatial and temporal coordinates formed or
created by particular acts and practices. These coordinates include the act or practice
itself but also the relations between persons so involved via transactions and the entities
thereby transacted. Acts and practices, Munn argues, are measured against one another
as ‘value transformations’ in terms of their differential capacities to extend or expand
social relations.
The distinctively phenomenological element that Munn brings to her materials
involves the intersubjective experiences that are generated by acts and practices and
which become conditions of their continuing operation and, hence, of human agency.
Following Giddens, Husserl, Schutz, and others, Munn claims that socio-cultural prac-
tices ‘do not simply go on in and through time and space, but [they also] ... constitute
(create) the spacetime ... in which they “go on” ’ (1986: 11). The ongoing formation of
spacetime through this mechanism plots out an ‘event history’ (Munn 1990: 13) con-
sisting of sequences of reproductions, or substitutions and transformations – partly
resembling my notion of recurrent action scenarios. For Munn, ‘people actively
engage[d] in these practices ... form this intersubjective spacetime in immediate expe-
rience’ (1986: 11). There is, in other words, a structure to this process of event history,

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but one wherein ‘good to think’ follows from ‘good to act’ rather than the reverse. With
reference to Sahlins’s (1985) model of structural history, for example, Munn argues,
‘Thus “cultural structure” does not consist here of a logic of received cultural categories,
“a priori concepts” that appropriate events, as in Sahlins’s well-known neo-Kantian
model. Rather, it refers to a society’s varied ways of forming the spacetime of event
relations in experience’ (1990: 13; see also 1986: 6 ff.).
My analysis of Trobriand agency, human and otherwise, to which I now turn, differs
from both Damon and Munn in relying more thoroughly and systematically on indig-
enous understandings and enactments of the full base-body-tip-fruit metaphor. Once
completed, I shall return to the theoretical issue of whether or in what respects plants
might be ‘good to think’ and/or ‘good to act’.

Base, body and tip – Malinowski

Trobriand cognates of proto-Austronesian base, body, and tip have been noted by
previous investigators. Malinowski (1935a: 140; 1935b: 89) described taytu (or taitu)
subsistence or exchange yams as composed of a tapwana, middle body, a matala, eye,
and a sibula, end, the latter of which today’s villagers claim equates with u’ula, base
or root (see Fig. 1, and below). Malinowski (1935a: 140-1; see Fig. 2) also reported how
yam seed tubers (yagogu) generate shoots from their matala, eye, ends which grow to
produce matala/dogina, growing tips at the ends of vines aboveground, but his terms
for a plant’s trunk, roots, and new tubers (yosila, kari lala’i, tamna, sisisilata, gadena)
differ from tapwana and u’ula. Present-day Omarakanans confirm, however, that
these correspond to sub-types of tapwala and u’ula, so yam tubers and plants are
self-similar. But Malinowski’s account reveals two further anomalies: a plant’s new
tubers or fruit (keyuwela), although harvested from underground, are considered
extensions of its doginala, tip, not its base; and villagers insist that shoots emerge
from a seed’s planted base, not its eye. I shall return to these anomalies at appropriate
points below.

Figure 1. Taitu yam tuber (after Malinowski 1935a: 140).

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Figure 2. Taitu yam plant (after Malinowski 1935a: 141).

Malinowski reported u’ula, tapwana, and dogina/matala in additional contexts.

Magical spells (megwa), he noted, consist of this ‘typical tripartition’ (1992 [1916]: 196,
199-215; 1922: 428-63; 1932: 182). The u’ula opening segment wherein the names of
ancestral performers are invoked is Trobriand magic’s ‘most universal feature’ (1932:
328). In the middle tapwana part, the magician articulates the actions, processes, or
qualities desired. A spell’s concluding doginala enunciate the desired outcomes or
effects. He notes that Trobrianders conceive keda, ‘roads’, according to the same ‘typical
tripartition’ (1935a: 76; 1935b: 140, 147), and even human sexual functions follow this
path. For males, the eye (matala) is

the basis or cause (u’ula) of sexual passion. From the eyes, desire is carried to the brain ... and thence
spreads all over the body to the belly, the arms, the legs, until it finally concentrates in the kidneys. The
kidneys are considered the main or middle part or trunk (tapwana) of the system. From them, the
other ducts (wotuna) lead to the male organ. This is the tip or point (matala, literally eye) of the whole
system (Malinowski 1932: 141-2).

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I have been told that for females the process is identical except that the exposed vaginal
tissues constitute the matala tip. But note for reference below, matala eyes figure here
at both ends, as the base and tip of sexual passion.
Despite its frequent recurrence, only once, I believe, does Malinowski accede to the
botanical metaphor’s full significance. This is in Sexual lives, where, reflecting his
pragmatic anathema for holistic schemes (Tambiah 1990; Young 2004: 140, 238-41,
433-4), he observes but develops no further that the ‘three cardinal points’ of the sexual
system just outlined are ‘characteristic of native canons of classification’ (1932: 143,
emphasis added).

Base, body, and tip – post-Malinowski

While subsequent ethnographers have revealed further traces of base-body-tip
sequencing, none have elaborated upon this last critical insight. In Campbell’s (1983a;
1983b; 2002) treatments of Vakutan kula, the highly decorated canoe prows are marked
as a vessel’s u’una and dogina ends, corresponding to the base and the top of trees from
which they are cut as well as female and male, fertile and infertile, earth and sky, fixed
and mobile, land and sea, and corporate versus individual identity, respectively (2002:
73, 116, 163-4, 177-90). The relative neglect of the middle tapwana hull and outrigger
reduces Campbell’s analysis to a series of binary polarities with little hint of temporal
recursiveness (2002: 153-60; cf. Munn 1977: 42). One informant remarked, however, that
the progression of feminine ‘anchoring’ to masculine ‘movement’ constitutes a keda,
road (2002: 177). Campbell (1983b: 234-5) relates also that Vakutans conceptualize
veigua, shell necklaces (but apparently not mwari, armshells), in accordance with the
three plant parts.2 And in a footnote, she speculates that this classification may also be
reflected in the human body – feet as ‘base’, legs and main body as ‘trunk’, upper body
as ‘top’ (1983b: 247n; cf. Munn 1977: 46-8, and below).
Damon alone has framed his Northern Massim analyses of gardens, villages, fishing
nets, and island landmasses explicitly in terms of fractal self-similarity (1990: 141, 186,
218, 243-5; 2005: 87-9, 93-5). None the less, he elides the significance of base-body-tip
recurrence in favour of the keda/ked road metaphor (1990: 85, 141, 163, 199, 202, 261 n15;
2005: 88). And like Campbell, his allusions to elements of the botanical metaphor focus
predominantly on structural transformations of the base-tip opposition to the neglect
of the middle tapwala body (2005: 82, 83, 98; but see 1990: 141, 163; 1998: 71).
Cognate fragments of the botanical metaphor appear at points in Munn’s analyses of
Gawan sociality (1977: 47; 1986: 55-6, 82, 125). In particular, she describes several key
value transformations as involving wouwura, ‘foundations’ or ‘bases’ (cognate with
Trobriand u’ula) – e.g. the reciprocal hospitality of comestibles between kula partners,
and food exchanges among in-laws (1986: 55-6, 125) – but no data are presented as to
whether the subsequent exchanges or elicited items correspond to tapwala or doginala/
matala. She observes, however, that these foundation gifts do generate paths or roads
(1986: 125). Also, while every person has a wouwura, base – his/her dala, subclan (1986:
82, 287n11) – it is unclear whether they also have corresponding relational bodies or tips.
As at Vakuta, Gawans juxtapose wouwura, ‘back’-end, canoe prows to those at the
dabwara, ‘front’, and again both curiously incorporate mata-ra, ‘eyes’ (1977: 47 n22; see
below). Otherwise, Munn (1986: 82-4) pursues the full wouwura, tapwara, and dabwara
sequence only with respect to magical spells, following Malinowski.
Additional ethnographic reports of the botanical metaphor are even more sporadic.
In Scoditti’s (1996: 68-83) analysis of Kitavan poetic formula (including megwa, magical

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spells), nanola, the ‘seat of the intuitive and intellectual faculties’, occupies the body’s
wawo’ra, which he renders as ‘centre’, though it is unclear whether the verbalizations
generated by/from it correspond to ‘body’ or ‘tip’, or whether any botanical allusions
obtain at all. Hutchins’s portrayal of the logic of Kiriwinan land litigation makes no
explicit reference to the botanical metaphor, but its apparent tripartite structure of
‘premise’, ‘proposition’, and ‘judgment’ (1980: 118) and the recognition of land histories
as keda, roads, suggests a likely convergence. Senft’s (1998) rendering of Kaileunan body
classification, while including such parts as ‘base’, ‘back’, ‘body’, ‘head’, and ‘tip’, elides
their possible botanical referents. Similarly, his treatment of the consistent internal
partitioning of magical spells (1997) makes no mention of sequential u’ula, tapwala, or
doginala sections. Powell’s, Montague’s, and Weiner’s publications make no reference
to the botanical metaphor that I can find, but the latter two authors acknowledge the
significance of keda, roads. Moreover, none of the authors discussed here have consid-
ered that keyuwela, fruit, might belong to the base-body-tip set.
On this evidence, it is difficult to discern whether these partial representations of the
botanical metaphor in the Northern Massim indicate regional variation, historical
changes, or limitations in subjects’ imaginations or investigators’ methods.

Taitu yams
Contemporary Omarakanans appreciate the recurrence of the botanical metaphor in
numerous traditional cultural contexts (gulagula). Prototypically, trees or plants (kai)
consist of the four main parts – u’ula, tapwana, doginala (or matala), and keyuwela (or
uwa) – which are understood as mapping both spatial and temporal growth. Taitu
tubers recapitulate this process – actually conceived as a road – growing along a root
(gadena) swelling first at its base, next in its body, and finally at the tip end. But recall,
maturing in the space otherwise associated with a plant’s roots and base, taitu yams
appear anomalous. Also, Malinowski’s report that roots emerge from a planted tuber’s
eye end is contradicted by contemporary villagers’ accounts.
When presented with these puzzles, my informants responded as follows. Harvested
taitu are of two types, subsistence and/or exchange yams (or taitu proper) and seed
yams (yagogu), each becoming the base of further, but divergent, keda, roads. At the
start of a subsequent agricultural season, yam seeds are sown horizontally in the
ground, each generating a whole yam plant patterned according to the generic scenario
outlined above. The shoots which emerge to become both roots and stems of the new
plant’s base and body, respectively, project from the seed’s u’ula, base end, contra
Malinowski, similarly to the way in which the matala, eyes or tips, of human sexuality
and reproduction (i.e. genitals) protrude from the abdominal base of parents’ bodies
(see above). Taitu yams, in other words, have eyes at both ends, like humans and canoes.
Now as stems grow upward, they produce the main foliage of the plant’s tapwala,
body (or tamu, Malinowski’s tamna), culminating in its uppermost matala, tips and
tendrils. And as the tips of roots grow downward from the seed’s base to constitute the
new plant’s base, they generate additional young tubers whose maturity coincides with
the doginala, end, of the parent plant’s life: that is, subsistence and seed yams are
harvested only as the rest of the plant dies – its luxuriant, moist green foliage becoming
brown and desiccated just before harvest (cf. Malinowski 1935a: 168). This association of
the doginala, tip, of a given base-body-tip-fruit totality with its death recurs in numer-
ous contexts. For example, humans generate baloma, spirits, upon the death of their
bodies (see below), and, I suggest, it may be no coincidence that leaping from the tops

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of coconut palms is a preferred manner of suicide (cf. Malinowski 1932: 399, 424, 475-6).
My main points here are, simply, that young yams emerge as fruit from the spatial and
temporal tips or deaths of vines, and the two, yams and plants, as well as humans are
self-similar.
Yams are also self-similar, however, to the gardens that produce them. At Omara-
kana, clearing, burning, planting, and staking constitute the temporal base (u’ula)
phase of growing a garden. Subsequent tapwana activities include twisting the young
emerging shoots around the vertical uprights, weeding the plants, and, half-way
through the season, pruning the immature tubers. The garden’s mature demise and
harvest correspond to its tip and fruit, respectively. Spatially, gardeners orientate their
rectangular plots (kwabila) with the two u’ula, base, corners nearest to the village, the
furthest corners its doginala, ends, and the area contained therein its tapwala, body, or
lopola, ‘belly’ (Malinowski 1935a: 89-109; 1935a: 99-100; cf. Damon 1990: 141, 143, 147,
163-4, 199, 261 n15). Magicians (towosi) perform their rites moving from the base
corners through the body to the end corners, and harvests proceed accordingly.
Villagers consider gardeners and their wives along with yam vines and plots as
parents of the tubers they grow, and the latter as their children (gwadi) (cf. Malinowski
1935b: 263). The gardener is the yams’ father (tama) and his wife their mother (ina).
And like their human children, their yam children are gendered. Capable of reproduc-
ing, yam seeds are like daughters. As agents of exchange and feeding other humans,
subsistence yams are likened to human sons (see Mosko 1995, and below). Even the
manner of sowing yam seeds is suggestive of these parental relations. During u’ula
planting, the gardener turns the soil with his digging stick held in his right hand, and
pulverizes the clods (kimimisi pwapwaya) with his left hand to form a cavity to receive
the seed and cover it up. Nearby he inserts a vertical yam stick. My interlocutor,
Pakalaki, likened the soil to a womb and the stick to an erect penis. Another Omarakana
resident, Molubabeba, described for me the near-erotic passions men experience when,
especially at dawn or dusk, they view the young vines emerging from the uniform,
horizontal black, moist softened soil as they begin to form around the hard, dry, white,
vertical yam sticks.

Pruning and heaping yams

Mid-way through a growing cycle, gardener-fathers carefully prune (tagudu, basi) the
tubers growing under each plant to form (kuli) a conical clump of several large tubers
at the base, one large tuber at the apex, and a limited number of smaller tubers left in
the middle (Ralph Lawton, pers. comm.; cf. Malinowski 1935a: 151-2). Unpruned, taitu
plants would produce numerous small tubers suitable only for feeding pigs. Gardeners’
prunings, therefore, differentially form feminine seed yams and masculine exchange
yams.
Whereas seed yams cyclically regenerate further yam plants and tubers, the action
scenario or road for exchange yams involves conversion into other valued entities, as
posited by Munn, but ones that are also self-similar to yams. As Malinowski (1935a:
171-4) noted, a gardener initially displays his harvested yams in temporary garden
shelters (kalimomia) for passers-by to admire, with the exchange yams gathered into a
conical heap (gugula) at the shelter’s centre and the seeds sorted into smaller piles at the
base of the shelter’s peripheral walls. Like newborn human children, harvested yams are
white and weak, vulnerable to the darkening and ageing light of the sun. Shelters thus
protect young yams similarly to human mothers’ birth cloaks (saikeula). A heap of

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exchange yams consists of an u’ula, base, typically circumscribed by a short ring fence
(lolewa; see Fig. 3) containing the largest, oftentimes non-symmetrical tubers, a
tapwala, body, composed of consistently proportioned tubers which culminate in the
pile’s doginala, peak. Villagers regard the outermost layer of perfectly shaped tubers,
however, as also a part of the heap’s tip, especially when, as in the case of chiefs, exposed
yams are decorated with paint and pandanus streamers, similar to the adornment of the
skins of human children, adolescents, kula traders, and the recently deceased (e.g.
Weiner 1976: 36, 69, 127, 237-8). The heaping and garden display of exchange yams thus
recapitulates the spatial and temporal coordinates of the now-dead plants and gardens
that grew them and the clusters in which they were formed.
After several days and with great fanfare, the yams are removed from gardens to
villages as the annual harvest payments, mistakenly labelled ‘urigubu’ by Malinowski
(Weiner 1976: 179-83; and see below). In the process, the yam heaps are dismantled or
destroyed and then reconstituted in base-body-tip form (cf. Malinowski 1935a: 179).
This indicates further transferences from the dead garden’s and heaps’ tips to new lives
at the village. The exchange yams are re-heaped in front of the yam house (bwaima) of
their new father (i.e. the man for whom the gardening couple laboured), assuming his
sons and/or in-laws have erected one for him, for days, sometimes weeks, before they
are deposited inside. With much less fanfare, the seed yams are placed in small piles
near their gardening parents’ domicile for only as many days as it takes to construct a
small seed storage house (sokwaipa). Recapitulating the spatial layout of garden shel-
ters, storage houses for seed and exchange yams stand in peripheral feminine and
central masculine regions, respectively, of circular villages (Malinowski 1935a: 242-3,
392-3).

Bwaima yam houses

The two types of storehouse are also holographs of the yams they contain. Seed yam
houses stand on u’ula bases of four wooden posts supporting rectangular log-cabin-
like tapwala storage cavities topped with dried coconut fronds to protect the young

Figure 3. Garden shelter (kalimomia) and yam heap (gugula). (Photo by Mark Mosko, 2007.)

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seeds from the sun (Fig. 4). Omarakana’s exchange yam storage houses have changed
little from Malinowski’s (1935a: 255 ff.) day, each with four or six foundation stones and
large horizontal beams upholding a quadrate storage area capped by a thatched roof,
the exteriors of which are decorated in the case of Tabalu chiefs (Fig. 5). It is not
insignificant that both seed and exchange yams are jettisoned from storehouse tips
when being put to villagers’ subsequent purposes (cf. Malinowski 1935a: 257).

Yams exchanges for valuables

Whereas seed yams retained by their gardening parents are replanted to regenerate
self-similar plants and tubers, stored exchange yams are redirected by their adopted
parents along divergent action scenarios or roads into male and female wealth and,
eventually, food. My 2006-9 field inquiries confirm my earlier argument (Mosko 1995:

Figure 4. Seed yam storage house. (Photo by Mark Mosko, 2007.)

Figure 5. Exchange yam storage house (Photo by Mark Mosko, 2006.)

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770-3) that there are two prototypical categories of harvest ‘payment’ linking the yam
growers and recipients. On the one hand, every adult male is expected to plant annually
a kaimata main garden for a senior male, ideally his father or another man who stands
in relationship to him as a metaphorical or adoptive father, such as the village leader or
chief on whose land he gardens. On the other, the father of a married daughter is
expected annually to give yams yielded from a separate plot to his daughter’s husband.
If the yams from a man’s main plot are given to his daughter’s husband, they are
kaimata; if his main plot is directed to his father, leader, or chief, the yams for his
daughter’s husband are termed kaimwila (cf. Hutchins 1980: 23; Weiner 1976: 140).
Where Malinowski and others have gone astray in claiming that ‘urigubu’ (sic) is mainly
given by a man to his sister’s husband is in assuming that the brother does so as a
representative of his dala. Instead, my informants insist that when a brother gives
annual yams to his sister’s husband, he acts on behalf of, or in place of, his father (cf.
Weiner 1976: 140-53, 197-8; 1988: 82-4). Generally, a son gardens for his father as long as
the latter lives, and it is the father who designates the person for whom the son will
garden on his behalf, either with kaimata payments to the local leader or chief or as
kaimata/kaimwila gifts to the father’s daughter’s husband.
As already noted, the man who receives exchange yams becomes their adoptive
father. Periodically he is expected to return (takola, sasova) to the man who gardens for
him a veigua article of male wealth, prototypically a stone axe-blade (beku), but a clay
pot, shell valuable, or nowadays money is sometimes substituted (cf. Malinowski 1935a:
190, 372; Weiner 1976: 179-83). A base-body-tip heap of masculine yams lost at the end
of harvest, in other words, yields as keyuwela, fruit, for the gardener an article of male
wealth shaped, in the case of axe-blades, holographically with an u’ula, base, at the
hafting end, a matala, eye, at the sharpened end, and an intermediate tapwana, body
(Ralph Lawton, pers. comm.). This item of male wealth becomes the adoptive child of
the man who receives it, which as fruit he can convert into the base of further exchange
roads (cf. Munn 1986: 156-7; Weiner 1976: 179-85).

Opening, intermediate, and closing kula gifts

Kula transactions constitute the anthropologically most well-documented of these
roads. If the takola/sasova a man receives is a shell valuable that is not already moving
along an established kula path, it becomes his kitomu, his child (cf. Leach & Leach 1983),
and the potential base (u’ula) of a new kula road when given as an ‘opening’ (vaga) gift
to a kula partner. Subsequent ‘intermediate gifts’ (basi) constitute that road’s tapwala,
body, and the ‘closing gift’ (kudu) that kills the road its doginala, tip (cf. Campbell 1983a;
Damon 1990: 92; Malinowski 1922: 98, 353-7). However, as elsewhere in the culture, a
second vaga opening shell given to accompany the closing gift, like fruit, enables the
initiation of a new road from the death of a prior one (cf. Campbell 1983a: 215-6;
Damon 1983: 315, 325-6; Munn 1977: 44-6).

Yams exchanged for banana-leaf bundles

Alternatively, Trobrianders convert exchange yams into ‘women’s wealth’ – banana-leaf
bundles (nununiga) and colourful skirts (doba) – as further recursions of the botanical
metaphor. As Weiner has noted, yam-bundle and skirt transactions are effected during
lisaladabu, mortuary ceremonies (1976: 91-120; 1988: 116-38; cf. Mosko 1985: 220-8; 1995:
773-4), but also in their manufacture and bartering.

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Lisaladabu rites are performed during the post-harvest (milamala) season after
exchange yams have been distributed to their new parents. In one of the principal
categories of lisaladabu exchange termed kaimelu, women assemble small heaps of
bundles for each man who presented them and/or their husbands with raw exchange
yams at either harvest-time or previous mortuary celebrations. The yams men grow for
other men thereby elicit female-wealth bundles from the latter men’s wives paralleling
the takola/sasova gifts of male wealth (cf. Weiner 1976: 110-12; 1988: 120, 131). The
receiving man’s wife takes possession of the bundles as the two become those bundles’
adoptive father and mother. The bundle children thus replace the lost and dead (i.e.
now-cooked and eaten; see below) yam-children as the fruit of the latter (cf. Weiner
1976: 79, 80, 104-5).
Moreover, the received bundles are self-similar to the yams that generate them and
which they supplant. The end where a bundle’s separate leaf-strips are tied is its u’ula,
base, the undecorated, fluffed-out middle portion is its tapwala, body, and the fringe of
loose decorated strip ends is its doginala, tip. These bundle zones recapitulate the
process of their manufacture (Fig. 6). The husbands of women who manufacture
bundles are their fathers partly because it is they who plant the special species of banana
plant (Gunter Senft, pers. comm.). Each bundle is made of strips taken from opposite
sides of a single leaf. After cutting the strips, bundle mothers scrape them from leaf-
centre to leaf-edge against an engraved wooden board provided by bundle fathers
which impresses designs onto the strip tips as instances of paternal ‘forming’ (kuli)
agency (Mosko 1995: 767-70). Like seed yams, old ‘dirty’ bundles can be retied to
reproduce ‘clean’ ones, which can be given in exchange for men’s prior gifts of yams.
New leaf strips can also be made into colourful skirts (doba) which signify the creation
of new reproductive relations among humans; but here, only new clean leaf strips can
be used (cf. Weiner 1976: 94). Unsurprisingly, villagers manufacture and conceptualize
skirts in three parts: a waistband string and flattened white leaves as u’ula base, a middle
tapwala portion of short frayed coloured leaves, and long red frayed dogina tips (Fig. 7).
The central lisaladabu transaction occurs when dala relatives of the deceased give to
the deceased’s father and spouse huge bundle piles, termed pela sepwana, that are
self-similar to the bundles of which they are chiefly composed. The main body of

Figure 6. Banana-leaf bundle (nununiga). (Photo by Mark Mosko, 2006.)

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bundles (tapwala) is piled high and tied atop a flattened coconut-leaf basket (u’ula,
base) with skirts, mats, calico, and paper money attached to its top (doginala) (Fig. 8; cf.
Weiner 1976: 105; 1988: 125). Clay pots, axe-blades, and other valuables are often trans-
ferred at the moment when pela sepwana are exchanged, and they are likewise regarded

Figure 7. Decorated young girl wearing banana-leaf skirts (doba). (Photo by Mark Mosko, 2006.)

Figure 8. Mortuary heaps of banana-leaf bundles (pela sepwana). (Photo by Mark Mosko, 2006.)

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as doginala portions of the prestation. But later, like fruit, these uppermost items
particularly have the capacity to be diverted into other paths and regenerate other new
relations (see below).
In urgent need of bundles, women can ‘barter’ (valova) for them with a wide range
of items (e.g. tobacco, pig meat, fish, areca nut, mats, trade store goods, or cash),
including exchange yams (Weiner 1976: 78-80). Until recently, seed yams could never be
exchanged this way, underscoring the separated paths of the two yam categories. Also,
women typically rely on husbands for yams or other barter items so they jointly become
parents of the acquired bundles.

Cooking and alimentation

The conversion path of exchange yams leads ultimately to their transformation into
food which, when eaten, sustains human bodily life. Taitu yams are the prototypical
‘body-building food’ (kaula) for Trobrianders (Montague 1985). But they must be
cooked by women before they can be eaten, normally at morning and evening on
self-similar hearths (Fig. 9). The three or four coral stones (kailagila) a woman receives
from her husband’s mother at marriage along with the wood fire they enclose is her
hearth’s u’ula, base. A clay (or nowadays aluminium) pot and contained food and water
ingredients constitute its tapwala, body. In my observation, women prepare yams by

Figure 9. Hearth-stones (kailagila) and hearth, here with fish tins substituted. (Photo by Mark Mosko,
2008.)

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slicing off the coarse skin and, with quick knife-strokes, detach the base and eye ends,
placing only the middle, body part of tubers into the hearth’s body. A large leaf or
aluminum cover serves as the hearth’s doginala, top, from which the cooked food is
removed as fruit. Cooked food is a substance fundamentally transformed by the proper
spatial and temporal ordering of all hearth elements. Cooking kills the raw yams, but
unlike seed yams, which also die when they are planted in gardens, exchange yams
cannot generate new yam plants. They none the less contain the vital capacity to feed
and sustain human bodies.3
The feeding of cooked yams to family members thus recapitulates the conversions of
harvested yams into pruned clumps, garden heaps, storage houses, male wealth,
banana-leaf bundles, and so on. In all of these transformations, fractal recursions of
base, body, and tip unfold as life-stages culminating in death, fruit, and new life
sequences. In the particular case of yams, the botanical metaphor offers a new under-
standing of why in the Trobriands and possibly other parts of the Massim yams are
regarded as people and vice versa.

Childhood, adulthood, elderhood, and baloma

Trobrianders’ identifications between yams and people are complex, however, involv-
ing additional temporally enchained self-similar recurrences and conversions. Omara-
kanans claim that human life consists of four phases of personal growth – childhood,
adulthood, elderhood, and existence as a baloma, spirit, after death – corresponding to
the base, body, tip, and fruit of a person’s total life. Childhood lasting from conception
to marriage constitutes the foundation (u’ula) of a person’s life wherein parents’
devotions are most concentrated. In adulthood following marriage, the tapwala phase
of human life, people become parents themselves, procreating and growing children
through sexual activity and various gender-defined labours (giving birth, gardening,
cooking, fishing, etc.). The doginala, tip, of human life consists in old age or elderhood
(male toboma, female naboma) when parents’ contributions to adult children emanate
chiefly from their minds in the form of magical and other secret knowledge. Elderhood
ends with the death of the body and the exit of a baloma, soul or spirit, as a person’s
fruit. These relationships, moreover, have direct implications for indigenous notions of
personhood and human agency.
Through cooking, the inassimilable peula (‘power’, ‘strength’) contained in raw yams
and other foods is transformed so it can be incorporated by humans. Similarly to how
the prepared tapwala, bodies, of yams enter a hearth’s body, upon ingestion cooked
food is deposited into a person’s lopola, ‘belly’, and from there its peula is carried by
blood (buyavi or buyai) to the rest of the body. Partly for this reason, villagers do not
regard cooked food as the u’ula, base, of their lives or bodies; the lower limbs including
the genitals are attributed this status.4 The lopola, belly or trunk, above the genitals
including the upper limbs is the literal tapwala, middle-body, culminating in the
uppermost doginala, tip, in the form of dabwala, top or head, or matala, eye.
As noted above, this classification from lower to upper extremities reverses the
base-body-tip sequence for human sexual arousal and yam seed propagation, suggesting
the mutual exclusiveness and inverse directionality of sexual and alimentary roads.Sexual
intercourse is forbidden in gardens, for example, and cooking is prohibited within the
central portion of villages where raw exchange yams are stored (cf. Malinowski 1932: 60).
However,classification of the lower extremities including the genitals as bodilyu’ula,base,
also suggests that human children, like other categories of children, are fractal recursions

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of their parents.A child’s father and mother are said to be the u’ula, base, from which they
are produced, particularly in the sense that the parents’ genital tips are the child’s cause
or origin and that the produced child is considered fruit of the parents.
The fate of dead humans’ souls and bodies parallels the divergent roads of seed and
exchange yam conversion (cf. Malinowski 1932; 1992 [1916]; Weiner 1976; 1988). Released
baloma travel initially to Tuma, the world of the dead, but eventually they return to the
world of the living as waiwaia, ‘spirit children’, to regenerate new humans much as seed
yams reproduce new yam plants. The indigenous treatment of corpses is a topic far too
complicated to discuss here fully, particularly as concerns chiefly dala; but in general
during pre-colonial times, although people’s dead bodies were initially buried in the
ground, exhumed, and variously redeposited, they lacked the analogous capacities of
seed yams and baloma spirits to generate new humans. People’s bodies, however, much
like exchange yams, were effectively converted into other self-similar valuables – pela
sepwana, mortuary prestations (see above) – composed of female and male wealth (i.e.
baskets, leaf bundles, skirts, pots, axe-blades). Once received by the deceased’s father’s
and spouse’s relatives, pela sepwana heaps were dismantled, and various items of which
they were composed, particularly those included as doginala, tip, were deployed as fruit
to create new relations along new reproductive paths.
Under the influence of Christianity, of course, Trobrianders have abandoned some
elements of their eschatological notions and practices, but not the ritual conversion of
souls and corpses, respectively, into self-similar humans and non-human items of value
and exchange in accordance with the botanical metaphor as I have outlined here. Of
further significance to anthropological understandings of Trobriand mortuary prac-
tice, the base-body-tip construction of pela sepwana heaps followed by their disman-
tling or death and redistribution as fruit lends further support to my earlier arguments
(Mosko 1985: 220-5; 1995: 773-4) against Weiner that the chief function of lisaladabu
generally and sagali (funerary distributions) specifically is to end, sever, or ‘de-conceive’
the deceased and pre-existing relations between his/her surviving dala-mates and
father’s and spouse’s kin, not to mend, repair, reconstitute, or extend them.

Human agency and fame

The final expression of the botanical metaphor I shall consider here coincides with
what in contemporary Melanesian ethnography would be considered the indigenous
theory of personal agency. For just as human beings are the products of the other
self-similar entities and action scenarios I have described, human intentions, efforts,
and results are understood in terms of base-body-tip-fruit recursion.
As my Omarakana associates explain, the u’ula, base, of a person’s action, as distinct
from the action itself (see below), consists of a simuli, which they gloss in English as a
‘plan’ or ‘scheme’. A simuli in a person’s mind (nanola) includes his/her plans for a
future action. They insist, however, a simuli is not synonymous with the English
meaning of ‘plans’, ‘intentions’, or ‘motivations’; it goes much deeper. A person’s simuli
consists of the totality of ‘images’ or elements of ‘knowledge’ (kaikobu or kaikwabu) in
his/her mind that is relevant to a specific contemplated action. It is understood that
people acquire their simuli images mainly through the medium of ‘advice’ (guguya)
which they receive primarily from their parents, and especially what fathers give to sons
and mothers to daughters.
People can receive images from many sources, as when children receive advice from
relatives and elders besides parents, and any of this advice can contribute to the

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formation of simuli in later life. But as villagers stressed to me, advice received from
relatives and elders can only point you in the right direction, it cannot take you step by
step along any given path. For that kind of advice, people rely on their parents, and
especially that which parents give to them as kalisam, or ‘whispers’. When parents
convey the same advice to all their children uniformly, it is not kasilam. Kasilam is a
much finer, more specific, and, most of all, private kind of advice when the parent
whispers directly into a chosen child’s ear from the very tips of his/her lips. Magical
spells (megwa) fall into the category of kasilam, as parents are expected to pass this
knowledge to one child only, sometimes partitioning their spells among different
children. Whispers thus contain the truly important and distinctive images with which
children formulate their personal simuli to guide their lives. Indeed, several of my
interlocutors likened parental whispers to fruit, the final personal detachments parents
are understood to transmit to children only in their dying moments.
To the extent that children’s simuli replicate or regenerate their parents’ images,
children are regarded as self-similar to their progenitors.The advice children receive from
parents is understood to give form to their simuli as the base (u’ula) of their life-long
personal characters.The images thereby organized into one’s simuli set the parameters for
everything else one senses, experiences, and does in subsequent existence.
Now if the images constituting one’s simuli are complete and nothing from parents
or others has been distorted or left out, a person should be successful or effective in
dealing with the world as presented. When people fail in anything, others assume that
they did not receive appropriate images from their parents or, perhaps, that the parents
possessed similarly impoverished simuli in the first place. It is for the same reason that
villagers regret that the children of unwed mothers lack fathers. They have no one to
give them proper paternal advice (cf. Malinowski 1932: 166).
The tapwala, body of action, to which a person’s simuli gives rise qualifies as his/her
kepwakari. In keda, road, terms, one’s kepwakari actions, are the actual steps one takes in
life, consisting mainly in corporeal labours (paisewa). The distinctive ways a man works
to create a garden,carve a canoe,carry his children,organize his lineage’s sagali exchanges,
practise kula,andsoon,arehiskepwakari,basedinandsubstantiatinghissimuli.Similarly,
the manner in which a woman cooks food for her family, manufactures and accumulates
bundles, engages in gossip, and cares for her children are kepwakari instantiations of her
simuli. And it is on the evidence of one another’s kepwakari that people estimate the
character of their respective simuli and those of their parents before them.
The realized ends or outcomes of a person’s kepwakari actions become his/her
karewaga – variously defined thus far as ‘authority’, ‘decision’, ‘power’, ‘autonomy’,
‘responsibility’, and so on (cf. Lawton 2002; Munn 1986: 68). Each of these glosses carries
some element of indigenous understanding, and villagers assert also that the realization
of karewaga is most people’s main goal in living. But Omarakanans insist, one’s karewaga
exists or is realized only in its recognition by other people. Thus karewaga is not the same
as the kepwakari actions from which it is produced. Successfully conducting a kula career
so as to acquire numerous renowned shells is an element of a man’s kepwakari actions.
The karewaga of becoming a kula master, however, involves others’ additional acknowl-
edgement of that success. Only with this recognition do the karewaga man’s or woman’s
decisions have agentive effects on other persons in that sphere of activity,or more properly
in relation to that road or action scenario. Seen in this light, karewaga is the end product
– the dogina tip – of the body of one’s kepwakari actions as performed in accordance with
the images of one’s simuli base.

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Persons are understood to enjoy the karewaga they have constructed through their
actions for as long as they live, but with death their karewaga disintegrates and dies. But
as with other action scenarios informed by the botanical metaphor, the death of one’s
karewaga generates fruit containing alternative capacities for regeneration and repro-
duction paralleling the roads of exchange and seed yams. Upon death, a man’s disin-
tegrated karewaga in kula, say, will be converted, on the one hand, into a new form – his
butula ‘fame’ or, literally, ‘noise’ – which persists and circulates far and wide around
Massim in the absence of his person; on the other, the dying man’s karewaga effectively
regenerates itself/himself in the form of the whispers released from his lips that become
incorporated in the simuli base characteristics of his children, who accordingly assume
his personal form (see Mosko 1995). A woman’s karewaga is similarly converted into the
fame arising from successful transactions with bundles and skirts or the human chil-
dren – waiwaia spirit children reincarnated from Tuma – to whom she gives birth.
Furthermore, these complementary bifurcations of both men’s and women’s agencies
in terms of the specific fruit they produce and contribute adds considerable refinement
and clarity to the gendered distinction of historical and cosmic time posited by Weiner
(1976: 20-1, 230-1). Women’s agency in the creation of fame and men’s in the procre-
ation of children, I suggest, are, as fruit, comparatively short-lived, whereas men’s
agency in the production of fame and women’s in reproducing children are relatively
long-lived. Through their differential fruit, in other words, both women and men
contribute differentially to historical as well as cosmic time.

Conclusion
From the time of Malinowski’s ethnography onwards, fragments of the pan-
Austronesian botanical metaphor have been recorded for numerous Trobriand cultural
contexts. In this article, drawing upon the notion of fractal self-similarity, I have
illustrated how Omarakanans’ recurrent employment of base, body, tip, and fruit is
much more thorough-going and systematic than has been noted so far and sheds new
light on a wide range of familiar ethnographic imponderabilia.
In the main, I have concentrated on cultural domains – or, more accurately, cultur-
ally recognized roads – additional to the sorts of botanically inflected origin structures
on which Fox and others have focused in Eastern Indonesia. On the kind of evidence
presented here, it is likely that those structures are also self-similar to additional local
trajectories of indigenous classification and practice. For example, in the Trobriands
the recursiveness of base, body, tip, and fruit that I have outlined lends considerable
support, on the one hand, to the presence of the sort of structural analogies in garden-
ing, seasonality, directions, fishing nets, and geography across the Massim posited by
Damon, among others. On the other, these recurrences are not merely synchronic
replications across diverse cultural contexts, as Damon has tended to represent them.
Every action scenario of base-body-tip-fruit contains within itself the implication of
temporal progression in that order, and every fruit generated by a particular tip has the
potential for fractal extension either for reproduction or for transformation into the
base of some further form. These two kinds of sequential phasing – from base to body,
tip, and fruit, and from fruit to additional base-body-tip-fruit successions – effectively
map out the numerous and diverse action scenarios that conform to the bifurcating
organization of people’s cultural classifications and activities. Some recursions are
cyclical or continuous – as when yam seeds as fruit regenerate the base of yam plants
whose fruit are yam seeds once again, as when genital bases of adults reproduce human

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children similarly endowed for reconstituting further children in their own right, or
when children incorporate in their simuli the advice whispered by parents. Alterna-
tively, the fruit of a given base-body-tip sequence sometimes initiates conversions into
other forms – as when yam seeds produce self-similar yam plants, as when people
labour to produce self-similar gardens or yam heaps, or when men’s kula careers are
converted into fame that extends beyond the immediate circumstances of their lives.
Not coincidentally, perhaps, divergences analogous to these have already been iden-
tified for the region in some of the key works of the New Melanesian Ethnography
(Josephides 1991) – for example, in Strathern’s (1988: 225-305) contrast between ‘forms
which propagate’ and ‘relations which separate’, and Munn’s (1986) distinction between
value ‘replications’ or ‘continuities’ and value ‘transformations’. One significant merit of
the botanical metaphor as I have deployed it here, with possible implications for
elsewhere in the Austronesian sphere, is that it conjoins in indigenous terms these two
distinct kinds of processes and agencies as articulated expressions and phases of fractal
recursion and conversion.5
Moving from fractal yams to holographic people, I am led to posit a number of
theoretical refinements to anthropological understandings of indigenous Melanesian
personal agency – a topic central also to the New Melanesian Ethnography (Mosko
1995; Strathern 1988; Wagner 1991). Although the botanical metaphor among Trobri-
anders is strongly conditioned by considerations of gender, for instance, the recursive
dynamics distinctive to its deployment involve categorizations additional to male/
female – most notably base, body, tip, and fruit. My point here is that Melanesian
personal partibility may operate according to axes of meaning other than same-sex/
cross-sex distinction (cf. Strathern 1988).
Between the two antecedent formulations of Massim sociality on which I principally
build here – Damon’s structuralism and Munn’s phenomenology – Munn ventures the
furthest in the direction of agency. Indeed, those familiar with her materials will have
recognized that some of the Trobriand substitutions and conversions which I have
presented as base-body-tip-fruit recursions parallel Gawan reproductions and transfor-
mations of value which originate from their own wouwura ‘foundations’ or bases. My
concern is that Munn’s otherwise impressive treatment is heavily burdened by recourse
to a body of exogenous formulation – namely the phenomenology of Western philosophy
– which has developed independently of the Massim cultural universe. At one juncture,
Munn (1986: 11) even concedes that Gawans do not speak about themselves and their
experiences in terms paralleling her abstractions. Of course, the same might be said of my
use of ‘fractal self-similarity’ drawn from chaos theory. However, while it is possible that
the success of Munn’s analysis is due to her phenomenological insights, one can legiti-
mately ask whether indigenous counterparts such as the Austronesian action scenario of
base, body, tip, and fruit, when available, might not yield understandings which more
closely approximate the experiences of Gawans and Trobrianders themselves.
As a case in point, and regarding Gawan personal agency specifically, Munn renders
kareiwaga (cognate with Kilivilan karewaga) as the ‘ultimate basis of action’ (1986: 69,
emphasis added). Had she been more sensitive to Gawan utilizations of plant meta-
phors rather than Western philosophizing, in other words, she might have appreciated
that the ‘basis’ of action is rather understood to be something resembling a Trobrian-
der’s simuli, ‘plan’, so that a man’s or woman’s kareiwaga instead constitutes the
outcome or tip (i.e. doginala) of those actions. Similarly, an awareness of the botanical
imagery in Gawan conceptualizations of human agency would have enabled Munn

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(1986: 114-18) to clarify more precisely the distinction between ‘fame’ and ‘influence’ in
relation to kareiwaga (‘decision’, ‘authority’; see above). These points, I think, under-
score the importance of ethnographically prioritizing indigenous categorical schemata
over exogenous ones whenever possible.
Munn’s attraction to Western phenomenology comes, in my view, at the expense of
a further, related analytical cost. Because her treatment of agency and value transfor-
mation tends to engage with only part of the full botanical schema – i.e. ‘base’ or
‘foundation’ to the exclusion of body, tip, and fruit – she is free to assert that it is from
people’s experiences of their actions and practices that cultural categories descriptive of
the world (including people themselves) are generated, rather than the reverse. For
Munn (1990), then,‘cultural structure’ consists phenomenologically in the formation of
spacetime through the experience of relations among events. Recall here Munn’s (1990)
critique of Sahlins’s structural history approach and its reliance on neo-Kantian a priori
concepts and ‘a logic of received cultural categories’. In this respect, Munn departs also
from Strathern’s (1988) formulation of the dynamics of Melanesian personal partibility,
which, it can be argued, is informed by a logic of received categorization of same-sex and
cross-sex relations. In light of my presentation of the recurrence of enchained base-
body-tip-fruit action scenarios along numerous paths of Trobriand thought and prac-
tice, however, it is difficult to accept that villagers’ conceptualizations of extensible
spacetime emerge primarily from their experiences of event relations when the relations
between events are consistently recognized and culturally structured as such by the
pervasive logic of base-body-tip-fruit recursion and inclusion.
On this evidence, the cultural structure of Trobriand personal agency appears to
consist of a logic of received cultural qua botanical categories. If so, then anthropolo-
gists ought to ponder the possibility that in the Austronesian sphere and possibly
beyond, plants, like animals, might indeed be good to act as well as think.

NOTES
This article is based upon eight months of ethnographic research based at Omarakana village during
July-October 2006, May-July 2007, April-May 2008, and April-June 2009. The Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research and the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National
University generously provided funding. The Tabalu Paramount Chief, Pulayasi Daniel, was my host and one
of several key interlocutors with respect to the new ethnographic information presented in this article. The
2008 and 2009 fieldtrips afforded me an opportunity to elicit numerous corrections to an earlier draft from
knowledgeable Omarakanans, Tabalu and non-Tabalu, and others. Besides the Paramount Chief, I am greatly
indebted to Molubabeba Daniel, Pakalakai Tokulapai, George Masulua, Mairawesi Pulayasi, Tokulapai Tam-
wanesa, Togugua Tobodeli, Yogalu Vincent, Kevin Kobuli, Mutabalu Tokwasemwala, Toby Mokagai, Modiala
Daniel, John Kasaipwalova, and Stanley Elliot. Previous versions of this article were presented at anthropol-
ogy seminars and conferences at Aarhus University, the Australian National University, and the European
Society for Oceanists (Verona). Numerous colleagues provided valuable comments and criticisms including
Ralph Lawton, Gunter Senft, Stephen Gudeman, Ton Otto, Margaret Jolly, Robert Foster, Shirley Campbell,
Kathy Lepani, Charles Lepani, Susan Montague, Micah Van der Ryn, Nils Bubandt, Aparecida Vilaca, Allan
Darrah, Jay Crain, Marilyn Strathern, Courtney Handman, Simon Coleman, and three anonymous referees.
I am solely responsible for any deficiencies in the data and analysis contained herein.
1
Kilivilan linguists Ralph Lawton and Gunter Senft (pers. comms) disagree as to whether /’/ in u’ula
represents a true glottal stop or an elongated pronunciation uula. I shall follow Malinowski’s written
rendering as u’ula. Also, my spellings of u’ula, tapwala, doginala, dobwala, and keyuwela represent the
northern Kiriwinan singular third-person inalienable possessive, or /-la/. When discussing other ethnogra-
phers’ renderings in different dialects, I retain their original spellings.
2
My Omarakana interlocutors claim that the main circular conus shell of a mwali, armshell, is its u’ula,
base, that the attached cowrie shells constitute its tapwana, body, and that the shell fragments, nutshells, and
beads suspended from them are its doginala, tip (cf. Munn 1986: 44, 114, 331).

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 The fractal yam 699

3
This contrast between seed and exchange yams parallels the complementary reproductive and feeding
relations of Trobriand mothers and fathers, respectively (see Mosko 1995).
4
Malinowski (1932: 371-2) reported that Trobrianders do not regard food as a requirement for human life.
Today’s Omarakanans flatly reject this, claiming that the peula from food is necessary for the body to work
and otherwise act. I suspect that Malinowski mistook villagers’ claims that food was not the u’ula, base or
cause, of human existence as a blanket denial of food’s efficacy.
5
Tony Crook’s (2007) recent analysis of Bolivip ritual practice, which was not available to me until I had
received referees’ comments, is similarly constructed around recurrent indigenous understandings of plants
and plant growth involving base, body, and tip. And inasmuch as Bolivip are not Austronesian-speakers, there
is a possibility that the botanical metaphor is more widely distributed than I have assumed here.

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L’igname fractale : imagerie botanique et agency humaine aux

îles Trobriand

Résumé

Les anthropologues ont compris il y a longtemps déjà que les animaux sont « bons à penser ». Dans cet
essai, l’auteur se demande si les plantes sont elles aussi bonnes à penser, et en particulier s’il vaut la peine
de se demander si les plantes (comme les animaux) pourraient être « bonnes à agir ». La métaphore
botanique de « base », « corps » et « tête » anime les structures originelles de beaucoup de sociétés du
monde austronésien, sinon toutes. On s’est moins intéressé aux élaborations indigènes de la région
dans d’autres domaines socioculturels. Sur la base d’un récent travail de terrain, l’auteur retrace ces
ramifications dans la culture trobriandaise, utilisant les notions de récursivité fractale et d’autosimilitude
de la théorie du chaos, selon lesquelles les « têtes » donnent des « fruits » qui deviennent la condition ou
« base » d’une nouvelle production et transformation. En conséquence, la métaphore base-corps-tête-fruit
sert de modèle culturel ou de scénario d’action sociale, jetant un nouvel éclairage interprétatif sur de
nombreux sujets qui intéressent depuis longtemps les anthropologues (tels que la propagation, la
présentation et l’échange des ignames, la kula, les célébrations mortuaires, les classes d’âge, la renommée),
mais aussi sur de nouvelles questions théoriques plus récentes.

Mark S. Mosko is Professor of Anthropology in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the
Australian National University. He has enjoyed a long-term interest in Trobriand ethnography as a point of
comparison to his research over thirty-five years among North Mekeo (Papua New Guinea). He is now
embarking upon a three-year project of fieldwork at Omarakana focused on the dynamics of Trobriand
chieftainship, sociality, and cosmology.

Department of Anthropology, RSPAS, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia.
mark.mosko@anu.edu.au

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 15, 679-700

© Royal Anthropological Institute 2009