reconciling cultural order and individual agency: complexity theory and the mekeo case

Anthropological Theory

10(4) 361–383

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DOI: 10.1177/1463499610386661

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Article

Reconciling cultural orderand individual agency:Complexity theory andthe Mekeo case

Steen BergendorffRoskilde University, Denmark

Abstract

This article argues that complexity theory offers concepts that could fruitfully be used

as inspiration to solve the long-standing debate between methodological holism versus

individualism. The article illustrates this by looking at the case of the Mekeo of PNG and

suggests that when complexity theory is transferred to society, we have to look at the

nature of local and individual interaction and the way this is linked to energy intake from

the environment, which for human communities to a large extent is based on some

form of exchange with other groups, and the way this form of interaction creates

emergent properties – or what we could call a cultural order. Complexity theory

would also suggest that change in the intake of energy (exchange possibilities) can at

certain points lead to phase shifts, or, as it is called in complexity theory, bifurcations, as

when a gas changes into a solid or water into ice. Seen in this light, Mekeo society seems

presently to be in the middle of a bifurcation.

Keywords

culture, complexity, holism-agency, Mekeo, Papua New Guinea

Introduction

The relationship between individuals and society has long been debated in thesocial sciences. Do people create culture through their individual practices (e.g.Watkins 1958) or is it culture that determines people’s behaviour (e.g. Goldstein1956)? These opposing views have come to be known as methodological individu-alism and methodological holism, respectively, and they are normally consideredtwo extreme positions in the individual-society debate.1 However, in this article

Corresponding author:

Steen Bergendorff, Institute of Development Studies, Universitetsvej 1, Roskilde University, P.O. Box 260,

Roskilde DK-4000, Denmark

Email: [email protected]

I use the case of the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea to show that the same societymay lend itself more readily to both explanations, but at different points in history.

Traditionally, Mekeo society has mostly been studied within a methodologicalholism paradigm (Hau’ofa 1971; Stephen 1985; Mosko 1985). This may be due tothe fact that the Mekeo chieftainship has been remarkably resilient to externalinfluence. Despite the attempts by the French Catholic mission, Notre-Dame DuSacre-Cœur, to civilize and convert the ‘savages’, and the English colonial admin-istration’s efforts to pacify and control the area, Hau’ofa (1971: 3) still had notrouble studying ‘traditional social and cultural institutions’ nearly a hundred yearsafter the arrival of the first missionaries. Indeed, he emphasized the persistence andcoherence of the Mekeo structural order: ‘although one can see many changes,both large and small, beneath the surface the traditional structures of relationshipsare largely intact’ (1981: 3).

As recently as 1981, Stephen found that Mekeo culture retained a richness andcoherence of its own (1995: 28). Mekeo society still had powerful chiefs and sor-cerers and a cosmology dominated by the presence of ancestors. For Stephen it wasapparent that Christian teachings had had little or no impact on people’s belief inthe efficacy of sorcery (1995: 58). So, despite the visible presence of the Catholicmission, Stephen found Mekeo Christianity to be only ‘skin deep’ (1995: 57).

The chieftainship institution persisted into the 1990s, thriving as a result of theMekeos’ partial incorporation into the market economy centred in Port Moresby(see also Gregory (1982) for similar observations in other parts of Melanesia).Sorcerers continued to wield great influence over the lives of the villagers, andancestors and the cultural hero – or first ancestor – A’aisa were until recentlythe main references in people’s minds (Bergendorff 1996, 1998; Mosko 1999).Although Christianity was by now widely practised, it was largely a supplementto the traditional cosmology.2

Ten years later the situation has changed completely. The Mekeo cultural orderappears to have disappeared within a decade. There is now a widespread feeling ofprofound change among the villagers, to the point where one young man evenfound that: ‘Our culture is dead. If we still had our culture we could use that,but it stopped in the 1990s.’ For many villagers, the traditional way of life hasdegenerated and is no longer good enough.

These days, the villagers bemoan what they experience as a widespread lack oflaw and order and complain that the chiefs are becoming bad examples to thecommunity, committing adultery, beating their wives and indulging in excessivedrinking. According to some clan members, ‘Nobody listens to the chiefs anymore’.This attitude to the chiefs was unthinkable just a few decades earlier.3 In thiscurrent period of change, everybody seems to be left to his or her own devices,without a coherent cultural order or a functioning institutional framework they canrefer to. This would seem to favour a more individualistic explanation of theMekeo case.

To understand this apparent shift from a seemingly determinant cultural orderto individual agency, we require theories that seek to explain the interrelationship

362 Anthropological Theory 10(4)

between individual practices and a coherent order. Complexity theory is a goodcandidate since it is concerned with the integration of both these levels. While thistheory emerged from the natural sciences, its basic premises nonetheless offernovel ways of thinking about the holism-individualism dichotomy in the socialsciences.4

The basic tenets of complexity theory are simple. The theory posits that localinteractions, combined with energy intake from the environment, create emergentproperties – in the form of a particular order – that feed back into the interactingelements. Changes in energy consumption from the environment lead to phaseshifts, i.e. a new way for the system to behave (see e.g. Prigogine 1996).

These ideas suggest that it might be fruitful to take into account the natureof local interaction and the type of basic strategies to procure a living(energy consumption) when trying to explain the relationship between the individ-ual and society in the context of the recent drastic changes that have occurred inMekeo society.

Society as a complex system

The Mekeo case of a relatively stable coherent cultural order during colonial times,followed by a drastic change in times of relative independence that foregroundsindividual agency seems to problematize the dichotomy between methodologicalholism and individualism. This is an old discussion that can be traced back to thephilosophical opposition between Kant and Hegel.

For Kant, true knowledge derived from sensory impressions, but he also stressedthat sensory data were filtered and shaped by the faculties of the mind. To knowthe world is to create a world that is accessible to knowledge, so for him knowledgewas a process. The ‘fixed point’ of this process was the individual (Eriksen andNielsen 2002: 14), making this a methodological individualist approach.

With Hegel, these fixed points vanish. Here the individual is both a participantin, and a result of, the process of knowing. For Hegel, the individual participates ina communicative fellowship with other people, and the world that is createdthrough such knowing is therefore collective. The individual is thus not the causebut one of its effects (Eriksen and Nielsen 2002: 14). This gives rise to methodo-logical collectivism in which society is seen as more fundamental than individuals.

According to methodological individualism, culture is seen as organizedsimplicity or as the sum of solitary individuals. Seen from the vantage point ofmethodological holism, this way of understanding society leaves a great deal ofsymbolism, social phenomena and institutional arrangements unexplained. So, toaccount for this excessive symbolism, methodological holism sees culture as disor-ganized complexity or as more than the sum of its parts.

In the original, but unresolved (Meyer 2003), debate between these two posi-tions, methodological individualism was accused of omitting how the institutionallevel of social reality influences the life conditions of individual members of society(Goldstein 1956), while those adhering to methodological individualism accused

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methodological holism of placing too much emphasis on ‘rules’, and thusoverlooking how individual choices and actions can have large-scale effects onthe community (Watkins 1958).

Both these explanations seem appropriate to explain the situation in Mekeosociety at different times, suggesting first that there is a rather loose relationshipbetween the two levels and, second, that these two levels are connected differentlythan either theory suggests. This point has already been made by several anthro-pologists. For instance, Murdock observed that ‘culture is merely an abstractionfrom observed likeness in the behaviour of individuals organized in groups’(Murdock in Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 251). Sapir was also very explicitabout the statistical nature of culture, arguing that the concept of culture, as it isdealt with by the cultural anthropologist, is necessarily something of a statisticalfiction. For him:

the true locus of culture is in the interactions of specific individuals and, on the sub-

jective side, in the world of meanings which each one of these individuals may uncon-

sciously abstract for himself from participating in these interactions. (Sapir 1949 in

Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 247–8)

As Sahlins reminds us, contradiction and variation have always been objects ofstudy in anthropology, producing intense debates about how to understand thediscrepancy between cultural norms and actual practices, between the ideal and thereal, and between cultural patterns and individual behaviour (Sahlins 1999: 404).

Regarding a different relationship between individual and cultural order,Archer (2003) has proposed that we keep structure and agency separate. Shedoes this by seeing culture neither as a super-human whole nor as the result ofindividual actions, but by arguing that, ‘ontologically, ‘‘structure’’ and ‘‘agency’’are . . .distinct strata of reality, as the bearers of quite different properties andpowers’ (2003: 2). She then finds that social ontology refers to structural andcultural emergent properties which are held to have temporal priority, relativeautonomy and causal efficacy vis-a-vis members of society (2003: 2).

Archer’s model is akin to the complex dynamic systems model in which themovements of individual particles produce an overall order that is different fromthe interaction of any of these. Prigogine (e.g. 1996) has been very influential instudying such complex systems in physics and chemistry. These systems are basi-cally characterized by a huge amount of interacting particles that, together withenergy intake from the environment, produce an overall pattern called ‘emergentproperties’. These properties differ from the motion of the individual particles andare not reducible to any of them. Such systems are termed ‘complex’ because theyuse energy from the environment to produce ‘structures’, in contrast to mechanicalsystems that dissipate energy through their ‘motions’, according to the second lawof thermodynamics.

As Nicolis and Prigogine (1989: 238) duly recognize, human systems differ rad-ically from nature. But these authors also identify similarities between human


societies and complex systems in nature. Like other complex systems, social sys-tems are characterized by particular forms of internal organization, but they arealso firmly embedded in specific environments with which they exchange matter,energy and information.

Cilliers (1998: 3–4) sums up the characteristics of complex systems as charac-terized by the fact that they consist of a large number of elements. These elementshave to interact. Interaction has to be rich so that any element in the systeminfluences, and is influenced by, quite a few other ones. Interaction is non-linear,so that overall behaviour cannot be reduced to that of its elements. Interactionusually has a fairly short range and information is received primarily from imme-diate neighbours. And finally, each element in the system is oblivious to the behav-iour of the system as a whole.

Culturally, this would mean that people do not need to know their entire‘cultural order’ and its formal logics to cope with everyday life; it is emergent,and so people do not need to be enculturated – they only need to be enskilled toact in everyday situations (Ingold 2000). However, the idea of emergence is not newto anthropology or the social sciences more generally. In the social sciences,Durkheim has perhaps been most influential in promoting this idea. In thesecond edition of The Rules of Sociological Method (1901) he wrote: ‘Whenevercertain elements combine and thereby produce, by the fact of their combination,new phenomena, it is plain that these new phenomena reside not in their originalelements but in the totality formed by their union’ (1964[1901]: xlvii–xlviii).He concludes by stating the most basic principle of complex dynamic systems:‘These new phenomena cannot be reduced to their elements’ (1964[1901]: xlviii).

What complexity theory adds to Durkheim’s thoughts, and to Murdock’s andSapir’s notions of culture, is the idea of open systems in which energy, information,or matter flows between the system and its environment to create local orders.We can use these ideas to comprehend the relatively long period of stability favour-ing a holistic understanding of Mekeo society, followed by a dramatic period ofchange favouring, in its turn, an individualistic approach.

Transferring complexity theory to the study of human societies, then, requiresthat we look at the nature of local and individual interactions, the way these arelinked to basic strategies to procure a living, and at the way these interactionscreate emergent properties – in other words, a cultural order. According tocomplexity theory, changes in the intake of energy (new livelihood strategies)can at certain points lead to phase shifts or ‘bifurcations’, as when a gas changesinto a solid, or water freezes into ice. Seen in this light, one could argue that Mekeosociety is currently in the midst of a major bifurcation.

The emergent properties of historic Mekeo society

Rather than seeing the long-term stability of Mekeo society as the result of acoherent cultural order per se, complexity theory would suggest that we see suchcultural orders as emergent properties of persistent interactions and the

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appropriation of energy from the environment. Our task, then, is to investigate thecharacter of local interaction and the possibilities for procuring ‘energy’ (mostly inthe form of garden products and circulation of valuables) from the surroundingenvironment before and during the colonial period.

We know that at the onset of colonialism, the Mekeo cultural order includedchiefs (lopia), sorcerers (ungaunga), war-chiefs (iso) and war-magicians (faia). Thesemale-headed localized clans typically consisted of a peace and a war section livingon either side of a village plaza (e.g. Seligman 1910; Hau’ofa 1971, 1981; Mosko1985; Bergendorff 1996). This organizational set-up must from a complexity pointof view be seen as an emergent order, and we thus have to link it to the form ofinteraction in Mekeo society and to the possibilities of exchange before and duringthe colonial period.

From the historical documents of the mission and government it is clear that,well into the colonial era, the character of local interaction was centred onprocuring ‘energy’ from land and valuables. To survive socially, a Mekeo clancould follow two strategies: secure land, and find marriage partners for theirchildren: land to produce a food crop for the clan to survive, marriage to securethe continuation of the clan.

Although complementary to the continued existence of the clan, these two strat-egies cannot be seen as mere empty interaction, as in physical systems. Thesestrategic actions must be seen as based on different underlying principles whichwould also make the emergent order different from the individual forms of inter-actions. So it is those principles that we want to investigate to see how they aretransformed into emergent properties in the social order, and how these continuedto produce a ‘stable order’ during and immediately after the colonial period.

The first of these strategies, securing land, could be pursued through inheritanceand territorial expansion. Seligman describes how this translated into a differencebetween older chiefs, lopia fa’a, and younger chiefs, lopia ekei. Fission happenedwhen a strong group was divided into two groups called, respectively, faangiau or‘first born’ and ekei or ‘subsequently born’, and the latter established itself on newland (1910: 337). Older lineages consisted of landowners, while younger lineageswent in search of new land, with a ‘simple’ rule of seniority as the defining propertyof clans and individuals.

Nevertheless, this strategy had its limitations. Given unlimited space, this prin-ciple of seniority and its resulting fission process would pose no problem. However,the limited size of the fertile Angabanga Plain combined with the swidden agricul-ture practised by the Mekeo complicated matters. As Governor MacGregorobserved, ‘the whole country has at some time or other been cultivated. It containsno old forest whatever, until the hills are reached’ (1890: 80). So, in reality, landacquisition was no easy matter, and land possession became a bone of contentionbetween elder and younger lineages. The latter were progressively deprived of land,spurring them to abandon their parent clans and go in search of new land(Seligman 1910: 336–41; Bergendorff 1996: 27). In this way, inheritance triggeredcontinual land disputes and attempts at conquest. The common feature of Mekeo


landownership was, as the expression goes, that the ancestors ‘got up and foughtfor it’ (Bergendorff 1996: 33).

The second strategy of social survival was to find a marriage partner for one’schildren. We know that well into the 20th century the Mekeo exchanged bride pricein pairs: the bride’s father paid bride price to the groom’s father’s clan, whilethe bride’s mother paid bride price to the groom’s mother’s clan – a rather expen-sive undertaking.

This form of interaction also had its limitations. Paying bride price would poseno problem if valuables had flowed freely into the Mekeo area. But they did not,which is clear from the descriptions both by government officials and missionaries.As Father Egidi observed, just after the turn of the 20th century bride price wasraised by the whole family, both male and female lines, and the purchase dependedon the financial situation of the parties involved (1912: 9). Some were even too poorto get married, or had to settle for a widower or an excommunicate (Kowald 1893;Egidi 1912). And the price paid also depended on the distance to the coast and ‘as arule more has to be given on the coast than inland’ (Kowald 1893: 62).

These observations indicate that people interacted according to a common strat-egy of getting married by paying bride price, and at the same time they acteddifferently depending on their situation. However, paying bride price in a situationof relative scarcity enabled larger groups to reinforce their positions by absorbingmembers from other clans or even whole clans who could not otherwise meet theirobligations to pay bride price.

The marriage strategy thus created a tendency towards the fusion of clans inwhich poorer groups lived in fear of being taken over by their in-laws. So thepractice of paying bride price had the consequence of creating status differencesamong clans, favouring the larger clans while at the same time countering thefission process resulting from land acquisition by establishing alliances or byfusing sections of weaker clans with stronger ones.

Seligman describes the net result of these two strategies: land acquisition andmarriage; fission and fusion. Writing about the history of a small community calledAfai, he notices how it

illustrates the number of times that portions of clans have come together and after

having seemingly coalesced so as to form a village, have separated to fuse again

partially before once more wandering apart. (Seligman 1910: 315)

Accordingly, we would expect that persistent interaction according to these twobasic strategies of social survival, land acquisition and marriage, produced emer-gent properties in the social fabric that were a combination of the shared socialcharacteristics of these rules. Land acquisition produced a difference between olderand younger lineages, while marriage produced a situation of four exchangepartners, together producing emerging properties in the form of a social realitybased on a dualism in which each part was subdivided into two parts (Bergendorff1996: 52).

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As Mosko observes, this gave rise to a quadripartite structure with four maincategories that were replicated throughout (Bush) Mekeo culture (1985: 3). As hewrites, ‘Categories distinguished and mutually defined as belonging to the same setsystematically come in fours . . . that constitutes the homologous or metaphoricalrelations among the culture’s varied contexts’ (Mosko 1985: 3, emphasis inoriginal).

We find this principle, or emergent property, replicated in the layout of theinstitutional order which had four positions split into two sections – peace: lopia(chief), ungaunga (sorcerer), and war: iso (war-chief), faia (war-magician) – livingon either side of the village plaza. In daily life, the lopia and the iso took care of theconditions and the relationships of the clans, as overseers of garden land andmanagers of exchange relations, i.e. representatives of the two different forms ofbasic interactions – acquiring land and getting married.

These positions were linked to the ungaunga and the faia, respectively, who tookcare of the same relationships as their counterparts, but in the unseen world. Thusthe faia was depicted as the one that could secured life for the clan’s warriors whilethe ungaunga acted as a kind of policeman for the lopia by punishing miscreants inthe clan, even to the point of killing them.

In sum, we can see how persistent interactions framed by the possibilities ofacquiring land and finding marriage partners together produced emergent proper-ties – that were different from the interactions that created them – and which werereproduced in the lay-out of the institutional order.

From social properties to social categories: The interrelatedworld of the ancestors

With inspiration from complexity theory, we can see that it is plausible to assumethat persistent interactions produced a social reality that was reflected in the Mekeoinstitutional order. What remains to be investigated is how these principles of socialinteraction became linked to social categories, i.e. the categories that made Mekeosociety appear as a coherent cultural order amenable to holistic forms of analysis.

When complexity theory is transferred to human lives it means that persistentinteraction and emergent properties take the form of basic livelihood strategies thatproduce directly emergent concepts. Consequently, part of the human environmentis symbolically constituted. But emergent properties are also an active element inthe everyday life of individuals, and are symbolically elaborated. They give featuresto the surrounding landscape, which confronts people as gestalts that emerge spon-taneously in their lives from the way interaction is constituted in any given place.We can see the Mekeo institutional order as an expression of emergent properties,but persistent interaction also produces ‘gestalts’ as a result of the recurrent topicsinforming the strategies (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 69–76).

In the Mekeo area ‘ancestor/ancestry’ appeared to be such a gestalt. It was themost recurrent issue in the two major strategies of acquiring land and valuables formarriage in order to secure the existence and continuity of a clan. These two


strategies shared a common denominator. In the first strategy, inheritance deter-mined the amount of land accruing to a given group, favouring the older lines ofdescent and thus equating ancestry with social position. In the second strategy, tomaximize the clan’s partners – its access both to valuables and to a workforce –previous alliances determined the potentially marriageable clans, turning alliancesinto a question of descent and ancestry.

Accordingly, both strategies meant that land and alliances were linked up withinheritance, and consequently position and status were to a large extent determinedby ancestry. In this way, one’s ancestry was manifest in a multitude of differentactions: in marriage, land issues, warfare, status and position, irrespective of howthese practices were actually carried out. Accordingly, ancestry, or the concept of‘ancestor’, emerged as a set of properties that occurred naturally in the daily lives ofthe Mekeo. It was a ‘directly emergent concept’ basic to the Mekeo conceptualsystem that was produced through interactions with their social and natural envi-ronment (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 69–76).

Seen this way, the category of ‘ancestor’ was not defined by its distinctivenessand inherent qualities with necessary and self-sufficient features (Taylor 1989: 23).Rather, it is best understood ‘as an experiential gestalt’: a prototype composed of acluster of elements produced by the two interlinked strategies aimed at the clans’survival (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 70). But as a gestalt, this cluster formed awhole that was more basic than the parts: it appeared as though social ‘reality’ wasinfluenced by ancestors.

Consequently, ancestors were thought to live in an unseen dimension of life, andso existence had two similar realms: one for the living and one for the dead ances-tors, and beings in these two spheres of existence were thought to be similar, allconsisting of an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’, substance and skin. As Mosko (1985: 32)observes, this gave rise to four ‘categories’ in the Mekeo thought system whichrelate to each other as: inside: outside :: inverted outside: everted inside, reflectingthe idea that existence was divided between two inverse realms.

Mekeo personhood and practice

From a complexity viewpoint, and as a result of the interconnection of persistentinteraction and an emerging order, we would expect that these fourfold qualitiescould also be found in, or would be extended metaphorically to, the Mekeo way ofunderstanding personhood. It is, after all, people who engage in persistent inter-action, and who experience its consequences.

To the Mekeo, a living person was thought of as an appearance in the visibleworld that had, so to speak, two consciousnesses, one in each realm: one forwaking life, and one that took over during sleep and which acted in the land ofthe dead. Thus, the emergent order described above was also metaphoricallyextended to the way the Mekeo conceived personhood.

Stephen finds that Mekeo personhood is divided between an embodied and adisembodied world, each divided into two parts. The embodied parts consist of an

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outside/surface form and an inside flux, while the disembodied consist of an outsidedream-image and an inside that is unknown (1995: 303). She then finds that aperson consists of (a) an inside self (alo) concealed from others, (b) a public‘face’ (maanga) visible to others, (c) a physical body form and surface (faanga),(d) a body interior of unstable matter (faanga ofunga) which is concealed, andfinally (e) a non-corporeal self (laulaunga) which exists in the hidden, non-corporealrealm (1995: 303).

For the Mekeo, then, a person was thought to live in both realms of existence atthe same time, with a manifestation in the visible world consisting of a ‘cover’(fa’anga) which was the public presence of a person, and ‘a substance’ (imaunga)which was thought to be the private self. These had their counterparts in theinvisible world of the ancestors (a laulau), which were thought to take overduring sleep.5

What Westerners calls dreams were consequently taken as proof of the existenceof this double-sided world. To the Mekeo, dreams were but the experiences of thelaulau in the world of the ancestors. By extension, death was believed to occurwhen the laulau failed to return to the visible part of a person. The laulau thenturned into an isange, which was a laulau without a relationship to a skin and asubstance in the visible world. Sleep was thus seen as a form of death.

In ordinary life, the experiences of both consciousnesses were equally important,and for an outsider it would not be possible to discern which one a narrator wasreferring to. Thus, for instance, when one Mekeo told a story about havingbeing attacked in the garden, he did not distinguish between which consciousness(sleeping or waking) had had the experience: both were treated as equally validand real.

We can understand the practice of the Mekeo ungaunga as informed by the sameemergent principle. In preparing to perform his duties (a practice called ngope), wecan see how personhood, position and the emergent order form the generativeprinciples in his practices. These involved secluding himself, eating next to nothingand abstaining as far as possible from sleeping. This could take several months andcontinued until he attained an appearance of mere skin and bones and lived in asemi-awake condition. In this way, his appearance was shrunk almost to his inner-most self or substance, and his two consciousnesses became inseparable, a state ofaffairs that was reflected in the term ngope, which means to ‘tie together’. Thus, thetwo realms of existence were thought to be ‘tied together’ – making it possible forhim to live in both realms at the same time.6

The same emergent principle recurs in one of the main tools of the ungaunga, hispolo. For the missionaries, this consisted of incongruent pieces of matter, somebiological, some geological and others human – at least seen through Westerneyes – assembled with a view to producing unlikely results. But seen in the lightof recurring emergent properties it becomes a replica of a person.

Accordingly, the polo consists of a container, a cover (fa’anga), which can beanything from a coconut to the skin of a diseased infant; some leaves, representingthe person’s outside consciousness, since they share identity with different body


parts of deceased people in the visible world; some stones representing the bones/fossilized blood of deceased people, which provide the person’s inside conscious-ness – all of which are mixed together with actual remains from particular ancestorsin the form of nail clippings, hair or even severed fingers, representing the insideperson. In extreme circumstances, depending on the status of the ungaunga, thepolo could be made to represent A’aisa.

Both practices are also carried out among ordinary people, albeit on a lesserscale, and mostly with the practitioners only aware of the formal procedures oringredients to be used, and not the hidden connection that produces them. Thishappens when, for example, young people prepare themselves for sporting gamesor card-games. Then they will perform a mini-ngope to get them on a winningtrack, or they will concoct a simpler polo. In both cases, this practice is intendedto influence the hidden relationships between appearances.

Seen as a whole, Mekeo exchange relations with the surrounding world pro-duced emergent properties in different spheres of social life that nonetheless werevery open to individual expression and manipulation. Ancestry as the foundationof social position was open to negotiation. Power and political skill often translatedinto superior ancestry, and incidences of distant ancestors changing birth rank as aresult of present-day interests occurred as late as the 1990s, when the Faingu clanof Eboa village installed a new chief in a vacant position. Furthermore, clans didnot need all four positions to qualify as a clan, and people could contest who themost influential ancestor was, again providing an example of individual differencesoccurring within an emergent system. But given that emergent properties can beseen as informing the lay-out of the institutional order, and as inscribed into per-sonhood, these properties feed back into daily lives of people and lend durability tothe cultural order.

Colonialism and changes in the Mekeo life-world

To understand the relative continuity of the Mekeo social order during colonialtimes, we must examine how the colonial regime interacted with, or influenced, thetwo major areas of persistent interaction: the acquisition of land and marriagepartners. First of all, however, we must look at how colonialism unfolded, andthen at the ways in which the colonial government sought to interfere in localmatters.

Colonialism came late to Papua New Guinea and the Mekeo area. Father Veriusof the Sacred Heart Mission arrived at Yule Island just off the coast of Roroterritory on 1 July 1885. Here the mission quickly established a station fromwhere they ventured inland to the Mekeo area. Governor MacGregor performedan inspection tour around the Mekeo area in 1890, and in the following year agovernment station was established led by Government Agent Kowald.

However, this was an era when colonies had changed from surplus enterprises toplaces of net expense for the colonizing powers whose interest was primarily polit-ical and military. Hence colonialism was relatively ‘mild’ and termed a mission of

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‘conversion and civilization of savages’ (Navarre 1887: 24). For the government,the Mekeo area offered great possibilities for the sustenance of the colonial admin-istration. The main objectives for the colonial administration were to keep theexpenses of the government low: ‘New Guinea, as a dependency of Great Britainmay eventually be made self-supporting . . . [and native production had to be sold]to defray the cost of Government’ (Bridge 1889: 39).

This optimism quickly proved premature. Despite the fertility of the Mekeoplain, MacGregor noticed that ‘there is no land available in the district for anyplan of systematic European settlement’ (1890: 80), and Mekeo production was notgeared towards export to any great extent. Therefore the government settled forkeeping law and order. Initially this meant to stop the incessant intertribal warfare,connected to the fission process, or in the words of MacGregor, ‘intertribal warfarehas been put down, peace has been established, and the principal chiefs have beenreconciled and acknowledged the superior authority of the Government’ (1890: 91).

The Mekeo reacted strategically to this new force in their area. Some ‘tribes’readily accepted the peace established by the government while others were morereluctant to do so, a choice that seems closely connected to recent successes orfailures in the ongoing fission process and its ensuing warlike competition overland. A telling instance of such pragmatism in the contact situation was theAipiana chief who seems to have used MacGregor’s presence as a new way ofsafeguarding his recent victory over Rairai villages from the encroachment of theaggressive Amoamo villages, while the Rairai wanted protection from the govern-ment against both these aggressors (MacGregor 1890: 80).

Mission influence was also met pragmatically by the Mekeo. For the mission,it was especially the Mekeo ‘belief’ in sorcery that was an obstacle to the ‘civi-lization of the savages’, and as Father Guis noticed, ‘[i]n the Papuan life, nothinghappens without the interference of the sorcerer’ (1936: 150). But the mission wasinitially very optimistic about its own influence and the persuasive power of itsteachings, believing that ‘[t]he disappearance of sorcery is only a question oftime . . .when all the station have become Catholics . . . no more sorcerers will beraised’ (Navarre 1896: 216). This was wishful thinking, and their optimismquickly dwindled, as can be seen from later writings of Father Guis. Reflectingon the persistence of sorcery in Mekeo society, he wrote almost in despair thateven ‘[i]f there were only two Papuans left on earth, I think one of them wouldcall himself sorcerer’ (1936: 181).

However, the twin colonial forces – mission and government – also offered somenew opportunities, partly because they needed a workforce which had to be paidand partly because the expatriate community needed provisions, producing a readymarket for local products. In this way the strategy used by the clans to acquire landto secure their continued existence, leading to fission and conquest, was supple-mented or replaced by the opportunity to gain an income from work. This situationdid not have the impetus to change the rule of seniority but it did make the villagesmore self-reliant, thus somewhat halting the fission process and making the villagesthe primary unit of reproduction.


Still, land remained the most important issue in the continuation of the clans,but the deprivation of younger lineages and the ensuing fission process could bepartly held at bay with petty income from the mission and the government. Brideprice still had to be paid in valuables, but these could now be supplemented withdirect exchange expeditions to the Gulf of Papua (Kowald 1893: 58), though not inproportions that completely ruled out the need for establishing alliances for thefuture procurement of valuables. As a result, ‘ancestor’ remained an emergentconcept – a gestalt – that was still present in the life of the Mekeo.

In this new environment, the strategy of securing the substance of the clan nowrevolved around the ‘village as a unit’, while the strategy to secure the continuationof the clan by paying bride price became a simpler duality between wife-givers andwife-takers. This altered the emergent properties to a unit split in two. This formedthe basis of an institutional order consisting only of chief and sorcerer, turning war-chief and magician into more honorary positions.

In this way mission teaching and influence was only ‘skin deep’. Since the basicemergent concept remained ‘ancestor’ and existence was still conceptualized asconsisting of two realms, the practices that the missionaries termed ‘sorcery’, butwhich the Mekeo saw as interaction between these two realms, continued.

So, instead of converting ‘the savages’, mission teaching was readily assimilatedinto the Mekeo understanding of existence. God became lopia/chief in the sky,interchangeable with A’aisa, the first ancestor. As Stephen observed, Christianityand indigenous beliefs have become inextricably interwoven, but ‘A’aisa and thecosmic order he initiated continues to dominate the Mekeo worldview’ (1995: 59).Despite the presence of the twin colonial forces, mission and government, the beliefin a double-sided world continued – ancestors were still a real force in the lives ofpeople and sorcery persisted.

Market and transformation: From valuables to money

Looking at the character of local interaction offers a plausible way to account forthe persistence of Mekeo culture throughout the colonial encounter. Since thecolonial forces only changed the conditions of persistent interaction slightly inthe Mekeo area, they also only gave raise to minor adjustments in the emergingproperties that informed the institutional order and the Mekeo conception of per-sonhood. We now have to look at which changes were set in motion by colonialism,and which were later enhanced, and at how these influenced basic interactions inthe Mekeo area.

With colonialism, the Mekeo gained an opportunity to buy their traditionalvaluables instead of having to obtain them through long distance trade relation-ships. Money became a short cut to valuables. Hence the strategy to procure valu-ables to get married could partly be met through earning money, but only aftercolonialism and the growing market in Port Moresby has money acquired a similarstatus to traditional valuables in bride price. And during the last decade this hasincreased to such an extent that money has almost substituted as valuables in

Bergendorff 373

bride price. So the strategy of getting married has, with the changing configurationof the surrounding world, spelled a shift from valuables to money. This shift hassignificantly changed the conditions of persistent interaction in the area.

This shift has become possible because, since independence, Port Moresby hasseen a steady increase in population, especially Papua New Guineans who enjoychewing betel as a stimulant. Given the dry conditions around Port Moresby, thenearest place the betel-palm grows abundantly is the Mekeo plain. With the high-way connecting the Mekeo villages to Port Moresby, the market is within easyreach and a selling round-trip can be made in one day.

This situation has provided the Mekeo with a steady source of income and amarket that can supply daily necessities ranging from food to prestige items likerefrigerators and generators – consumer goods labeled ‘moni things’ (see alsoMosko 1999: 42). Selling betel for money is on everybody’s minds, as expressedby a young man in 2003: ‘We live from money these days’. Thus, the proximity ofPort Moresby offers new opportunities in Mekeo villages.

But growing betel for money changes the conditions for persistent interaction.First, growing betel nuts is an individual matter. The palms need little land and thenuts can be ‘harvested’ by young boys who climb the palms for a symbolic pay-ment. In the new system, extensive land possession is less important since smallplots can, given the right circumstances, yield a good harvest of betel.

Second, as a consequence of the new opportunities offered by the proximity ofthe market in Port Moresby, extended land possessions have come to play a minorrole in the reproduction of the families and there is no longer any great need fordistant long-term exchange partners since bride price is mostly paid in cash.

The net result is that valuables are increasingly seen as an unnecessary inter-mediary in bride price. The common opinion in 2003 was, as many young menexpressed it, that ‘people want ‘‘things’’ that can be consumed and usedinstantly’. As one young man explained, ‘Now people do not want things thatare meant to be stored [as the traditional valuables were] but things that cancirculate and be consumed’, and another young man continued, ‘in a couple ofyears it will all be money’. This change in attitude is now so consolidated that ifthe parties involved in a bride price want traditional values they have to state thisexplicitly in advance.

Taken together, this new situation is in stark contrast to the pre-colonial systemand its emergent systems of institutions. Then, extended land possessions and mul-tiple exchange partners were the key factors. It was a system that gave precedenceto older lineages which held favourable positions both in the land game in whichthey were the landowners and in the exchange networks in which they had mostconnections – ‘chiefs’ in the English translation of these favourable positions.However, and as a result of the new possibilities given by the altered conditionof the regional exchange landscape, the main strategy now is to obtain money.Hence, ancestry and the chiefly order cede importance to those who are able to‘control’ the source of money and who are gaining increasing prominence –businessmen.7


With the growing opportunities for selling betel at the market in Port Moresby,money has become the main issue in Mekeo villages. Now the strategy to ‘getmoney’ has subsumed the former strategies of gaining land and valuables, andthus the properties these strategies produced in the social fabric have also changed.Obtaining money does not depend on ancestry, but on the ability to ‘controlmoney’.

Concurrently, people are trying to make sense of changing emergent properties,a process that is altering their understanding of their own personhood. People nowseem to favour the outward solid appearance and a more elusive inner ‘spirit’. Theynow talk about ‘human beings’ as if they had a ‘body’ (imaunga) and a ‘spirit’(laulau). In case of severe accidents people say they can experience themselves aslaulaus whilst looking at their body from outside it: ‘when my laulau was out there,out of my body, he [the laulau] was feeling light’. The laulau is no longer thought tobe the link to the ancestral world but has become an entity detached from thematerial ‘body’. It has become an entity residing in the body, ‘where it usuallystays’, as a younger man explained. In other words, the Mekeo now have ‘souls’:Heaven/God – soul/body.

As a result of these new contemplations of understanding personhood, death isby many now understood as God reclaiming the laulau. Sickness is understood asthe result of a person having been separated from the power of God. This can onlybe understood as a result of sinful living – ‘this is what we call sickness’, as one ofthe new religious leaders explained. In this worldview, ‘sickness’ is cured byre-establishing the link to God and the Saints, and prayers activate the help ofthese ‘people in the Sky’. As a consequence, traditional ‘sorcerers’ have lost influ-ence, and to a large extent they have been replaced by ‘healers’ who have acquiredtheir powers from some personal revelation.

Thus, changing emergent properties have caused conceptual transformationswhich have far-reaching existential consequences. According to this new socialprinciple, issues of sickness, leadership and power have been recast. Sickness iscaused by sin; leadership and power are the result of insight into a divine world.

In search of a new culture

According to complexity theory, new forms of interaction produce new emergentorders. The new possibilities for obtaining riches provide the precondition for aphase-shift, i.e. a social and cultural transition. The Mekeo presently feel suchchanges vividly because their coherent cultural order has recently collapsed,making it appear as though individual actions are the fundamental issue in society.This situation would also seem to lend itself to more individualistic forms ofanalysis.

Money income has given families the opportunity to break away from the clanstructure. Many now seem to want to live a more clan independent life, and havemoved out of the village to live on their garden land, or along the routes to thegardens. As a consequence, whole ‘suburbs’ have been established in certain areas

Bergendorff 375

where people from different clans live together undisturbed by daily clancommitments.

The new money-landscape has also made new strategies possible. For example,new opportunities for gaining wealth have made it possible for young people tobreak away from their families. They can earn their own money either by growingtheir own betel nuts or simply by stealing them. Many young people express a wishto live an independent life. They do not want to live with their relatives or in-laws,and they think that clan-based sharing is an obstacle to their own prosperity.

Today, then, much of the older social organization has become a relic, withempty titles that have neither role nor authority. The old order may dictate thatpeople live together in clans, but many try to escape this. It is a period of transition.Ironically, the old Sacred Heart Mission does not reap any benefits from all thesechanges. They too are caught up in the ways of the old regime, having translated alltheir scriptures into the former concepts that are now becoming outdated.

The Catholic Church is having a hard time adapting to this new situation. Onemission strategy has been the establishment of a ‘Youth Analysis WorkshopGroup’ that is concerned with how these changes affect young people, whomthey see as having lost their culture due to Western influences. As they see it, thecore of the problem seems to be that:

The rapid and constant changes in the culture under the impact of Western influence,

has put youth in a situation of being caught between two worlds which are both in a

state of transition, and which at the same time attract them, and cause further

complication and burdens for them. (Youth Analysis Workshop Working

Document – 8–12 August 2005: 1)

Concurrently, other congregations such as the ‘Christian Outreach Church’ and‘PNG Bible Church’ have found their way into the Mekeo villages. Some membersof these churches have formed smaller independent congregations, such as theso-called ‘God Gets Glory Ministry’. These new churches preach what manypeople increasingly want to hear: look out for yourself. These churches enjoy vary-ing degrees of success, but they can all be seen as conscious ways of challenging theold chiefly order. For the members of these congregations there is only one author-ity – Jesus. Not the government, nor the Bishop, and certainly not the lopia(‘chiefs’).

These churches also further contribute to clan fragmentation since they establishthemselves outside the villages, and people tend to move closer to their church.Joining the churches also means that people have to exclude themselves from fullparticipation in clan-based feasts, since drinking, smoking and dressing in the tra-ditional attire are considered immoral.

Seen in this light, new ways of obtaining ‘wealth’ must necessarily challenge orchange social relations. Changes in access to valuables, or a shift from shells tomoney, represent changes in the energy consumption of the community whichoffers people an opportunity to establish themselves outside existing relations of


domination. Hence, a shift in the type of valuables available can alter the entirebasis of existing reproductive conditions, rendering the old hierarchical ordersoutmoded.

Many lopias (chiefs) have subsequently been forced to think about their situa-tion. One lopia thinks they have lost all influence and that ‘in 10 years time therewill not be any chiefs left’. Another lopia just clings to his old ways, and still findsthat his role is to look after the people. He seems unperturbed by the fact that manyof the youths no longer heed the lopias. These statements all suggest that the socialreality of the Mekeo is changing. And this is happening concurrently with a shiftfrom using valuables to a situation where money is taking over in nearly all spheresof life. Money gives the villagers the opportunity to reproduce themselves indepen-dently of former exchange networks based on valuables.

With the new strategies of obtaining wealth/money from Port Moresby, newemergent properties are produced that are at odds with the old way of understand-ing the world as consisting of two realms, and with it, the old institutional order isreduced to insignificance. Many young people do not even consider the chiefs andsorcerers as honorary titles – they are just superfluous. And so, many Mekeo seeknew way to organize themselves, while scrambling to make sense of the new ways inwhich the world is presenting itself.

In this new and uncertain landscape many young people search for culturalimageries that fit the situation and thus they claim to find strength in movies. ‘Itbuilds confidence’, as one young unmarried woman expressed it. Movie heroes likeBruce Lee and other Kung Fu fighters help the young people to focus on their ownplans, because as one young man said, most heroes have ‘one mind’: they are verydetermined to accomplish what they want, no matter the cost. Inspired by a movie,this young man is trying to put ‘the plan [from the movie] into action’ by concen-trating on his own future. He has no plans to participate in the traditional feaststhat would otherwise cost him a fortune. When people die, he reckons that they are‘gone for good’ and consequently he does not see the point of spending money onthe traditional mourning attire or paying for the mourning feasts, lo ipalo: ‘Nospending on pointless things’.

There is no longer any cultural order they can practise. The young man whoclaimed that Mekeo culture was dead continued: ‘So we must find it [culture]somewhere else’. This is a time of making sense of the new emerging propertieslinked to interaction centred on obtaining money. It is also a quest for a newculture, but presently it points in all directions.

Complexity wise, Mekeo society is now at a bifurcation point. The old insti-tutional order has lost importance, and the Catholic Church is struggling to shoreup its dwindling influence. At the moment, Mekeo society lacks a functionalinstitutional order, and it is difficult to predict what will happen, or if a newkind of uniform institutional order will emerge in the Mekeo area. Thesechanges are driven by the nature of local interaction, but they are also linkedto the constitution of the larger economic landscape in which the Mekeo aresituated.

Bergendorff 377

Conclusion

In the social sciences there have historically been two predominant and opposingviews on how to understand the relationship between individuals and society:structure and agency. At one end of this spectrum people create culture throughtheir individual practices, while at the other end culture is seen as determiningpeople’s behaviour.

In the first case, culture is seen as organized simplicity or as the sum of solitaryindividuals. This theme has informed Western economic thought from ThomasHobbes to Adam Smith to Milton Friedman. According to these theories, individ-ual self-interest is the fundamental premise of society. As already expressed byd’Holbach in 1770, ‘A nation is nothing more than the union of a great numberof individuals, connected to one another by the reciprocity of their wants’ (quotedin Sahlins 2000: 533).

According to methodological holism, conversely, society is more than the sum ofits individuals, it is a ‘total’ culture, in which the particular character ‘of this unityor wholeness . . . comes from the interrelation of the parts and not from anythingthey singly contribute’ (Nadel 1951: 382). This view reached its apotheosis withRuth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934). Here symbolism becomes central to theunderstanding of culture, and people are seen as applying their cultural categoriesto the surrounding world in order to make sense of it.

However, when we turn to the Mekeo these opposing views become blurred.First, Mekeo society has normally been studied as a coherent cultural order. Thiswas due to the fact that Mekeo society had historically been remarkably resilient toexternal influence. Neither the mission nor colonialism left major marks on theMekeo cultural order. This seems to imply that cultures in relative equilibriumshow a remarkably high degree of coherence.

But the Mekeo were not bound by their culture, nor were they condemned toceaselessly reproduce it. When the opportunity arose to circumvent the traditionalhierarchy of exchange relations, many seized upon it. This has been a completelyMekeo-driven process, in contrast to the colonial period that did not lead to sub-stantial changes. Mekeo villagers embraced the Port Moresby market and themoney it promised, which made it possible, so to speak, for them to buy theirway out of traditional obligations. Now the villagers want money that can be spenton consumer goods.

This transformation has reconfigured the conceptual order of Mekeosociety. Formerly, the world was believed to be horizontally divided betweenancestors and the living; now it is seen as vertically divided into Heavenand humans. Such conceptual changes remove the ideological content from thechieftainship, leaving it an empty form. Changing the conceptual apparatus hasproduced changes in loyalties, since the forces thought to rule the world havechanged along with the way Mekeo concepts represent the world. Thus, newgroup memberships are born and new ways of rationalizing leadership becomepossible.


Since power is no longer perceived as located in the ancestral world but inHeaven, the chiefs have lost their status as those with the closest connection tothe power by virtue of their close relationship to the unseen world of the ancestors.They become ordinary men, and ordinary men now have the chance to becomeleaders through their ability to communicate with God due to some personalrevelation.

In times of rapid, or continual, transition, it seems that the individual level ofsocieties comes to the fore, privileging methodological individualism as the mostapt explanatory approach. The present Mekeo situation might seem to confirmElster’s observation that ‘the elementary unit of social life is the individual humanaction’, and ‘to explain social institution and social change is to show they arise asthe result of the actions and interaction of individuals’ (Elster 1989: 13).

At the same time, the critiques that these two schools level against each otheralso seem to be correct in the Mekeo case. Methodological holism has difficulties inexplaining the drastic changes brought about by individual actors (Watkins 1958)as occurred when the Mekeo gave up their cultural order, while methodologicalindividualism has difficulties explaining the historical Mekeo institutional set-up(Goldstein 1956) and how it persisted throughout the colonial era.

To reconcile these two approaches to the constitution of society, complexitytheory proposes that we see dynamic systems such as culture as systems basedon groups and sub-groups which interact repeatedly according to simple andlocal rules. Such interaction is based on the exchange of resources with the sur-rounding world, and it creates ‘social properties’ that feed back into the system as awhole, giving the social system its overall pattern (e.g. Nicolis and Prigogine 1989;Taylor 2001): individual interaction and cultural order. Looking solely at one endof this equation conceals the dynamic of social systems.

Acknowledgements

This study is based on four periods of fieldwork among the Mekeo carried out between 1989and 2002, lasting 21 months in all. The Danish Council of the Humanities, DANIDA, theDanish Foreign Ministry, the Danish Research Council of Social Science, and RoskildeUniversity financed these studies.

Notes

1. See Sawyer (2005) for a thorough presentation and discussion of these forms of expla-

nations and different attempts to bring them together.2. In contrast, Mosko finds that the North Mekeo adopted a Christian sociality (2010: 228)

but he does so from within a completely holistic paradigm, claiming that this adoptionfollowed indigenous beliefs and categorizations. Mosko claims that the North Mekeo

retained their concepts of a dividual personhood and that it was this concept that shapedthe encounter between the North Mekeo and Christianity (2010: 228–31). This is anargument which Mosko extends to Melanesia generally and he does so by reinterpreting

the works of, for example, Robbins on Urapmin and Knauft on Gebusi. Here he arguesthat although exchange and relationships figure prominently in these authors’ accounts of

Bergendorff 379

religion in these societies, they do not pay adequate attention to the dividual character of

local personhood to account for the dynamic interplay with Christianity (2010: 217). Thiskind of dividual personhood may have played an important role in the North Mekeoencounter with Christianity, but for the rest of the Mekeo it seems that their model of

personhood is now changing and that people are increasingly embracing Pentecostaldenominations. This seems to be a result of the changing life conditions in the area.As Robbins notes, Mosko downplays the extent of change that has occurred by insistingthat North Mekeo, and all other Melanesians, have retained their fundamental model of

personhood (2010: 242).3. According to Robbins, Melanesia today is characterized by social change: ‘Rapid, messy,

and thoroughgoing’ (1998: 91). As Robbins observes, cultural ideas in Melanesia have

changed a great deal in response to the colonial orders, the advent of Christianity andcapitalism providing people with ‘a thousand and one fantasies about how life might bedifferent’ while at the same time the social structure and social conditions of these groups

have changed relatively little. Most Melanesians are still engaged in some form of sub-sistence economy supplemented by varying degrees of money-income (1998: 91–2).However, the Mekeo example shows that although they might still be engaged in someform of subsistence economy, both social structure and social conditions have changed

profoundly.4. Barth (2002) has recently suggested that we see culture as a complex dynamic system, and

a number of other studies have also attempted to use complexity theory to explain social

phenomena (e.g. Byrne 1998; Cilliers 1998), with several social anthropologists using it asa source of inspiration in their work (e.g. Wagner 1986; Strathern 1996; Appadurai 1996;Mosko and Damon 2005). However, in the relatively few cases in which social scientists

have used, or been inspired by, complexity theory they have merely transposed thetheory, or parts of it, to social phenomena because social systems seem to have similarcharacteristics to complex dynamic systems in nature.

5. Stephen (1995) has made a similar observation about the constitution of Mekeo cosmol-ogy. She finds that the Mekeo think about existence as divided into an embodied world ofthe living and a disembodied world of the ancestors. These worlds are each divided intoan inside and an outside, and each of these domains has a correspondence in the way the

Mekeo think about human beings (1995: 302). This can be seen as a similar argument toMosko’s, who argues for quadripartite structures. I only work with three kinds of ‘selves’,but I see the laulau as a double entity, giving the same kind of structure.

6. This ngope practice has been the subject of a controversy between Stephen and Mosko:whether ngope enables the sorcerer to send out his spirit, or laulau, to do his bidding(Stephen 1996, 1998), or whether it enables him to contact the spirit world so that it can

do the job for him (Mosko 1997). In both cases ngope is translated as ‘to close’ the bodyoff from the surroundings, but the Mekeo do not have a singular expression for the‘body’ and we need to understand this practice in another way. In contrast, I have

been arguing that the sorcerer’s practices – and his ngope preparation – are carried outto transcend the conceptual division made by Mekeo cosmology and to master both thevisible and invisible world. With this in mind, ngope is done not to ‘close off’ the sorcerer,but to convert him into a kind of transcendent being who is able to live in both the visible

and invisible world at once (Bergendorff 2003).7. Thus, the Mekeo are moving from direct exchange in personal relationships to becoming

consumers of commodities, with the changes in social relationships that this implies (see


Foster 2001: 65). It is a shift that is taking place throughout PNG: from valuables

obtained through affinal linkages and exchange partners to money that is gained bythe sale of some local product sold at the market.

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Steen Bergendorff has a PhD in anthropology from the University of Copenhagenand a Doctorate from Lunds University, Sweden. He has been an Assistant andAssociate Professor at the Institute for Society and Globalization, RoskildeUniversity, Denmark, since 1997. His research interests are in historical anthro-pology and world-system theory, which has lately turned into a concern with cul-ture as a complex dynamic system. Publications include ‘The Mythology of Aid:Catchwords, Empty Phrases and Tautological Reasoning’ (Forum for DevelopmentStudies, 2003, with Secher Marcussen); ‘The Mekeo Sorcerer and His Magic’ (TheAsia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2003); ‘Cultural Complexity andDevelopment Policy’ (The European Journal of Development Research, 2007); and‘Cultural Complexity and Religion: Persistent interaction and Perceptual Order inMekeo Society, Papua New Guinea’ (Culture and Religion, 2008).

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reconciling cultural order and individual agency: complexity theory and the mekeo case

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