Women, warfare, and the life

of agency: Papua New Guinea

and beyond
Francesca Merlan The Australian National University

Agency entered anthropological discourse as a key word from the 1970s in renewed
social-philosophical theorizations (e.g. structure and agency) as major deterministic theories (e.g.
Marxism, structuralism) became less persuasive. It came to play an increasing role in ethnography.
Though agency, too, has been partly replaced in some of its earlier semantic range, it has been more
fully retained in some areas of usage than others, especially in analyses of subordination in the face of
power. This article considers several different conceptualizations of agency. Ethnographically, it
focuses on womens differing forms of action in two episodes of warfare in the Highlands of Papua
New Guinea. In contrasting these, the article concurs with critiques of approaches to agency that turn
it into a (liberatory) abstraction, and proposes a view of agency as lived relation of intervention and
involvement in social action, inherently linked to values and constraints. The combination may be, but
is not always, liberatory. The article considers the life and (partial) expiry of agency as a term of social
science art.

This article considers agency as a term that emerged in social science vocabulary
a few decades ago, and has become the subject of partly retrospective consideration
and critique. In a typically non-synchronous pattern of replacement, the term seems
to be more fully retained in certain contexts of use than others. It has continued to
play a role in analyses of subordination in the face of power, and, of specific relevance
here, as a debated term in literature on womens role in warfare in various parts of
the world. The articles ethnographic focus is on the role of women in warfare in
New Guinea (and other parts of Melanesia). In sketching two episodes of womens
action in constraining and difficult circumstances, I show the contrasting forms of
action they took. The contrast grounds a view of agency as an inherently unstable,
generative capacity, a lived relation between conditions and forms of human action,
linked to value and constraint, but fluid in a way that resists understanding of it as an
abstract force, as implied in some usages. The social science differentiation of human
action and its conditions makes recursion of terms like agency inevitable, along with
alternatives that, like actor-network theory, propose re-integration of social and natural
worlds.

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The life of gency

Asad (2000) observed of agency that it had not been an anthropological key term
until three decades prior to his writing. Why, he asked, had it become prominent
since roughly the 1970s? His answer: it had become de rigueur as an expression of
empowerment and powerful positive moral evaluation of the alleged capacity of subjects
to act independently, part of a conceptual shift in which determinist Marxisms and
structuralisms had lost persuasive power. Asad pointed to two significantly different
entailments of uses of agency: first, to designate the locus of responsibility for acts
(which need not coincide with the notion of individuals as agents); and second, to
designate an agent as one who acts on behalf of others. Despite the complexity of
meanings that agency implicates, Asad observed, cultural theory tended to extract
from them an idea of the conscious agent-subject whose inherent abilities and desires
orientate her/him in the singular historical direction of increasing self-empowerment.
Uses of agency were thus, in Asads view, commonly entangled in a metaphysic
characterized by problems of essentialization of the subject-agent as independent
and individualized, on the one hand (Marxian rhetoric of the class-subject was out
of favour), and an assumption of the externality (and oppressiveness) of powers
against which that agent pits herself, on the other. Reductive usages of agency as
designating self-empowerment distort the practical requirements of social life, he
suggested, presupposing too autonomous a view of the human subject, unjustifiably
downplaying her social character. Agency should instead be understood as a complex,
relational term, whose senses emerge within semantic and institutional networks
that define and make possible particular ways of dealing with people and things
(Asad 2000: 35).
From what contexts did agency come into social science, and why? Analytical
philosophy had made earlier usage of the term, designating the human individual a
voluntary agent with a set of normative characteristics (e.g. reason). There, the agents
reasons for action were argued to be a form of causal explanation (Davidson 1980
[1963]), leaving the concept individualistic and within the genre of philosophy of mind.
Taylor (1985) can be taken as representative of an ethical philosophy concerned with the
connection between ethical normativity and the distinctive capacities of humans, their
concerns and evaluations.
With the weakening of structuralist and Marxist approaches in social science to which
Asad refers, there emerged a considerable literature, exponents including Giddens (1984)
(structuration), which posed the issue as a relation between structure and agency,
developing themes of reflexivity, practical consciousness, and strategy, and retaining
the (Marxist) theme of contradiction. With practice theory, Bourdieu addressed some
of the same fundamental issues, but rather than dichotomizing structure and agency,
he argued overall for a complicity between agent actant (or agent social) and field that
constrains and enables action (and shapes the dispositions of the agent, via habitus).
Agents may engage in strategic action, but the strategies are always already embedded
in the articulation of field and habitus. An agent may deploy language and other forms
of practice to constitute aspects of social reality, but does not constitute the categories
he deploys to achieve those constitutive ends.
The period to which Asad refers also saw what Ortner (1997: 138) has termed a power
shift in cultural theorizing, visible in the influence of Said and Foucault, and in ethnic,
minority, feminist, and postcolonial studies. While, Ortner (1997: 138) opines, one does
not want to undercut engagements with power and history, that shift came at the expense
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(in some work) of dealing with culture or meaning. For example, Foucaults early focus
on discipline and technologies of domination later shifted to technologies of the self,
with a corresponding move from (corporeal) repression to a more productive concept
of the reflexive subject, but retained an abstract and individualized notion of the body
as a surface upon which power relations are inscribed (McNay 2000: 165-6; Turner
1994). Such renderings of power as effects raised the stakes for anthropologists to
closely consider the relevance of critical theory to their contemporary ethnographically
based work, especially its potential to reveal complexity. Some of the most influential of
these theorists (e.g. Deleuze, and via them certain predecessors such as Nietzsche) are,
of course, philosophical but not empirical in orientation. Anthropologys combined
ethnographic and conceptual workspace, and need for critical positioning, left it open
in this poststructuralist moment to a certain hierarchy of academic values according to
which critical theory was sometimes overlaid on even rich and detailed field materials.1
Asads critique of agency was one point of departure for Mahmoods noted book on
womens Islamic pietistic practice. Asking why would such a large number of women
across the Muslim world actively support a movement that seems inimical to their
own interests and agendas (2005: 2), she proposed that one think of` agency not
as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action
that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create (2001: 203). From
within such a view, she sees Egyptian womens pietistic practices as contributing to what
are for them valuable forms of flourishing, which may include desire for submission to
recognized authority (2005: 15). Some of their practices appear complicit with dominant
Egyptian notions of marriage, male prerogative, and female subordination. Evaluation
of womens pietism, Mahmood argued, necessitated a return to the conditions of their
lives, their engagements in social processes and relations, and the analytical question of
developing more fully social, less voluntaristic concepts of agency.
Drawing on Foucauldian notions of ethical formation (which presuppose familiarity
with Nietzschean concepts of the illusion of will), she concluded that [t]he kind of
agency I am exploring here does not belong to the women themselves, but is a product
of the historically contingent discursive traditions in which they are located (2005: 32).
Frank (2006: 295) criticizes Mahmoods placing of agency in a register of discursive
production and repeated bodily practices; she calls for a more specific theorization of
the psychological processes at work (2006: 296). My view is that contained within
Mahmoods work is the ethnographic evidence for interpreting agency somewhat
differently than she herself does. She notes that the pietistic women themselves see their
activities as recuperation of a set of traditional practices grounded in an exemplary
past (Mahmood 2005: 116); and her own summary view (above) reflects such a position.
However, her depictions of womens dealings with questions of female circumcision,
(the anomaly of) female collective prayer, sex segregation, modesty, issues of knowledge
conditioned by juridically diverse and dissenting opinion, among other matters, provide
material for agency to be seen not simply as the product of traditions, but in the ways
that women formulate their involvement and intervention in variegated and sometimes
contentious matters, with their (somatized as well as intellectual) understandings
of those structuring traditions (cf. Merlan & Rumsey 1991: 90). In New Guinean
ethnography below, I argue for this view of womens agency their involvement and
intervention in social action in what are strongly constrained as well as changing
circumstances.

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Victimhood and agency: women and warfare

Much recent ethnographic literature on women and warfare relates to Irish, Balkan,
and African contexts. Though some focuses on womens subjection to psychological
and physical brutality, a great deal of this work challenges dominant images (Utas
2005: 406) of women in war as victims. Much of it suggests that such images should
be replaced with more multifaceted views of womens roles in warfare, though with
due consideration of the ways in which war is gendered.2 Clearly, many situations in
which women become involved in warfare do not allow reductive versions of agency,
or any simple agent-victim dichotomy.3 However, the literature reveals a victim-agent
opposition to have energized uses of agency as an abstract nominalized form. Utas
proposes to collapse the dichotomy in victimcy, a form of womens self-representation
as both victim and agent, by which agency may be effectively exercised under trying,
uncertain, and disempowering circumstances (2005: 405) a tactic of self-staging in
womens social navigation of war zones.
Views that women are naturally more peace-orientated than men have also been
countered by others recognizing the contribution women may make to violence, despite
an international institutional orthodoxy (Charlesworth 2008) that women have a
particular aptitude for peace-building. Calls for fuller views have been accompanied
by acknowledgements that women themselves can be perpetrators of violence (Dilorio
1992: 54), and that there is often considerable ambiguity around the voluntary or forced
character of womens participation in fighting, including the extent to which women
see themselves as compelled or choosing courses of action.
Women, warfare, and social models in Melanesia

Though both gender relations and warfare have been central to the characterization of
New Guinea as an ethnographic region, there is little literature on womens participation
in warfare, or inspection of its gendered character. Sketchy as it is, the ethnographic
record nevertheless reveals a consistent female presence.
Critiquing as inaccurate Meads characterization of Arapesh men and women as
placid or maternal in temperament, Fortune countered that there is strong malefemale differentiation. There were Arapesh men who were seen as womanly, and a
few women who actively participated in warfare; of those who did, it was said, She
had in her a mans heart (Fortune 1939: 37). (Compare with comments below on
the Western Highlands.) Van der Kroef (1952: 225, 229) and Zegwaard (1959) write
of womens roles among the Marind-Anim and Asmat, respectively, in what is now
Provinsi Papua, Indonesia, and where head-hunting was practised. Women supported
mens head-hunting raids on neighbouring communities, but in so doing took roles in
scouting, carrying knives, preparing food, participating in raids to mind young children
left parentless, and, much more occasionally, took part in the killing. Pospisil (1963: 59)
describes women shouting tactical advice to their husbands in the midst of Kapauku
(West Papua) warfare.
In her path-breaking ethnography of Hagen women, socioculturally similar to the
valley context of our4 research in the region (see Fig. 1), very different from Papua, and
comparing more secretive poisoning with warfare, Marilyn Strathern observed: Warfare
is primarily a male activity. Women did not participate in the fighting (1972: 176).
Writing of the widespread nature of fighting among Kewa of the Southern Highlands,
Josephides notes that women supported mens efforts, but were ignorant of, and
unconcerned about, the reasons for wars, which they said were mens affairs (1985: 30).
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Figure 1. Field location, Kailge, in Western Highlands province, PNG. (Map: F. Merlan and A. Rumsey.)

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Wardlow (2006: 69-70), also making the point that Huli (Southern Highlands)
attribute collective agency to men, says that women are excluded from tribal fighting,
principally on the ground that they are thought unable to act collectively. She does,
however, footnote former kiap (patrol officer) Ron Hiatts having told her that women
participated in fighting in the early colonial period, running onto the field of battle
to collect arrows (cf. Pospisil 1963: 59), cheering on their own warriors, and mocking
their enemies (Wardlow 2006: 242). These reports suggest that women typically had a
support and incitement role in warfare, occasionally more, but that a fighting role,
even if taken by women, was regarded as masculine. Nevertheless, women were present
and participating (even if they denied knowing what mens affairs were about).
Melanesian peoples have long lived in multi-segmental societies featuring localized
rather than centralized authority sources, in which conflict and warfare have been
regular aspects of intra- and inter-group relationships (see, e.g., Glasse 1968; Koch
1974). However, warfare seems to have been regularly limited in its intensity by norms
of combat: that it be conducted in particular, agreed locations, at particular times
(e.g. Fortune 1939: 31), preceded by practices to gain ancestral support, and (for the
Western Highlands, at least) in the understanding that enemy women, though they
might be captured, raped, and abducted, were not to be killed (cf. Pospisil 1963: 59).
Though some analysts have argued that causes of warfare included land and resource
shortage (e.g. Meggitt 1977; cf. Fortune 1939: 23-4), or latently served to promote
demographic, ecological, and territorial balance and redistribution (Rappaport 1968),
evidence generally points to conflict arising from within a range of interpersonal
frictions and desires (including but not necessarily involving land and resource usage),
and allied constituencies arising in active negotiation of their implications.
Accounts of the Highlands in both western and eastern parts of the main island point
to the regularity of conflict among many groups there, but also to structured modalities
of the transformation of hostility: passages from violence back to the more routine
everyday.5 Both peace-making and resort to violence are regular alternative modes
of dealing with conflict (though differently morally weighted: see Merlan & Rumsey
1991: 154, 207; Pospisil 1963: 57). Violent or conflictual behaviour is not seen as asocial
(M. Strathern 1985), though it is often seen as problematic. Given the pervasiveness of
conflict, in the Highlands peace-making often occurs not between enemies directly
opposed to each other, but rather between allies on the same side as a strengthening
of coalition.
Warfare has re-emerged in many regions following independence (1975) and waning
of the influence of the pax Australiana.6 To a large extent, fighting remains outside
anything one would call state control (A. Strathern 1993). In many places, warfare has
changed in nature owing to the adoption of non-traditional weaponry, bringing with
it weakening of norms of behaviour relating to combat (Alpers 2005).
Given warfares past and present prevalence, sparse ethnographic discussion of
womens relation to it is notable. Limited mention may be due to the pax Australiana:
actual reduction of conflict due to establishment of colonial control in the eastern
half of the island, imposed (conditionally) by patrol officers and fairly successfully
maintained by the Australian colonial regime until independence (Burton 1990). In
many areas (including the Highlands), such control was often at least as much the
result of the enthusiastic indigenous response to colonial arrival, new kinds of goods,
and imaginings of alternative futures, as it was of physical pacification (Burton 1990).
The fact remains that few anthropologists who did fieldwork in the 1960s and 1970s in
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Papua New Guinea actually observed ongoing warfare, whereas kiaps there before them
(like Hiatt) did.7
Womens role in Nebilyer Valley warfare, 1980s

I take up the question of agency arising from my own ethnographic experience of two
periods of warfare in the Papua New Guinea Highlands in the 1980s and 2000s. In
these, women collectively played different roles: in the first instance as peace-makers,
and in the second as partisan accessories to the violence. I suggest that there is more
commonality in these two episodes than might seem to be the case, when womens
actions are, as Mahmood says, placed in relation to the practical engagements and
forms of life in which they are embedded (2001: 225). Comparison of the two periods
reveals how they conformed to existing practices as well as innovated, and motivates a
view of agency in both.
We first lived in the Nebilyer Valley from mid-1981. In September 1982, warfare broke
out between what were two identifiable sets of allies as of that time. These sets had,
as cores, first, neighbouring groups who recruited the tribe-pair with whom we lived,
Kopia-Kubuka, opposed to, second, another neighbouring tribe-pair, Tea-Dena and
their allies. This was seen as a renewal of previous hostilities, fighting having occurred
between these two constellations in the 1940s and 1950s, and was remembered by older
people.
For any given person and named group, the landscape can be imagined as a
chequerboard of territorially based named groups with which ones own has, at any
given time, a relation publicly reckoned to be along a spectrum from great enmity to
alliance, with various shades in between (cf. Singh 2011). These relations have some
stability over time, but are mutable in events.
The social landscape has implications in general, and for women in particular.
Relations of marriage both cross-cut and reinforce agnatically based segmentary
relations. For women, these are consistent with the status they occupy as what Marilyn
Strathern (1972) called women in between. With his relatives, and especially agnates,
a man takes a woman in marriage. Once married, women embody and represent
significant ties between their own tribespeople and their husbands. Marriage ties are
among the most important roads along which men organize many of their relations of
exchange and other transactions, with their in-laws among others. Many men want more
than one wife. Marriage is central to mens activities as transactors, which extend into
distant groups well beyond the closer ties of affinity. As those in between, women have
constantly to keep in mind the requirements and relations with which their marriages
intersect.
The residential unit in this region is normatively (and to a large extent actually)
agnatically based, and post-marital residence is normatively virilocal. Correspondingly,
women as wives are notional outsiders. Preference for dispersion of the marriages
among men of any given territorial group means that women resident as wives in a
locale will come from a variety of tribes and their sub-groups. Women accumulate
insiderness with respect to the place into which they have married as they stay longer,
demonstrate loyalty to their husbands, and bear them children who, everyone assumes,
will, on many occasions, be counted as belonging to the line (segmentary unit) of the
husband and his kin.
Indigenously reckoned causes of warfare centrally involve men as main instigators
and actors, with women as ancillary, linked to or acting on behalf of key figures, as
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foci of mens dispute, or as conduits (of information, or poison). Stories of causes

typically consist of quite intricate and specific accounts of previous and recent conflicts
and relationships (especially woundings, killings, poisonings, treachery: Merlan &
Rumsey 1991: 49-50). The acts of involved members of territorial segmentary groups
are reinterpreted as grounds for inter-group hostility or other shadings of collective
relations. Segmentary groups (often a tribe-pair) are typically identified as el pul, fight
base (source), because of such conflicts involving one or more of their members, and
proceed to recruit allies. The subsequent politics and events of recruitment, incitement,
and persuasion are intense and sometimes dizzying.
Recruitment of allies results in the formation of chains extending outwards from the
initial point of conflict. Initial hostilities with members of Tea-Dena, which broke out
over disputed use of a hunting trail, came from within a constellation of small tribes on
the valley floor. These small groups recruited medium-sized neighbouring tribes called
Kusika-Midipu; they recruited our hosts, Kopia-Kubuka, who then recruited major
allies, Poika-Palimi and Mujika-Laulku (who live across the Tambul Range to the west,
and with whom there have been significant rates of marriage over several generations,
as well as the movement of small segments of Palimi into Kopia territory).8 As is
conventional in this region, alliance in warfare was correlated with marriage density
to a considerable extent, and enmity with its relative infrequency. Members of KopiaKubuka and allies on one side, and Tea-Dena and their similarly recruited allies on the
other, began skirmishing. This would undoubtedly have led to widening of hostilities
had an unusual event not occurred.
A womens group, one of many forming in the region around the early 1980s with
some government support, and including members from where we lived at Kailge,
took an influential, mediating role in stopping the ensuing warfare in 1982 (Merlan &
Rumsey 1991: 1-7, 156-97). They literally stepped in between combatant sides, bearing
the Papua New Guinea flag, made gifts of soft drink, cigarettes, and money to both
sides, and enjoined them to go home, which they eventually did. The womens action
was regarded as an accomplishment of a kind more typically associated with judicious
male actors not acting for their own benefit, but suggesting options of resolution.
The novelty of their action was reflected in compensation events among the former
combatants on both sides of the fight, in that the womens group was given a return
prestation by each side. The womens position a small space of neutrality was not
identical to that of either set of combatants, who were compensated in separate events
celebrated on each side of the fighting. At the compensation events, the women repeated
many of the elements of their previous battlefield appearance: they prayed in overtly
Christian terms, and emphasized the importance of peace and gavman lo (government
law). These are all values which people in the region consider important, though they
exist in tension with others.
We thought it significant and unusual that it had been women who stopped the
fighting, conveying a message concerning bisnis and lo that all locals value positively.
But we were cautious about attributing too much to the gender factor alone, seeing the
womens ability to make a difference as probably also deriving in some large measure
from the two group leaders status as daughters of a powerful big-man, and as belonging
to a sizeable neighbouring tribal group, Kulka, that (up until that time) had maintained
its neutrality, remaining outside the warring factions in the western Nebilyer Valley. It
is also relevant that there was direct encouragement of, and some government funding
for, womens work groups at this time, enabling women to organize and earn small cash
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incomes, and generally to achieve some control of money. These were favourable and
even motivating conditions for the womens intervention as peace-makers. However,
the womens intervention was remarkable to themselves and others it created the
valued sensation of their having done something new and original.
Innovation in these events set the stage for later developments. Several years later, a
direct payment was organized between former enemies by a prominent Tea-Dena bigman to Kopia-Kubuka, and in 1998 a large return payment to Tea-Dena was made by
Kopia-Kubuka. On these occasions, too, leading men on both sides prided themselves
on altering convention in direct exchanges between major enemies (Rumsey 2003). The
1998 payment was followed by the establishment of the Faivpela Council a coalition
of people in the five local government council areas associated with the collective
nine tribes who had thus consolidated relations among themselves. The Council has
been important in subsequent (often contentious) electoral politics and other events,
including warfare in the 2000s.
Womens role in Nebilyer warfare, 2000s

In 2004, a dispute arose between Kopia and a neighbouring small group, Tilka, with
whom Kopia had had peaceable relations for some decades, over the death of a Tilka
man, Alfred Alima. The dispute provides another view into the central role of male
figures and the role of women.
Out of maternal concern for Alfred, sick and in hospital, his mother had urged a
Kopia man working at the Mt Hagen Hospital to give him medicine. Alfred is said by
some Kopia-Kubuka people to have been HIV positive; he may have died of AIDS. But
Tilka blamed his death on the medicine and held the Kopia medic, and by extension
Kopia, responsible for the mans death. While not necessarily accepting this view, Kopia
paid compensation to Tilka to assuage their anger, as is customary in such cases.
Slightly later, however, some Tilka were blamed for the death of a Kubuka man. They
were said to have given poison to two Kopia men, who administered it to him via the
Tilka mother of one and wife of the other.9 This version of the Kubuka mans death
was not accepted by everyone (some thought he had died of binge drinking), but it was
widely enough credited to become the basis of further collective action. Tilka were seen
as culpable in the deaths by most Kopia and Kubuka, and compensation was demanded
of them. They refused to pay it. Soon after this, there were hostilities between Tilka
and Kopia at Sibeka, a large shared garden area near Kailge. Hearing this, a large band
of Kopia and Kubuka went and attacked Tilka, who fled east to take refuge with their
allies, the Kulka the large group that had maintained its neutrality in the 1980s. In
ensuing recruitments, Kulka and Tilka were directly drawn as allies into warfare against
Kopia-Kubuka and the allies in the Faivpela Council. Kulka was no longer neutral, on
the one hand, nor Tilka a buffering group, on the other, as they had been in the 1982
war.
The fighting in 1982 had remained at a low intensity: although there were alerts in
our hamlet, threats of the burning and razing of villages, and fighters who returned
seriously wounded, there was no large-scale destruction and there were no deaths.
The fighting of the 2000s was different in intensity and toll. Following the example
of recent fighting in 1993-510 that occurred between the large valley floor Kulka and
neighbouring Ulka tribe (towards Mt Hagen), combatants obtained rifles, some of
which were semi-automatic. Wantoks (tribesmen, including politicians) who had the
capacity to do so were prevailed upon to help obtain them. Over the next two years,
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Figure 2. Graves of fighters killed in the recent war, at Walyo near Kailge, 2009. (Photo: A. Rumsey.)

Figure 3. Grave marker of fighter showing death by semi-automatic weapon, 2013. (Photo: F. Merlan.)

from 2005 to 2007, unprecedented numbers were killed on either side: the final tally
was about eighty in total, split evenly between the two. The dead brought home were
buried under cement tombstones, many of which indicate not only name and death
date, but method of death: by rifle, and/or, in a novel development of dispatching the
wounded, by machete at close quarters (Figs 2 and 3). The Kailge Community School
was completely destroyed.11 Though fighting stopped after 2007, tension has persisted
to this day, to some degree.12
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During this much fiercer fighting, women on both sides became engaged. Women as
well as men talk of enemies as fair game for brutal treatment in periods of open hostility.
Enemies are not seen as nonhuman or asocial.13 They are seen instead as rather like
oneself, but hostile. They are mistrusted, and one is cautious to avoid placing oneself
in their way. People routinely take roads that avoid enemy territory.
There appeared to be a new degree of brutality in the treatment of the (enemy)
wounded and dead. Women recounted with obvious relish how fallen enemies, some
of whom they had known, or known of, at a distance for years, were roped in vines
and dragged along the ground, wounded or dead, while their own fallen fighters were
carried back to their place of refuge in the higher mountain slopes to be tended or
mourned. The norm that women though they may be raped and captured will not
be killed in warfare was clearly challenged in practice, given new conditions (see below).
Women were reported to have acted as scouts (mobile phones did not begin to enter the
area until 2007). I asked people with whom we regularly live about an unusual episode
in which a woman scouting for the other side was shot dead at long range. They said
it was only when the male combatants reached the body that they realized this was a
woman camouflaged as a man. When I asked women on our side how they felt about
this, they said, without compunction: Thats all right, she was an enemy.
Jakelin Peter14 is a mother of three young children, in her later thirties, married
into Kailge from across the Tambul range to a man from a large and prominent Kopia
sub-group. She was one of a number of younger women who spoke animatedly about
the recent warfare.
Jakelin largely saw herself and other women in a sapot (support) role with respect
to the men during the war, collecting rocks and weapons for them, providing food,
minding children.
We did what we did so the men could fight. We would stay, the men went first, and we would follow. We
would dig sweet potato at Sibeka [garden, on the valley floor near Kailge]. We would go back and sleep
at Ukulu [i.e. in the upper, more mountainous reaches of the river]; the men would stay where they
could, sometimes up the mountain [with Poika-Palimi allies on the Tambul side, sometimes wherever
they could]. They went to Kumaku [in Kulka territory] and burned the place, they also cut the coffee
trees down. We women followed, we cut down the pandanus, and the smaller coffee trees [i.e. the
women did follow-up work]. They cut down the coffee trees, the casuarina trees and pandanus, set
things on fire and attacked people. They [the enemy] were weak; the women [on the enemy side] were
afraid and ran to the river, they carried a coffee machine to the river and threw it in. They couldnt carry
it, it was heavy, so they threw it in the water. One [Kulka] woman was carrying a child in a netbag she
went into the water and the child drowned. We went to attack the enemy, and they went into the water.
They threw their children into the water, and the coffee machine. They went and stayed at Wareli [i.e.
fled their homes and moved to a Kulka location nearer the Highlands Highway]. Our men followed
them to Wareli and continued attacking. Aaron [a young man who lives in our house compound] went
to Wareli too. They told a woman [they met on the way] not to warn the men; they killed two women [as
a result, apparently, of their not co-operating; it seems likely to me that not all such collateral damage is
regularly reckoned by people tallying up the deaths resulting from the fighting]. Our men attacked the
other men, the women ran away. Theyd started out fighting with bows and arrows but they wound up
using guns as well.

Jakelin said that women went along with the men when they had advanced and
could plunder a village: they stole whatever they found that was worth taking, including
chickens, pigs, cookware, and utensils. But they didnt take their clothes, she added:
these people were full of disease. AIDS was much on peoples minds, and there seemed
to be a general attribution of disease to enemies. Some women at Kailge described how
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they, in turn, had to flee on more than one occasion, and looked down from the slopes
they were scaling to see their houses going up in smoke as they were torched.
Our men werent afraid! We women werent afraid either. We women sometimes went ahead to check if
the enemy were coming we, me too, we went stealthily, supporting our men, saying Let them fight!
We went first, and if there was nobody there, wed tell them to advance. Wed make smoke signals and
the men would know to advance.

Jakelin and others told stories of captured women. One young woman was
surrounded while she was collecting peanuts. She couldnt run away. They caught
her and gave her to an old man (to take her as his wife). They were married; the woman
had no strength (todul) to resist, Jakelin said, so the enemy kept her.
Fighting affected mobility. People had to change how they moved around the
countryside (they followed an alternative route to the Highlands Highway which avoided
enemy territory), and within the space of Mt Hagen town (where bus stops normally
used could no longer be shared with members of certain other groups).
Women composed songs during the fighting, and sang them at night, keeping
their spirits up. They re-enacted the way they linked arms, and performed wapi puku
(a dance), enthusiastically singing some of the songs they had composed: You say you
will eat me but you wont. My ancestors were here long ago, and I belong here. The
enthusiastic renditions of these songs gave me some insight into their experience of the
periods of fighting as thrilling and emotionally intense.
On the other hand, women recognized that they were enclaved in the place into
which they were married. A Kopia woman, Miriam, from a large family on whose land
we live is married to a Kulka man. She told me that she was unable to come to Kailge
for six years during the fighting even though, in normal times, she could walk here
from her Kulka home in less than a half hour. Occasionally, she said, she managed to
see her brothers in Mt Hagen. But it would have made her life impossible to be seen to
sympathize with her Kopia kin.
Since most women in the area are Christian, and regular attenders of some kind
of church activity, I asked some who had recounted their involvement in the sapot
activities: You go to church; do you think that the fighting you and others did was
good or bad? At which, almost universally, the answer was: Bad. But this was said
with enthusiasm, and a giggle, that belied the adjective. The fighting was eventful,
dangerous, and brought many hardships; but even after enduring some years of it and
acknowledging the difficulties they had to live with, enthusiasm concerning the war
period was relatively high.
There are, however, personal and generational differences. One older woman, now
widowed, who has contributed many children, now adult, to our locale of Kailge, and
who, like the others, considers herself Christian, said she felt pipilyi, shame, and is now
reluctant to go to Tela, an enemy area near the exit to the Highlands highway. All those
people knew my sons were involved in the fighting, she said; and so I feel ashamed. As
a mother, she felt it reflected badly on her that her sons had been involved in trying to
kill the others whom she now had to face if she wanted to go to Tela.
However, few expressed explicit shame as she did. People sometimes articulate
Christian ideals, realizing that these enjoin humane and even-handed treatment of
others. But in the context of warfare, people think of others primarily in terms of the
segmentary and related categories to which they are seen to belong. An enemy is an
enemy.
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Differentiated ties, of course, persist. Some women had sympathies for those
considered enemies by others in their residential locations. A woman from over the
Tambul range who was married into a family many of whom I know well told me that
two of the young Tilka men who were killed early in the fighting were the sons of a
clan sister of hers. Though she wanted to mourn them, she felt unable to do so. To cry
for people who were regarded as the collective enemy would have earned her rough
treatment at home, she said; and so she said nothing.
The Kopia mother of a Tilka youth also told me that she had not dared to contact
Kopia relatives of her fathers line. Instead, during the war, she fled with her Tilka
husbands family to a place of refuge out near the Highlands Highway, where most
Tilka remained until recently. The first to return all had close family connections to
neighbouring Kopia. Although that gives people confidence to return to the lands they
have left, such connection is not taken to offer protection in times of fighting. This
Kopia woman married into Tilka fled with her in-laws, and would have had a very
difficult time doing otherwise.
The stories of some of these (especially older, established) women provide evidence
of variant values, not fully complicit with those that underwrite warfare. Again on
a somewhat gendered and age-related basis, some more established men tend to see
younger men as hotheads, ready to fight at the drop of a hat, who need to be reined
in. Such men are attuned to the societal valuation of judicious male behaviour and the
capacity to mediate between disputants, capacities that are generally part of what it is to
be a big-man, rather than a mere fighter. Some raids and expeditions of the recent war
were described as being largely the work of younger men. It seemed to me, however,
that people also revelled in telling me about the participation in fighting of young men
I know attributing audacity and flagrancy to it.
What are some of the conditions, including their fluid dimensions, that enabled
womens particular ways of dealing with people and things?
Values and change

There has been considerable change in the Nebilyer since the 1980s, in economic,
political, religious, social, and cultural terms; but not as much as people would like.
Since the colonial period, people of the region have valued notions of acting in ways that
uphold gavman lo, of conducting bisnis and attempting to bring about development
rather than stupidly destroying everything, of being Christian and varying with
denomination and message what that might entail. Big-men, those recognized as
having power and influence as transactors, regularly invoke these values, but there seem
to be relatively few for whom these constitute the sole set of values on which they call.
To date, an assemblage of values and practices underlain by the centrality of belonging
to territorial segmentary groups remains fairly constant in peoples lives in the Nebilyer.
Some Nebilyer men and women nevertheless entertain imaginings of a world
otherwise constituted. Several people, referring to the fighting of the 2000s, have spoken
of people not living in lines or segmentary groups, but simply trying to earn a living,
making their way, without contributing to such joint ventures as collective warfare.
Several women previously married, but now single or in tension with husbands,
typically over the latters efforts to take second wives have said that they do not want
to remarry, and prefer an independent life, though they are always confronted with
the problem of having to depend upon their kindred, who would in general like them
to conform to gender norms. Nevertheless, it is increasingly considered normal for
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girls to attempt high school (and other) qualifications, something which is not seen as
incompatible with their marriage prospects, and might even enhance them.
Traditional elements of marriage arrangement, bride-price, continuing exchange
between in-laws remain very important, but alongside convention there is much
fluidity. In her ethnography of Huli (Southern Highlands) passenger women, who sell
sex for money, Wardlow (2006) examines why sexuality is an important instrument
of what she explicitly calls the agency of such women. Despite differences between
Huli and Hagen, both regions have certain common structures that condition womens
lives: ideology that emphasizes male kinship links and agnatically defined territorial
groups; virilocal post-marital residence; considerable male control over womens social
relations; and bridewealth marriage and its increasing monetization and volatility as
families seem less able to anchor the relationships of husband and wife. Within these
sociocultural structures, Huli (and Hagen) women utilizing their sexuality outside of
licit relationships are seen to be perversely wresting their relational potential from kin.
In both regions, these conditions produce strong notions of good and wayward
femininity, the latter the kind of agency a woman may decide to operationalize
particularly when she feels neglected, betrayed, or treated like a marketable chattel. As in
many other parts of the world, though, there is no accepted valuation of personal choice
which would allow womens disposing of their own sexuality to be seen as anything but
disruptive. Though women value the autonomy they may achieve, they have internalized
hegemonic evaluations of what it is to be good as opposed to wayward, even when
they put aside (sometimes temporarily, often resentfully) any aspiration to be seen, in
local category terms, as good women.
There is now continuous mobility, especially to and from Hagen town, and even
previously rare to further-flung locations such as Port Moresby that can only be
reached by air. Many young men exude impatience to join in the Highlands-dominated
taxi trade in Moresby, and to earn money in places like Australia that they understand
to enjoy a much higher standard of living than Papua New Guinea. Gone is the older
generation we first knew, many of whom, as young adults, had lived through direct and
indirect experiences of European arrival in the region. Now, despite limited contact,
everybody has an understanding that Europeans (yab kuduyl, red people) exist, locally,
nationally, and internationally.
Economically, money is universally desired; but ways of earning it remain limited.
Women, especially, find that many contemporary ways of using money for example,
mens use of it for a second wife disadvantage them, and contravene their ideals of
a stable marriage to which husbands commit their efforts. Women resent what some
experience as the commoditization and destabilization of marriage and sex.
Politically, elections have become much more central to peoples lives and imaginings
about how change might take place; but postcolonial government, in practice, is largely
understood as a spoils system: get your man in and you will benefit. Men commit effort
to assisting and becoming candidates, but see this as an inadequate basis for a business
system with few entry points.
What was formerly universal adherence to the Catholic Church in our region
southwest of Mt Hagen has become diversified and indigenized. Many other churches
have entered Mt Hagen and surrounding rural areas. In Kailge, the pastors of six
relatively new churches are, if not local, then from the region (none of them are
women, though women form the majority of the congregation). Church-going has
become increasingly re-imagined as the medium of material renewal and prosperity,
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and of spiritual satisfaction. Church activities generate genuine enthusiasm, as well as

suspicions of churchmen and their motives.
Warfare remains tightly linked to the ideology and practice of group solidarity. What
would it take for the centrality, the absoluteness, of that value of group belonging to
become attenuated, or placed in a different relation to other circulating and changing
values? There are various ways in which such a question is being repeatedly asked.
Innovation and conformity

There are similarities between the situations of the women of the Nebilyer Valley and
those of whom Mahmood writes. Both are doing things that largely but not entirely
conform to many aspects of the asymmetrically gendered status quo. In the Nebilyer
bouts of warfare, women ventured (further) into what is stereotypically seen as a
masculine domain of war, bringing to light (for the actors themselves) ways in which
gender difference is at issue.
Much of what the womens group did in 1982 making payments that recognized
sides in the fight to named segmentary groups that they recognized as significant
collective actors was in keeping with convention. Making prestations to both sides,
however, was innovative, though supported by a widely held set of values concerning
judicious action. The latter, as well as fighting itself, is stereotypically masculine; it is
considered extraordinary even for men. A perspicuous innovation (as with Egyptian
womens collective prayer) is the fact of women undertaking these valued forms of
action, despite structures and stereotypes that define their association with them as
marked, or unaccustomed.
In the Hagen region, it has long been possible for women to gain approval for
doing things that remain defined as stereotypically male, such as confronting or killing
enemies; but this results in their receiving accolades for being man-like. Even if women
are praised as being like men, however, bravery is often understood to enhance their
female capacities. In our fieldwork during the 1980s, it was said of one such manly
woman that, after she had stoned an enemy in a garden, her hair grew enviably long and
luxurious. She was highly sought after in marriage, and went on to have eight children.
What better proof of transcendental favour (Merlan & Rumsey 1991: 234)?
Jakelins assertion We women werent afraid in the war of the 2000s stakes a small
claim to being equivalent to men in bravery. Our experience, however, has suggested that
mens commitment to the pursuit of political action, including warfare, on a segmentary
basis is typically greater than womens (Merlan & Rumsey 1991: 194). Women were and
are not recognized as having a major role as transactors in segmentary politics, but
are valued as mothers and producers. Even if praised as being like men, their male
behaviour can be differently aligned with key values than mens.
In both the 1980s and 2000s, womens activities could be understood by them and
others as resonating with values of the good female kinsperson. In the 1980s, the womens
groups capacity to settle hostilities undoubtedly drew on their relation as daughters to
a renowned big-man of (then) neutral Kulka, also reinforcing his position. The club
leaders orated and transacted in ensuing compensation events. Womens actions were
both innovative and deeply implicated in segmentary political life, with many of its
modes of living painful relations (Asad 2000:43), and shifts in political relations that
can occur within the span of any married womans life.
In the 2000s, as hostilities expanded, many (especially younger) women mainly
managed intersecting and conflicting relations by supporting their husbands, and
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their agnatic groups, in ways consistent with stereotypes of the good wife. To do so
often meant they backgrounded other relations and suppressed other sympathies. They
supported each other in looking after their young families in refuge, but trialled greater
involvement in other ways that are consistent with tendencies emergent in male-female
relations today (scouting, camouflaging themselves as men, etc., as discussed above).
While partly consistent with images of the supportive wife, such actions were also
expressive of distanciation from gender conventions in ways that local men and women
recount as attention-getting, even outrageous. The woman who camouflaged herself as
a man in order to be able to engage at the front line was judged to have done something
flagrant. In the Nebilyer warfare of the 2000s, younger wives with greater exposure than
their mothers generation to travel, schooling, and the fluctuation of moral certainties,
partly arising in experimentation with alternative church affiliations, were widening
the support role and taking advantage of the possibilities of participating in plunder
and other excitements. This freed but also imperilled them in new ways, given the
introduction of guns, heightening the poignance of their claims to bravery.
For women in between, warfare represents an exceptional moment in which, on the
evidence of the war of the 2000s, womens links may become radically simplified. The
more intense warfare is, the more it can compel a cutting off of women from other ties
than those into which they have married. The situation constrains them to maximize
this aspect of their social value, and to join together in collective support of the line
into which they find themselves married. And this is what it seems many did during
the war of the 2000s. Older women evidently find it somewhat more possible to remain
aloof from support activities if they choose.
Alongside some innovation, deep embeddedness in the practice of a segmentary
social order informed what women did. Two other, pervasive societal values fed Nebilyer
womens actions in both the 1980s and 2000s. The first is that of doing something seen
as novel. Since womens lives are highly conditioned by gendered norms, their acting
in novel ways will often involve experimenting with these as judicious, transacting
peace-makers in the 1980s (Merlan & Rumsey 1991: 186), and in pushing the boundaries
of the support role in the 2000s. The second is a related value, that of doing something
that will be seen and recalled as the basis of later action, building renown.
Reviewing agency

Asads (2000) critique of reductive, evaluatively loaded notions of agency is well taken,
as is his call for context. In Egypt as in the Nebilyer, we need to return to the conditions of
womens lives to understand their actions and evaluations of them, which remain linked
(though sometimes oppositionally) to asymmetrical gendered models and inclusive
social values.
From most outsiders views, there is an order of moral difference between the
Nebilyer episodes. Women who stop fights are doing something we can praise; women
who help the fight, less so. Yet in both, the women drew on wellsprings of value
and innovated to some extent, involving themselves in ways that earned considerable
regard (at home) and produced a personal and collective sense of their prowess. Their
orientations reflected values of novelty and renown (contrasting with Egyptian pietist
womens overt orientation towards reproducing sacral tradition).
If agency is broadly taken to designate a capacity to act consequentially in
circumstances, and perhaps more specifically to act in unanticipated but (locally)
apposite ways, Nebilyer women acted agentively in both instances. What I suggest
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is identifiable as agency is neither kind of behavior per se, but competently living
the relation between conditioned potentials and self-projection into often complex
and conflicting circumstances. This does not necessarily make agency liberatory or
praiseworthy. Agency in this sense does not only pertain to women, though, of course,
their circumstances are often particular and asymmetrical ones within social orders.
This is a view of agency as a mediatory social category which designates something
lived, perhaps hard to grasp in its immediacy and instability.
All major approaches to agency discussed so far Asads, Mahmoods, Giddens,
and Bourdieus take it to pertain to relations between actors and their conditions.15
There is considerable difference between their positions and what Marilyn Strathern
proposed as an indigenous (not sociological) model of agency. Stratherns (1988) ideas
concerning gendered agency have some of their ethnographic grounding in Hagen. She
does not purport to represent the complexity of a broad set of social conditions, but aims
to model certain ones concerning how Hageners (Melanesians?) live agency, cause,
and effect. Her concern is with particular relationships (having to do with marriage,
reproduction, kinship, feeding). In this model, men and women are seen as causes of
each others actions; the complete person as the product of others interactions (1988:
273, 287). Action draws out and exhibits what others are capable of (1988: 290), which
becomes visible as effect (such as the production of a child). While relationships are
taken as conditions for action (1988: 305), their successful elicitation is always a matter
of uncertainty and anxiety, and can be one of coercion, even violence (1988: 293, 299).
Strathern separates cause, understood as a reference point for acts (1988: 272), from
agency, activated in persons (themselves the products of multiple causes and agents),
who act thereupon and produce effects which become embodied in others (1988: 297).
Agents are not, however, thereby reduced to automata, but are made social. In Stratherns
words (1988: 272), an agent is one who acts from his or her own vantage-point with
anothers in mind, mindful of certain kinds of effects. Strathern emphatically states
that agents are not the authors of their own acts . . . Agency and cause are split (1988:
273).
Does this correspond to Mahmoods conclusion that agency does not belong to
Egyptian pietists, but is the product of traditions and orientated to their reproduction?
There is certainly a big difference in the dimensions of womens lives that Strathern
examines. She treats agency as explicitly embedded in human relationality. In these
relations, agency is orientated internally to reproducing people, not externally to
reproducing religious or political effects, which is understood to be mens domain.
Conclusion

We can return to ask: why did agency take off in the social sciences, and how did analysts
attempt to make it conceptually load-bearing? Asad suggests that in the theoretical
conjuncture of the late twentieth century, a new vocabulary was needed beyond
determinism and voluntarism, compulsion and freedom for the relation of human
actors to action, especially in constraining circumstances.
The epistemology of difference between social and natural forces which underlies
the social sciences often returns us to the humbling realization that we can only really
understand human action in terms of the deeply relational nexus between persons and
their conditions. Marx (2005 [1852]: 1) epitomized the issue when he observed that
we do not choose our circumstances they are to some considerable extent already
existing, given, and transmitted from the past. Persons are already deeply embedded in
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the circumstances in which they act. But, Marx insisted, men make their own history.
Agency emerged as a term for interrogating that relation yet again. But the fluid
meaning I have suggested for it as lived relation, though it resurfaces, has not been the
most common one. Agency increasingly filled a space in social analyses as an abstract
nominalized form having to do with capacity to act, inviting imagination of a distinctive,
persistent energy or force. That lent itself to further reification in particular ways we
have seen, including, for example, as a generic characterization of women in warfare
as not victims but agents; and the attribution of agency, in such usages, frequently
signals particular commitments on the part of authors.
NOTES
I am grateful to people at Kailge for their perspectives on the recent period of warfare, to audiences at The
Australian National University, and to Alan Rumsey for critical reading. Thanks to Kailge school headmaster
Steven Kurui for discussion of its consequences and the return of children after the fighting.
1 Arguably the large literatures on accommodation and resistance also require consideration in terms of
social theoretical tendencies that Asad criticizes towards positive valorization of autonomous, free agents, a
point only mentioned here.
2 See Coulter (2008) on the diversity of womens war experiences in Sierra Leone; Utas (2005: 404) on the
Liberian conflict.
3 The same applies to other situations of subordination (see, e.g., Johnsons [2003] critique of facile uses
of agency with respect to the New Social History of slavery).
4 My husband Alan Rumsey and I have jointly done fieldwork at Kailge in the Western Highlands province
since 1981.
5 For comparative discussion, see A. Strathern & Stewart (2011).
6 As Wiessner has described for Enga (2010; Wiessner & Pupu 2012) and Rumsey (2009) for Ku Waru.
7 In the western part of the island, Dutch missionaries like Zegwaard (1959) directly observed the results
of raiding and taking of heads; and there are also Gardners (however contested) fight sequences in the film
Dead birds (1963; cf. Kirsch 2010); studies of the neighbouring Jalemo by Koch (1970, 1974); and Pospisils
(1963: 57-63) first-hand account.
8 My husband Alan was identified as Kopia-Kaja (a specific lineage of Kopia), and I as Laulku-Wijangayl,
because of a significant number of marriages between sub-groups of Kopia and Laulku (and my actually
spending considerable time, in practice, with certain in-married Laulku women).
9 Note the allegations of negative female agency, common here (see M. Strathern 1972: 268-9).
10 Ulka and Kulka fought in the 1970s, then again in the mid-1980s, and in 1993-5, in the latter period
using high-powered semi-automatic rifles instead of bows and arrows and spears, destroying much property,
including a community school and police station that have never been rebuilt, and killing over a hundred
people.
11 The school has been rebuilt in recent years, with assistance from the ubiquitous mobile phone company
Digicel.
12 The Catholic arch-diocese in Mt Hagen began to urge peace talks and reconciliation; a first direct meeting
of enemies, co-organized by Archbishop Douglas Young and Alan Rumsey, occurred under their aegis in
January 2009 (Rumsey 2009). Alan did not return to Kailge until then, and I only did so in 2013; but we kept
in touch with some people there by other means.
13 This can be compared and contrasted with another recent phenomenon. Shortly before one of our recent
field trips, a young Enga woman had been accused of sorcery by a large crowd in Mt Hagen. She was burned
to death in the presence of several hundred people, by all accounts including police, and nobody intervened
(The Australian 2013). No doubt anyone attempting to intervene would be in big trouble; nobody gave any
sign of wanting to do so. When we attempted to glean a first response to this from some of our close associates
in Kailge, their immediate response was: She did it, she admitted it herself (that she had killed a young
boy, and was a sangguma, or witch); and so, they concluded, it was right to burn her. This case differs from
the discussion of warfare in that sangguma are regarded as ontologically other, nonhuman or possessed by
nonhuman forces.
14 This and all other names used here are pseudonyms.
15 The period Asad refers to also saw the emergence of actor-network theory, a disparate family of ideas
and approaches that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect
of webs of relations within which they are located. The whole approach necessarily changes the status of

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human-nonhuman difference: people are relational effects that include the human and nonhuman. Latour
(1987) has proposed that one may talk of actant rhizomes; Law (2004) has argued that there is little difference
between Deleuzes agencement (awkwardly translated as assemblage in English) and the term actor network.
Actor-network theory dissolves some of the issues which underlie agency approaches.
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Les femmes, la guerre et une vie dagenceite : la Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinee

et au-del`a
Resume
Lagenceite est lun des mots-cles du discours anthropologique depuis les annees 1970, ou` elle a fait son
apparition dans des theories socio-philosophiques renouvelees (par exemple structure et agenceite ),
alors que les grandes theories deterministes (marxisme, structuralisme . . . ) commencaient a` perdre leur
de plus en plus important en ethnographie. Bien
force de persuasion. Elle en est venue a` jouer un role
quelle ait e te partiellement remplacee a` son tour dans une partie de son champ semantique dorigine,
elle subsiste davantage dans certains domaines dusage que dans dautres, par exemple dans les analyses
de la subordination face au pouvoir. Le present article examine plusieurs conceptualisations differentes de
lagenceite. Lethnographie se concentre sur des formes divergentes daction des femmes au cours de deux
e pisodes de conflit arme dans les Hautes-Terres de Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinee. En comparant celles-ci,
lauteure rejoint les critiques des approches qui font de lagenceite une abstraction (liberatrice) et
envisage cette notion comme une relation vecue dintervention et dengagement dans laction sociale,
intimement liee aux valeurs et aux contraintes. Cette combinaison peut e tre liberatrice, mais ce nest pas
toujours le cas. Larticle examine la vie et la mort (partielle) de lagenceite en tant que terme des sciences
sociales.

Francesca Merlan is Professor of Anthropology at The Australian National University. Since 1981, she has
done research with Alan Rumsey in Papua New Guinea, a span which has given her a long-term perspective
on change grounded in a field location, Kailge, in the Western Nebilyer Valley, Western Highlands province.

School of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia.
Francesca.Merlan@anu.edu.au

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 392-411


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