Melpa

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Melpa

ETHNONYMS: Hageners, Mbowamb, Medlpa

Orientation

Identification. The Melpa people live in the Western Highlands Province of the independent state of Papua New Guinea. They are a homogeneous ethnolinguistic group, bounded on the west by the Enga and on the east by the Wahgi peoples.

Location. The Melpa live in a location which is approximately between 144° to 145° E and 5° to 6° S. Geographically, their area consists of montane valleys and mountain slopes, varying between 400 and 2,100 meters above sea level. The bulk of the population lives at altitudes between 1,500 and 1,800 meters above sea level. The climate is marked by a relatively wet period from October to March and dry from April to September. Temperatures vary from seasonal lows of 4° C or less to highs of 27° C or more. Annual rainfall is in excess of 250 centimeters. In the dry season there may be periods of drought and nocturnal frost. Otherwise, the climate is benign and the planting of crops continues year-round.

Demography. The 60,000 or more Melpa speakers occupy the areas south and north of the modern township of Mount Hagen. Population density varies with ecology, but exceeds 134 persons per square kilometer in parts of the Wahgi Valley and Ogelbeng Plain just outside of the town, tapering to fewer than 19 persons per square kilometer in the northern parts known indigenously as "Kopon" (Dei Council). Annual growth of the population since colonial times is calculated at slightly over 2 percent per annum.

Linguistic Affiliation. The Melpa language is spoken by more than 60,000 persons. It belongs to the East New Guinea Highlands Stock of Non-Austronesian languages and to the Central Family within that stock. The nearest related languages are spoken in the Nebilyer Valley, Tambul, and Ialibu south of the Melpa area. To the east the Wahgi and Chimbu languages and to the north the Maring, Narak, and Kandawo languages also belong to the same family.

History and Cultural Relations

Intensive horticulture has been practiced in the area for some 9,000 years, starting in fertile drained swamps and moving later to hillsides when sweet potatoes became available to replace taro as the staple crop, an event estimated to have occurred within the last few hundred years. Trading networks brought shell valuables, plumes for decoration, salt, and stone axe blades from distant parts. Europeans discovered the area in 1933 as part of an exploratory drive in search of gold in the highlands creeks. The brothers Michael, James, and Danny Leahy and the Australian Patrol Officer James L. Taylor were prominent in the process of discovery and initial pacification. Mount Hagen was established as a center for mission activities, trade, and administration. Until the 1950s, major contact with the outside world was by air. Nowadays the Highlands Highway to the coastal port of Lae on the north coast of Papua New Guinea is the chief channel for goods to enter and leave. Until 1975, Papua New Guinea was under Australian colonial control, and Western Highlands was a district. At independence, the districts became Provinces and from the late 1970s these gained their own provin cial assemblies and governments in addition to the National Parliament.

Settlements

The indigenous form of settlement is the hamlet or extended family homestead situated close to gardening areas within a clan territory. Pathways lead from one settlement to another. Some settlements have a ceremonial ground associated with them. This is particularly likely to be so if one of the residents is a political leader (a big-man). There are two kinds of houses: men's houses, usually round and occupied by men and boys from the time they are 8 or 9 years old; and women's houses, long and sometimes with a special compartment for pig stalls, in which the women and their unmarried daughters live. Houses are made from posts, bark, woven cane, and thatching grass. Missions introduced "line villages" with Family houses instead of separate men's and women's houses. These innovations have had variable success. Houses Nowadays tend to be built near roads, introduced since colonial times.

Economy

Subsistence and Commercial Activities. Traditional Subsistence rests on the cultivation of sweet potatoes, in mounds or squares surrounded by drainage trenches. In fallow areas among trees the people also make vegetable gardens for cucumbers, beans, maize (introduced), sugarcane, and bananas (both for cooking and for eating ripe). These gardens are nowadays supplemented or even replaced by areas planted with coffee from which cash is earned. Vegetables are also taken for sale in Mount Hagen market. Trade stores dot the countryside, in which introduced clothing, foodstuffs, and household utensils can be bought.

Industrial Arts. In precolonial times, a number of stone-axe quarries were operated, and the rough-cut or polished stones were exported as well as being used locally. Europeans brought steel tools that replaced those of stone. Prehistoric mortars and pestles are found archaeologically, but these items were used by the Melpa as cult objects rather than tools.

Trade. Over time, exchange networks extended beyond the Melpa area in all directions, but particularly westward with Enga speakers, with whom stone axe blades were Exchanged for salt packs. Major religious cults also diffused into the area from the south and southwest via Tambul. The lowlying northern areas were sources of fruit, pandanus, and bird plumes. The Melpa moka ceremonial exchange chains linked together many groups in the area itself in a complex set of obligations to make prestations of pigs and shells between Exchange partners from different groups. Trade nowadays is in coffee, exported to the world market.

Division of Labor. The indigenous division of labor is by sex. Men create garden areas, fence them, and plant luxury crops. Women plant greens, the staple sweet potatoes, and taro. They harvest gardens and keep them free of weeds, and they are also largely responsible for feeding the pig herds that are essential to the prestige economy.

Land Tenure. Land is generally inherited by sons from their fathers as they grow up and marry. Daughters can be allocated portions to use even after marriage, but marriage is usually virilocal and a wife expects to garden mostly on her husband's land within his clan area.

Kinship

Kin Groups and Descent. Descent groups are normatively patrilineal, but there is a counterbalancing stress on matrilateral relationships and on affinal alliances expressed through exchange and in shifts of residence to the maternal group in case of in-group conflict or economic advantage. Exogamous clans are clustered into tribes and divided into subclans and smaller units that act as groups in exchange activities.

Kinship Terminology. Kinship terminology follows the Iroquois system with bifurcate-merging terms for collaterale. Most kin terms are self-reciprocals in address but not in reference.

Marriage and Family

Marriage. Marriage takes place through an exchange of payments of a bride-wealth type. Payments are high and require the cooperation of kin groups. The items are pigs, shells (traditionally), and cash (nowadays). Reverse prestations are made from the bride's side, including an endowment of breeding pigs over which she has significant control. Residence is normatively patrivirilocal. Divorce does occur and is marked by the return of a part of the bride-wealth, especially if the woman is judged at fault or has produced no children for the husband's clan.

Domestic Unit. A newly married couple may either build a fresh women's house for the bride or may use space in an existing women's house. Over time they will build houses for themselves, close to the man's settlement.

Inheritance. Land rights are the most important for inheritance, and land is parceled out according to the needs of children at their marriages. Most land goes to sons. Married daughters may be given cultivation rights at their natal place also.

Socialization. A postpartum taboo is observed for two to three years, after which children are weaned. Training is not severe, and children are treated with tolerance. There is no formal group-based initiation ritual for either boys or girls, but boys shift to the men's house well before puberty. Puberty for boys is marked by the donning of a wig made from human hair. Traditionally, both sexes learn by the "look and learn" method. Nowadays, most children go at least to primary school.

Sociopolitical Organization

Social Organization. Clans are primarily linked by Marriages and the exchange ties that flow from them. Clans of a tribe generally had obligations to give support in serious warfare, but internally they might also fight each other. Tribal warfare has returned in the 1970s and 1980s with the partial breakdown of government control.

Political Organization. The indigenous leader is the bigman (wö nuim ) who does not formally succeed to an office but with the aid of his kin establishes a dominant place in the networks of moka exchange. In precolonial times, big-men held a greater monopoly over shell wealth, which disappeared after Europeans brought in thousands of these previously scarce items. Big-men must also be good speakers and negotiators. Nowadays, the big-man system operates along with the introduced roles of councillors, provincial members, and members of the National Parliament, all of whom are elected every four or five years.

Social Control. Force played a major role in relations Between groups in the past, modified by the negotiating skills of big-men. Internally, conflicts were settled by moots. Nowadays, these are replaced by official Village Courts and by a range of other introduced courts.

Conflict. Conflict is endemic in Melpa society, counter-balanced by strong norms of friendship between kin and Exchange partners. The resurgence of political conflict between groups is a serious contemporary problem. It is fueled both by economic change and by continuity of a revenge mentality.

Religion and Expressive Culture

Religious Beliefs. Everyday religion in the past was centered on the family, lineage, and clan ghosts, to whom pork sacrifices were made in cases of sickness and at times of Political danger (e.g., prior to warfare). In addition, circulating cults moved through the area, exported from group to group. Nowadays, many Melpa are members of various Christian churches in the area.

Religious Practitioners. Religious experts (mön wö ) were significant in both local and circulating cults. They were both curers and intercessors between people and spirits. Some learned from their fathers, others by apprenticeship to existing experts. Women could become mediums possessed by spirits and able to reveal secrets.

Ceremonies. The climactic ceremonies of the circulating cults were impressive public affairs, in which the male participants danced out from the cult enclosure and distributed pork to hundreds of guests.

Arts. Self-decoration was, and is, an art and a major preOccupation of the people at festival times, both for cults and for moka exchanges. Other arts include the composition and performance of courting songs, laments, and songs for Ceremonies, the playing of flutes and Jew's harps, and the chanting of epics.

Medicine. The mön wö knew ranges of spells to cure Sickness. Adults in general were acquainted with a small number of herbal remedies. Often sickness was attributed to moral causes. Wrongdoing within the group was thought to bring an unfavorable reaction both from ghosts and from the group "mi," a sacred object or creature associated with the group's origins. For these spirits indigenous sacrifices had to be made. Nowadays, people make prayers in the Christian churches (Catholic, Lutheran, Pentecostal, Seventh-Day Adventist) for sickness, and they visit hospitals and aid posts for pragmatic treatment. Mön wö still practice their art, however.

Death and Afterlife. Death is marked by elaborate mourning and later by a funeral feast with special emphasis on gifts to maternal kin. Formerly, the corpse was exposed and after a while its bones were removed for use in shrines; nowadays, bodies are buried. Traditionally the dead are thought to travel down watercourses to a place in the lowlying northern Jimi Valley called "Mötamb Lip Pana." Spirits of the dead are believed to come back in dreams, however, and to continually influence the living with their benevolent or malevolent presence. Small skull houses were constructed in the past for personal sacrifices. Nowadays, many people are baptized and few maintain skull houses, but belief in the activities of spirits continues to influence people's interpretations of events, and indigenous notions underlie many Christian practices.

See alsoChimbu, Mae Enga, Maring