Tea and tinned fish: Christianity, consumption and the nation in Papua New Guinea. (2024)

INTRODUCTION: MOTHER'S MILK

In Western Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), Gogodala recollections of national Independence in 1975 are dominated by a cultural 'revival'. During the early 1970s, Anthony Crawford, an expatriate Australian working with the Commonwealth Advisory Board, proclaimed in several publications that the Gogodala had experienced a 'cultural revival' after the destruction of their culture by evangelical missionaries during the colonial period (see for example Crawford 1981, 1976, 1976a, 1975). This revival, initiated by Crawford's interest in local painted and carved objects, culminated in the building of a traditional style longhouse as the Gogodala Cultural Centre. The Centre housed a great number of a revived style of carvings, in the form of elaborately pigmented and decorated canoes, paddles, crocodiles, drums and headdresses, and was opened in 1974 by then Chief Minister, Michael Somare (later PNG's first and current Prime Minister). The Gogodala 'cultural revival', valorised in nationalist discourses as one of the first examples of a new nation's 'unity through cultural diversity' policy, and vilified in other, academic contexts, as 'cultural folklorization', marked a time in which village people experienced a level of personal interaction with national leaders and institutions. (1) It was referred to by some as the 'selling days', when aspects of Gogodala iniwa ela gi or 'customary ways" were marketable (see Dundon 2004). (2)

It was also during this time that there was an increase in the availability of trade-store goods like tinned fish, rice, flour, tea and sugar in Gogodala villages. This was partially at least the result of increased access to money, earned through the production and sale of carvings to tourists, art dealers and the Cultural Centre. At that time, Gogodala recall that many resisted these new foods, increasingly presented at mortuary feasts or village celebrations, sceptical of their value and taste. In particular, older men were repelled by the sweet tea, as its milky texture seemed reminiscent of breast milk. Those in paid employment and younger members of village communities, however, urged them to drink and eat, saying 'Hey, this is what Independence means: you have to wear white man's clothes [and] eat white man's food'. Although some continue to avoid milky tea, such goods are now consumed in many contexts, ceremonial and mundane, as a valuable addition to local food. Mounds of steaming, fluffy rice topped with tinned fish, salt and greens, and pots of sweet, milky tea are common fare at feasts and social gatherings, and are considered both prestigious and healthy foods.

In this paper, I suggest that the confluence of nation and consumption exemplified in such statements, is based on an underlying and, for Gogodala communities, critical transnational relationship with white people. Gogodala attitudes to and understandings of these products, and the effects they have upon their bodies, have developed within the context of both national independence and the articulation of both an intensely local, yet globalising Christianity and a national Church. Like many communities in Papua New Guinea, their relationship with the nation-state is fraught with ambiguity. The Gogodala live in an area that is difficult to reach and have had limited interaction with state institutions or other economic interests. During the colonial period, Western Province was labelled an economic and political 'backwater', and, from the local perspective, the achievement of national independence has had limited impact on the area. The majority of Gogodala profess to be sceptical of the motives and viability of both regional and national governments and their policies, despite recent success of local candidates in the 2002 national elections. Visits by national or provincial politicians, at least until recently, have been generally greeted with tepid interest, indifference, or, sometimes, hostility. Even with the appointment of a Gogodala Provincial Governor and Member of Parliament, few in the community feel that their position has been substantially transformed.

Since Independence, PNG has struggled to encompass the numerous communities, linguistic categories and lifestyles within its national boundaries, and local intelligentsia and political elites have sought to produce salient images and ideals of nationhood, providing the basis of a continuous dialogue about custom and tradition (Foster 1995:1). In this context, processes of nation-making, encompassing both the production of a 'collective peoplehood' and an 'individual personhood' within it, have been dominated by state officials and institutions in their attempts to 'nationalize state structures' that existed prior to the nation (Foster 1995:1). (3) Yet officials and agents of the state have retained only partial control over discourses of nation making, and the production of either collective or individual personhood, particularly in rural PNG. These processes intersect with local community projects that may both challenge and reiterate their central propositions. So much so in fact, that the nation in PNG has been cast as an 'unimagined community' rather than an imagined one (Foster 2002:3; see also Anderson 1983).

To what extent, then, does the nation figure in the lives of the Gogodala? I suggest in this paper that, although the nation constitutes a frame of reference for action and articulation among these communities, particularly 'for staging a whole range of collective and personal identities' (Foster 2002:4), it is constantly challenged by a local dialogue that emphasises contiguity between Gogodala and white people. That, as Foster (1995:6) suggests, the nation competes with or invokes other forms of identification such as Christianity. Joel Robbins (1998) has argued that the Urapmin of Sandaun Province, PNG, have a clear concept of national identity and consider themselves first and foremost members of a nation-state. Nonetheless, they are overtly critical of the nation and claim solidarity with a transnational community of Christians. This Robbins (1998:104) labels 'negative nationalism', a state in which the Urapmin unhappily consider themselves Papua New Guineans, a situation they seek to rectify through the realisation of an international Christian community through the apocalypse. Christian narratives about the apocalypse, thus, are the site of potent calls for trans-nationalism, as well as being a crystallisation of 'their nationalist sentiment' (Robbins 1998:104).

For the Gogodala, images and experiences of the nation have always been based on their relationship with Europeans. Expatriate missionaries, primarily from the United Kingdom and Australia, with the Unevangelised Fields Mission (UFM) (later Asia Pacific Christian Mission, APCM, and more recently Pioneers) have made this area of PNG their home since the 1930s, and came to dominate many of the first Gogodala interactions with formal styles of education, biomedicine, money and business. Thus, mission and Christian assumptions about and knowledge of such issues and institutions became central to local understandings of them. This was also the case for consumption. So that, although consumption may well be a vehicle through which people experience and imagine the nation, one of the 'banal' ways in which the nation is experienced in PNG, becoming evident 'through mundane engagements with radio talk show programs and commodities ranging from locally made tinned meat to globally marketed soft drinks' (Foster 2002:2), it may also be the site of contestation and perhaps even the 'unmaking' of the nation. Thus, for Gogodala communities, consumption of 'white man's food' at the time of national Independence 'materialises' not simply a nation, but rather a more substantial and significant trans-national relationship based on Christianity. It is primarily through this Christian relationship, then, that Gogodala articulate the basis of a unified, 'imagined community', rather than through ties to other Papua New Guineans or even Melanesians. This is often referred to in English as 'Christian country', a self designation of difference from other Papua New Guinean communities based on an adherence to a particular form of Christianity and Church (see Dundon 2002, 2004). Thus the consumption of these trade-store goods, still represented as 'white man's [hod' despite their nationalistic or 'Melanesian' overtones, and the adoption of European clothing, is both a significant part of their engagement with the nation-state and the means by which they challenge some of its central precepts.

SAGO AND STRENGTH: WORKING UP A SWEAT

Much has been written on the person or 'experiencing self' in Melanesia since the 1980s (see for example Battaglia 1990: Linnekin & Poyer 1990; Morton & Macintyre 1995; Poole 1982, 1984; A. Strathern & Stewart 1998; M. Strathern 1988). Nancy Lutkehaus (1995:14) notes that one of the major themes to emerge from this material is the significance of substances to the constitution of persons, in particular sem*n, blood, breastmilk, bones and food. For this paper, I am interested in the last of these, food, and the ways in which certain persons are created by its consumption and production. I do not seek to encompass the myriad ways in which Gogodala understand and experience personhood, but rather provide an exploration of some of the elements of its constitution. (4)

For the Gogodala, consumption has always been a central concern: to be a person is to produce and consume certain products, exemplified in the local idiom 'living on sago' and the practices of ela gi (way of life). The result, Gogodala believe, is a community of hard, strong bodies and moral persons. This is, however, a matter of much negotiation and rumination, and consumption creates a context in which this is debated on a daily basis. Village and townspeople constantly talk about what it is to 'live on sago', a discussion that is often framed in terms of bodily shapes and sizes, and increasingly concerned with the differences inherent in the consumption of trade store foods primarily associated with 'living on money' (see Dundon 2002a). For the majority of Gogodala, the cultivation, production, and consumption of sago and garden foods still serves as the basis of a certain 'way of life' or ela gi. As they live on the floodplain of the Fly and Aramia Rivers, the area is inundated for several months of the year, with canoes the primary form of transport between villages, gardens and sago swamps. Villages, gardens and swamps are situated on hillocks that rise out of the surrounding lagoons, which are full for up to nine months of the year. (5) Although the significance of yams has waned with the cessation of male secrecy and initiatory practices, sago remains central to articulations and experiences of ela gi, exemplified in the oft-repeated statement 'we live on sago' (see also Dundon 2002a). This kind of lifestyle remains the basis of contemporary village life. It also creates certain types of bodies, as it is characterised by oko kalakalabega or 'hard work'.

In this kind of watery landscape, sago palms predominate as the primary nutritional source. Baya or sago, a fine, pinkish-white flour derived from the pith of the sago palm, is cooked and eaten with coconut, banana, waterlily seeds, garden foods like sweet potato, yams, taro, pumpkin and cassava, as well as various species of primarily freshwater fish, sago grubs, pig, cows, deer, possum, wallaby and other small game animals. Local green vegetables (seniwa, and solosolo) as well as sugarcane, are also grown in gardens and around houses, providing a valuable source of greens to the local diet. There are also various forms of bush 'fruits' or adami, a category of food that is not eaten with sago, and various introduced fruits like pineapple and watermelon that grow well in the tropical and wet conditions.

The significance of food, the production and consumption of it, and the ways in which it is central to experiences and discourses of relationality, has been the locus of several studies in PNG (see for example Meigs 1984: Kahn 1990; Whitehead 2000; Young 1971: Fajans 1997). Meigs (1984), for example, has pointed to the 'major preoccupation' that the Hua of Eastern Highlands have for the symbolic evaluation of food. Kahn (1990) suggests that taro and people are part of a death and regeneration cycle, inherently dependent on each other, and that the Wamira of PNG conceptualise their identity through this intimate relationship with taro. Similarly, Jorgenson (n.d.) notes that the Telefolmin posit an everyday link between taro and people, and that they identify themselves as 'taro people'. Whitehead (2000:42) suggests that in several areas of PNG there is an 'obsession[INS'] with food that defies simplistic causal links with its nutritional qualities. (6) In this context, food represents a central link between the body and wider cosmological and social relationships, the most basic assumption being that those whose food you consume are those who constitute your being (Knauft 1989:223). As Jolly (1991:46) has suggested for many parts of Melanesia, food renders the boundary between object and subject problematic through the process of production, exchange and consumption.

For the Gogodala, food has certain intrinsic growth-inducing qualities. The substantial contribution that sago makes towards strengthening and energising people's bodies is greatly appreciated and much commented on. Sago was brought with the original Gogodala ancestors, who migrated to the area from somewhere south of the Torres Strait long ago. Spread around by such ancestral agents, it was to be the basis of a new life in a new place. No longer destined to wander around, the ancestors planted their sago seeds, built villages, and got married to each other. Sago, in the form of a substance referred to as saege or baya too, is inscribed in the clan designs that delineate people's clan affiliations and relationship to the landscape (Dundon 1998). Saege or bava too, was explained as 'something like life for Gogodala people' as it represents the process of 'living on sago', the basis of Gogodala experience.

The singularly most appreciated quality of sago as a food is that, particularly in combination with fish, meat and coconut, it is said to imbue people with strength or kamali. An old woman noted that 'from our fathers and grandfathers, our staple diet has been sago. That was the sago we have been eating, the sago to make us strong'. She used the term gwananapa gosa, which literally denotes a 'bone of the stomach'--that is, sago gives a hardness to the stomach and, thereby, the body of the person who consumes it. (7) 'Sago is more than just food' I was told; it generates energy in the bodies of those that consume it. It also regulates the consumption and digestion of other foods in the body. Foods eaten without sago often induce sickness and vomiting, because, as a Gogodala person, 'you need sago in your system'.

The strength of sago derives from its capacity to provide energy, even cooked on its own in the form of a flat, dry pancake or tubular, wrapped in sago leaves. But it also becomes a food that 'grows a person', by definition a 'healthy food', when combined carefully with other garden and lagoon or river foods like coconut, fish, meat, water lily seeds, banana and kane (sago grubs). Such foods are 'greasy' and promote growth amongst children and adults. Any food that is based on sago and coconut milk, squeezed from the ground flesh of the coconut, is considered greasy. Dry foods are those that, like plain sago, yams and bananas, imbue energy without providing the grease and 'fats' necessary to 'grow a person properly'. These kinds of foods are valuable because they provide energy and promote strength and hardness of bodies so that adults, in particular, can maintain their vigour in the face of hard work. But women, in particular, spend much time and thought on ensuring that dry and hard foods are supplemented with greasy foods that ensure that their families do not lose weight and strength.

It is not just the intrinsic nature of food that produces good growth and strong bodies, however: work, nurturance and clan substance are also vital to produce such life-giving substances. As Knauft (1989:223) has argued for Melanesia, the physical energy expended in subsistence activities is much admired, as is the way this is then 'converted into bodily substance to maintain health and well-being'. Men present themselves as gardeners and hunters, the basis of what is known as dala ela gi (men's way of life), and women as the primary fishers and producers of sago. (8) Women and men both make gardens, but men in particular spend much time on them and gain (and lose) much status from their efficacy as gardeners. The significance of hunting as a male activity has waned over the last thirty years with the advent of guns and ammunition and as game has been eradicated in large numbers. Ato ela gi--women's lifestyle or work--is based on making sago, fishing, and having and caring for children. Women are responsible for the sago making process, from the cutting down of the palm and transformation of the pith into flour, to the preparation and cooking of the sago into a nutritious and tasty whole. As sago palms and gardens are often situated some distance from the village, both types of work require much daily effort and travel.

The value placed on the ability to maintain the effort and level of work is exemplified in the prestige accorded certain bodily images. To work up a sweat or tukama, or a 'big sweat', tukama kabigibega, for one's family is a matter for pride and respect, one comment being that 'if you make your clothes dirty and your body dirty, then you are working, doing something good'. Corporeally, Gogodala see themselves as strong and fit; their bodies muscular, agile and light. They have strength, kamali amem, and the capacities inherent in such bodily power. Such forms of bodily strength are highly visible and connote responsibility and purposeful agency. It is what people can do that realises crucial moral relationships for village Gogodala. Having muscular, well-developed arms, then, enables people to demonstrate their worth through strenuous daily activities, whether pounding the sago pith in the swamps or digging in the garden. They are inner capacities and worth made visible on the body.

Consumption of foods invested with much effort and sweat, then, concomitant with the vigours of the local lifestyle, creates the context and conditions in which physically and morally appropriate persons are made. Such people are 'healthy' people, that is, people with "good growth' or apela awapa. Strong, lithe and well-formed bodies are deemed healthy persons, physical designations that Gogodala refer to as a person's appearance or gite tile gi. In some senses, apela awapa or good growth is closely allied to the 'fat' body or person--lumagi dububega or lumagi batalabega. Such designations are usually ones of praise rather than denigration. However, if a person appears to have good growth and a large body without participating in the hard work of village life. or others around them do not have the same kind of health, then they can be called didaemi tawanapa or lazy. The implication is that fat or growth on such a person derives not from their own hard work but, instead, the work of others.

GHOST SKINS: CLOTHES AND CANOES

Work and the consumption of certain types of foods like sago, however, do not in themselves constitute moral and adult personhood: people develop strength, kamali, and achieve growth, apela gi, through their clan and familial relationships. Strong bodies and moral persons are as much the result of these crucial relationships as the consumption and production of foodstuffs. Gogodala persons belong from birth to the clan or udaga of their father. Such clans derived from the original ancestral beings, who migrated to the area in canoes and established local villages and practices. These beings brought clan and moiety affiliations with them, having established such relationships with their father, Ibali, the creator-father of the Gogodala. In this system, the dynamics of which continue to be of great significance today, all Gogodala are divided into two exogamous moieties: the 'red people' or Segela, and the 'white people', the Paiya moiety. These two primary groups are further distinguished into eight clans or udaga, four in each moiety. In each clan, there are also several sub-clans or 'canoes' (gawa) in which people are said to metaphorically 'sit' or 'stand'. Each person then belongs to a canoe (hereafter referred to as clan canoe) from which they derive their names, claims to land and water, familial relationships and ancestral knowledge, which connects them to a clan and hence to the moiety. These relationships are central to the constitution and practice of ela gi and 'living on sago'.

Clan canoe and familial relations are exhibited on objects like canoes and trade-stores or houses, and on the body during times of performance, whether dancing or playing sports like rugby league, in the form of a canoe design or gawa tao. (9) Each 'canoe eye" or design designates clan canoe membership and, before the arrival of the missionaries in the 1930s, were an integral part of the decoration of bodies and objects for ceremonies, dancing and canoe races. Although, at this time, everyday clothing consisted primarily of a series of small grass skirts and bands tied around the waist and under the crotch for women, and chest and arm ornaments, and a diba--a conical cap affixed to the head at the time of initiation and worn until old age--for men. ceremonial garb was more elaborate. Women and men also wore atima, woven mourning nets that covered much of women's bodies, in particular, and men's heads and faces, almost continuously as a result of the elaborate mourning process. Both men and women also wore woven grass or sticks (dumutu) through their noses and ears.

When A.R Lyons (1926:339) travelled to the area in 1916, he took note of the ways in which they also decorated their skins to mark different stages and experiences. Lyons wrote, for example, that a man who had killed another in a headhunting raid was entitled to wear a feather ornament on his chest and paint his body black and his face red. Crawford (1981:247) has also noted the importance of the colours red, white, black and yellow, the basis of the clan canoe designs or gawa tao, that dancers and other participants in male initiation ceremonies wore on their skins. The colours and designs painted onto bodies were complemented by masks and dancing plaques that also displayed the canoe design of the dancer. (10)

Before the coming of the missionaries, women and girls were also scarred in a distinctive fashion, referred to as kaka poledae, across the chest, breasts and upper arms. Although there are few oral accounts of such practices, it seems that older women undertook the cutting of the girls during some kind of 'female initiation'. Crawford (1981:257) writes that both Paul Wirz, an early ethnographer, and Bernard Lea, a UFM missionary, witnessed such an event in 1937 in which two girls were initiated soon after their first menses. The first stage revolved around seclusion in a small house not far from the longhouse and the implementation of strict food taboos. Crawford (1981:257) writes:

 [m]uch sago was made by the mother and wrapped in sago leaf bundles, which at the end of the seclusion were piled high near the genama. The girls were then decorated with new long-tasselled chest-bands, frontlet and a wide belt. This was followed by a short and simple song ceremony by other women in the house, just before they emerged. They then performed another simple dance around the genama accompanied by their fathers beating the drums, circling the longhouse three times, after which they set out on a final stage. On this occasion, each time they reached one of the women's entrances, an old woman lay prostrate on the ground and the girls, on reaching her, gently touched her simultaneously with their toes. The old woman then rose, and collected a bundle of sago from the pile. Thus ended the ceremony.

Girls spent their menarche in the gwaei saba (small houses on the edge of the lagoon). When they emerged from their period of seclusion, they were adorned with paint around the eyes and along their bodies.

The decoration, painting and scarring of bodies and skins has lost much of its significance since the arrival of the missionaries in the early 1930s, and the development of an indigenous Church, the Evangelical Church of Papua New Guinea (ECPNG). Contemporary Gogodala, like their compatriots throughout PNG, primarily wear western clothing, women in long, flowing skirts and loose shirts or meri blouses (TP), shirts and shorts or trousers for men. Early in colonial contact, administrators and missionaries encouraged local villagers to wear European clothes and thus cover their 'nakedness'. The 'ugliness' of scantily clad Gogodala women was particularly stressed in early mission and administrative descriptions of these communities. (11) Women today dress in clothes that cover most of their bodies, particularly their legs and thighs, considered the most erotic parts of a woman's body. (12) Tight clothes and shorts or pants connote an avid sexuality and availability, and women take care to dress modestly. Men, on the other hand, and particularly younger ones, may simply don a pair of shorts or cut-off trousers, with or without a shirt. Many younger men paint canoe designs onto jeans or other pants, or, occasionally, their shirts and wear these on a daily basis. The Gogodala word for European clothes was, and for older people still is, gubali kaka or 'ghost skin', although most, younger, people call them kakana lopala or 'skin things'. The term 'ghost skin' refers to the colour of the skin of the dead and relates to an ancestral story about the journey of the recently deceased to the place from which the original ancestors emerged. On the way to this place, the dead enter a boiling pool of water, which strips their bodies and transforms their skin from black to white. Ghosts, or gubali, then, are characterised by their pale skin.

Michael O'Hanlon (1989) writes that Andrew Strathern, in a personal communication, suggested to him that Hagen women tend to wear brighter clothes than their male counterparts, which resonates nicely with the brighter face paint worn by women on ceremonial occasions. O'Hanlon (1989:87), however, notes that Wahgi men and women wear clothes that are a similar hue and brightness, which parallels the wearing of face paint during ceremonies and dances. In everyday terms, Gogodala women tend to wear clothes whose colours are muted in comparison to the men, particularly young men who often sport gawa tao on their jeans and shorts or shirts. Women, even young ones, never wear these clan designs on their clothes, bags or billums (TP). Girls, when they reach the age of two or three, are encouraged to wear under pants and skirts while boys of a similar age are allowed to run naked. Even as young as three or four, girls must wear skirts that reach past their knees, and shorts are very seldom worn unless they closely resemble a skirt. Whereas men, whether sixteen or forty, may walk around without shirts, displaying their upper bodies. Once dressed up for feasts or Church, however, men and women wear clothes that are similar in hue and brightness.

In the past, canoe designs were worn on dancing male bodies, either painted onto the skin or worn in the form of masks, dance plaques or drums. Such decorations displayed the clan canoe of the person, or that of his mother or wife, to the audience and other dancers. In the process, attention was drawn to the beauty, strength and 'growth' of the person and, thereby, the efficacy of the clan and clan canoe from which they derived and which they exemplified. Marilyn Strathern (1979:254) has suggested that, in Melanesia, the inner self is displayed upon the surface of the body, on the skin, through decoration with objects from the outside world. She argues that this 'self' conveys efficacy, a capacity for action and achievement. Through these decorations, the person both establishes and redefines relations between themselves and others, between humans and non-human aspects of the landscape. For the Gogodala, wearing the gawa tao on their bodies and objects is a comment and embodiment of certain vital relationships: those based on food, family and canoe. During Independence, when younger people urged their elders to wear 'white man's clothes', they sought to make visible, and viable, an essential relationship between Europeans and Gogodala, initiated by a colonial administration but cemented during the 1930s with the arrival of the Unevangelised Fields Mission (UFM).

THE CHOSEN PEOPLE: CHRISTIANITY AND CONSUMPTION

Contemporary Christianity plays a central role in prescriptions of responsible and embodied personhood and consumption. I have noted elsewhere that Gogodala refer to their communities as 'Christian country', a cultural and linguistic category that distinguishes them from others in PNG through the practices and beliefs of their evangelical Christianity. (13) Expatriate missionaries have influenced, often explicitly, local perceptions and understandings of a Gogodala lifestyle, bodies, and persons since the 1930s. Initially attracted to the area from across the Fly River at Madiri Plantation, a UFM missionary by the name of Albert Drysdale travelled to several Gogodala villages inland from the Fly, visiting 24 villages over a period of five weeks. (14) While at Madiri, it became obvious to Drysdale that "one group of labourers stood out head and shoulders above the rest in physique and in intelligence. They were the Gogodala' (Prince & Prince 1981:12) (see also Dundon 2002a:145). Drysdale chose twelve Gogodala labourers to work with him, shunning the Kiwai and other language groups at Madiri. By then, the twelve Gogodala farmers were 'becoming more of personal retinue of the two missionaries, a mutually dependent community somehow maintaining itself in an environment alien to them all' (Prince & Prince 1981:14). After he returned from his trip to the Gogodala villages, he became convinced that the Gogodala "represented a missionary target more strategic than anything the Fly River could offer' (Prince & Prince 1981:17). Within a couple of years, Drysdale had established three mission stations, one on the Fly River and two much further inland among the bulk of the population. Since that time, expatriate UFM staff have maintained a close, residential relationship with their hosts. The Gogodala say that, at this time, the missionaries designated them saelena luma--the good or chosen people.

From its inception, Christianity in this area was predicated on certain patterns and forms of consumption. In this case, the avoidance of certain consumables and substances became emblematic of a Christian lifestyle, and the sign of a moral, Christian body. Gogodala men and women were discouraged from smoking the locally grown tobacco, as well as drinking i sika or kava that formed an integral part of dala ela gi or male life. The growing and chewing of betelnut, another activity associated with both male daily and ceremonial practices, was also discouraged by the early missionaries. The ingestion of such intoxicants was seen to contravene the tenets of the Christian person, and signified an 'incomplete surrender to Christ'. Abstention from the consumption of such substances was deemed vital to the attainment of Papuan Christianity.

But consumptive practices were also transformed in more subtle ways. Before the missionaries came to the area, there was more emphasis placed on the significance of yams within the local diet. Yams were identified more readily with men and their ceremonial complexes, which focussed on the growth of boys into men. Wilde (2003:139-40) has argued that growing yams was an effective symbol of male efficacy, and that the consumption of yams by young boys was essential for their growth to maturity. (15) Yams also formed the basis of a 'yam medicine', or gagaga, that was used in the context of male ceremonial life, and stood as a metaphor for anal intercourse in male initiatory cycles.

The missionaries encouraged the making of gardens, fishing, and the production of sago as the primary forms of village practice. They focussed particularly on the consumption and production of sago, as it was more closely allied to women and female activities, which, in turn, were seen to be less ritualistic, sexualised and secretive. Women, in particular were encouraged to be diligent in their responsibilities to their families and to promote the subsistence lifestyle above all else. Christian men were exhorted to assist their wives and families by forsaking male ritual and concentrating on their gardens and houses. (16) The sign of the Christian family became the hardworking couple, busy in their gardens and sago swamps, their children replete with plentiful and nutritious food. In the process, although yams remain a significant indicator of masculinity, sago has become the primary food and crop around which Gogodala Christianity operates.

But food and subsistence practices were not the only focus of the UFM: clean and clothed bodies equally became a sign of conversion and Christianity. When the missionaries first came to the area, they marked the comparative nakedness of the Gogodala. Women, as in many other areas of Papua, were perceived to be especially ugly and pathetic in their dirt and toil. In a mission publication of the 1960s, tracing the life of one of the first female Gogodala converts to Christianity, Pino, Shirley Home (1962), wife of Charles Home, a prominent missionary, made much of Pino's metaphoric journey from 'the dark' into the 'light'. A significant part of this transformation of the soul was based on the bodily metamorphosis from dirty, cowed, and naked to clothed, clean and respected member of the new Christian community. Calico, in the form of laplaps (Tok Pisin), was an integral part of the creation of certain types of Christian people. Laplaps, pieces of cloth that were wrapped around the waist, came to signify the skills of the Christian worker, for they were distributed to those who became missionaries to other areas of PNG and pastors in their own community. Pastors were trained in three fields: pastoral, medical and teaching, and received a laplap with the letter R M, or T inscribed on it.

In the contemporary context, dressing and preparing for Church services and meetings are highly prescribed, particularly for women. In 1995, in a sermon presented at a Church conference for women, a prominent expatriate missionary reiterated the importance of clean and clothed bodies in the Christian community. During the sermon, she posed a question to the waiting women: "Why do we have to change completely [when attending Church services]? Ladies, you cannot come to God with dirty clothes". Women bathe and dress carefully for attendance at Church services and activities, choosing clothes that have been set aside for this purpose. They also spend much time brushing their hair, and, for those with long hair, confining it into tidy buns away from the face. Men also wear hats and clothes that are relatively new and clean that cover their arms and legs (if possible). Sunday morning is devoted to preparing the person and clothes for Church.

The relationship between Europeans and Gogodala is foregrounded in the local form of evangelical Christianity that continues to dominate this area of Western Province, despite recent challenges to its primary institution, the Evangelical Church of Papua New Guinea (ECPNG). (17) This relationship has been a primary preoccupation since the 1930s. It is related to an ancestral story or iniwa olagi that elucidates the connections between them. A long time ago, two brothers were brought before their father, who gave them a choice between a gun, and a bow and arrows. The elder brother chose the bow and arrows, upon which the father gave the gun to his younger son and took him away to another place. There he was given houses and cars like those of white people, for he was their primary ancestor. The elder brother, on the other hand, remained where he was, armed only with the weapon that he had chosen. He was the forefather of the Gogodala and his choice marked the beginning of the inequalities apparent between Europeans, who have money, and their older sibling's descendents, who live on sago.

Based as it is on the cultivation and consumption of certain foods, Gogodala bodies and persons remain quite distinct from their white co-residents. Weymouth (1978:322) has noted that Gogodala were aware from very early in this relationship that they were physically stronger and more adept than their European counterparts. White bodies are marked by their lifestyle, which is predicated on the possession and use of money. Gogodala refer to this kind of life as 'just sitting and eating', or 'living on money' rather than on sago. If Gogodala life is characterised as hard, living on money is perceived to be easy by comparison, a situation in which food is readily accessible, tasty and plentiful.

In the last thirty years, trade store goods have become increasingly available in most Gogodala villages in the form of tea, tinned milk, sugar, rice, flour, margarine and tinned mackerel. These foods have become part of the local repertoire of feast foods, as well as those of more everyday consumption, particularly amongst those who can afford it. The majority, however, only have access to these store bought foods on special occasions, and their nourishing values are much appreciated. Increasingly these foods are considered healthy, foods that provide enough nourishment to promote apela awapa or good growth. Yet, despite acknowledging that trade store foods are often more 'Melanesian' in flavour and content than Australian or British, and that many brands are made and packaged in PNG, such foods are still associated primarily with white people. One old woman noted that "with the introduction of European foods, it is good now', in comparison to the past when people struggled to feed their families. 'Some people they sit down and eat and they gain weight and that is good. One thing about us is we are mixing food, eating our Gogodala food [and] at the same time eating this white man's food, which is good.'

Yet, although the consumption of trade store foods is considered a 'healthy' alternative to the local diet, eating these foods is also 'linked to displacement' (Jolly 1991:59), and the undermining of bodily strengths. Those who 'live on store things' are characterised by their fat and soft bodies, and are increasingly incapable of the hard work characteristic of the village lifestyle. Those who have money, primarily Gogodala who work as teachers, nurses, soldiers or in the police, are said to just "sit around', so that their 'blood is not running around'. As a result, they are more susceptible to illness. The ambiguity with which Gogodala approach 'living on money' is indicative of conflicting perceptions of money, as empowering as much as debilitating. Local images of ancestors and 'ghosts', for example, are characterised by their 'tall and tat' bodies, an indication of their powerful capacities. The original ancestors are said to have been "very tall, big people'--'giants', heavy and fat. Yet they were much more powerful than their descendents. If Gogodala were aware that they were much more physically powerful than expatriate missionaries, they were equally aware that these white people had access to a different source of knowledge and power (Weymouth 1978:322). This realisation has had a significant impact on perceptions of an embodied personhood in Christian country.

'THE GLORY DAYS': DEPENDENCE AND IN(TER)DEPENDENCE

There has been much debate about the character of the PNG nation, the type and strength of its nationalism, and the kind of national subjects that such a nation-state engenders (see Foster 1991, 2002; Hirsch 1995; Kelly 1995; Robbins 1998). LiPuma (1995:36) has suggested that being a 'citizen of a nation-state, as opposed and in addition to being a member of a region, culture, and kinship group, engenders new ways of thinking and experiencing'. Foster (1995a: 177) has drawn attention to the connection between nation making and consumption in PNG, particularly in terms of the ways in which participation in commodity consumption may be the basis of a certain style of national consciousness. Eric Hirsch (1990) has suggested that betelnut has become an increasingly important item of consumption throughout PNG (see also Foster 1992:40). (18) Among the Fuyuge of Central Province, as well as in urban centres like Moresby, betelnut consumption has emerged as significant because of its associations with certain notions of power, politics, and the appropriate and 'civilised person'; enabling people to make better oral presentations and to work more effectively for long periods (Hirsch 1990:21,25). The 'betelnut chewing, speech-making, articulate individual' imagined by such practices is held to be the primary example of the political figure', which is, he argues, 'emerging in the ideal conceptions of the nascent PNG national culture' (Hirsch 1990:29). Foster (1995a: 153) has also pointed to the role that consumption, in this case mass-consumption, plays in 'anchoring an imagined national community in ordinary, everyday practice'. He argues that, in the context of advertising in metropolitan centres in PNG, nations can be seen as 'imagined communities of consumption' (Foster 1995a:153).

As I have already suggested, however, consumption for communities in this part of Western Province is not simply a site of nation making, however banal. The consumption of commodities, such as tradestore foods and clothing, forms the basis of a localised discussion about personhood, and its relevance to the fulfilment of the potential realised by the first missionaries in their designation of the Gogodala as the 'chosen or good people'--saelenapa luma. The missionaries, unwittingly perhaps, played upon certain themes and resonances inherent in stories of the originary ancestors, iniwa luma or idi luma. In these ancestral stories, iniwa olagi, the first ancestral beings were sent to the Gogodala area to find a place called Dogono by their father, Ibali. Once settled in the area, these ancestors laid the foundations for the ela gi or lifestyle of future generations. On the way, however, they contravened certain prescriptive measures on their behaviour and lost the magical village of Dogono, their original destination. Dogono was to have been the home of the Gogodala, a place that would have ensured the comfort and well-being of its inhabitants, as it was 'alive' and replete with amazing powers. In such a place, sago bags were replenished without effort and other foodstuffs were plentiful, fish jumped into nets and onto hooks in great numbers, and houses were strong and easily built. Once lost, however, the 'hard life' of contemporary village life became inevitable.

Since then, Gogodala say, there have been several opportunities for them to reverse this originary misfortune. The coming of the missionaries represented one such opportunity, one they refer to as the 'second chance'. National Independence, on September 16 1975, represented another such date. Said one man about this time, 'people said "this is it"--people had mixed feelings. "This is the day that we will inherit these things". Then it didn't happen. The next occasion was the 1991 ECP[NG] Jubilee [celebrations[ but it didn't happen then either. "When are we going to inherit the good life?" [they asked]'.

These perceptions of national independence are intermingled with understandings of another ancestral place that embodies the hopes of many in the area. It is a place called Bolame, a place, like Dogono, that is magical and that has a population that lives a life much like Europeans in its ease and comfort. But it is also quintessentially Gogodala, as the inhabitants of Bolame are "black people who have clans, canoes, names and so on like [the] Gogodala'. What differentiates them from Gogodala are their magical abilities and their 'intelligence'; they are known as iwalela sakema or 'knowledgeable' and this is what ties them to white people, as this latter group are said to be similarly knowledgeable. One person expressed their understanding of the situation in emotive terms during a conversation about Bolame:

 Our Gogodala lifestyle we feel is not that good--we do things that you have to sweat it out. Maybe we are not knowledge[able] like you people. You and Bolame are the same people. Most Gogodala hate our way of life. Its just because our ancestors did some things wrong. One of these glory days, we shall live like white people, live like Bolame people are living. All this sickness, sweating, hardship will go away and we will have an easy life.

National Independence, then, features as one possibility for the transformation of a hard life into an easy one. This certainly explains the cynicism with which most Gogodala view politicians and other agents or officials of the state, whether national, regional or local. For the majority of them feel that such people have only served to underscore the relative poverty of Gogodala communities within their province.

At the time of Independence, Gogodala hopes for the future were high. Many argued that Independence meant the realisation of the lifestyle envisaged by Gogodala and intimated by expatriate missionaries. Some suggested that their Australian brothers had judged and found them ready for their own country, money, and other valuables that Australians have access to. One man said that Gogodala expected Australia would use this opportunity to provide Papua New Guineans with these things, nmch like a father gives his names, land and lopala 'things' to the son he believes is adequately prepared. In this characterisation, Michael Somare, the Prime Minister, was the man who had convinced the Australians that Papua New Guineans were ready for such responsibility. After Independence, however, the valuables that Australia had given to PNG were never distributed amongst the people, and the Gogodala did not receive their share. As a result, many blamed national politicians for 'blocking' the flow of things, knowledge and people from Australia. When during the drought of 1997, AusAID sent some bags of rice and other foodstuffs to the Gogodala area, people were very happy with Australia. They saw it as confirmation of this relationship. At that time, some old men stood up and said 'After all these years, wawa [father] is helping us; thank you wawa/kaka' [father/big brother].

THE GOOD PEOPLE

I have argued elsewhere that the nation in rural PNG may be articulated in several ways, including appeals to 'culture" or custom, shared geography and Christianity." (19) In this paper, I have suggested that consumption represents another context in which a national frame of reference comes to the fore, hence the correlation between national Independence and trade store foods and clothing. But for the Gogodala, consumption is also a primary vehicle for an articulation of the relationship between Gogodala and Europeans. So that, although the consumption of clothes and trade store-derived foods imbues Papua New Guineans with similar tastes and bodies, imagined and real, it is founded on the original relationship between black and white, Gogodala and European. Expatriate missionaries, and the type of evangelical Christianity they engendered, have significant purchase on local practices and perceptions of consumption, and have been extremely influential in terms of Gogodala understandings of bodies, persons and consumption of others.

A nation's diet plays a key role in constituting national identities. Producing and consuming certain kinds of foods, literally and metaphorically, creates certain kinds of people. Nationalism and consumption are often intertwined, as Foster (1995a; 2002) has demonstrated in the context of print advertisem*nts in metropolitan PNG (see also Hirsch 1990). Foster (1995a) argues that advertisem*nts for commodities in PNG constitute and reflect relationships between consumers and commodities, and between a community of consumers. 'That is', he writes, 'the social relations of commodity consumption implied by ads entail particular definitions of personhood, on the one hand, and of community, on the other' (Foster 1995a:154). Foster argues that such relationships and definitions of community and person may potentially supplement or even subvert or displace understandings of such concepts that derive from 'social relations of kinship and locality' (Foster 1995a: 154).

Foster suggests that Melanesians are increasingly engaging in practices, such as the consumption of products like rice and tinned fish, which 'constitute subjects as possessive individuals' rather than 'relational persons' (Foster 1995:19). His analysis of commodity consumption in urban contexts begs the question: is the consumption of clothes and foods like tea and tinned fish, milk and rice, concomitant with the process of nation making in rural PNG and have definitions of person and community been transformed or supplemented by such patterns of consumption?

I have argued in this paper that, since the coming of the missionaries, and the designation of the Gogodala as the 'chosen or good people', the issue of Christian personhood has been a central, local problematic. The debate has been framed around local idioms of living on sago or living on money, and the kinds of embodied personhoods such lifestyles entail. It has surfaced at events such as the cultural revival in terms of an, at times acrimonious, public discussion about the categories of and relationship between 'customary ways' and Christianity. At that time, what constituted Christian country was as significant as what was termed custom or culture (Dundon 2004). Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that the notion of Christian country was crystallised during the events of the revival and the building of the Gogodala Cultural Centre (see Dundon 1998, 2002, 2004). Through patterns of consumption, however, such issues are teased out and debated on a daily basis. By buying and eating what they see as 'white man's food' and wearing 'white man's clothes', Gogodala seek to dissolve national boundaries and reinstate colonial relationships, which, they believe, elicit more promising opportunities for development.

Thus their identification with the nation-state would seem to be a critical one, a form of 'negative nationalism' (Robbins 1998) that seeks ultimately to transform or even dissolve the primary relationship between PNG nation and PNG citizen in favour of a transnational Christian one. Yet the Gogodala perception of the nation differs from that of the Urapmin, as it is not based on a correlation between 'black' and 'nation'. Robbins (1998:111) writes, '[Flor the Urapmin, the national order of things is also a racial one in which black nations rank below white ones' and thus Papua New Guinea, a nation of black people, is by its very nature flawed. Thus they enter into what Foster (2002:138) refers to as the 'paradox of self-interpellation', which may arise in the process of imaging oneself a 'trans-national subject'--the production of a 'double self'. In contrast, for Gogodala, the critique of the nation and its institutions and officials relates primarily to their role in the systematic refusal to recognise the 'good' or 'chosen people'. Rather than representing a move towards possessive individualism, claims of kinship with Europeans and Christians through consumption attempt to challenge and reinvent individualism in terms of a relational and embodied personhood. For the Gogodala, images of 'collective peoplehood' are based on the fulfilment of the potential inherent in the term the 'good people'. Yet, at the same time, they acknowledge the difficulties inherent in such a project and the troubling transformations that it may entail, in terms of bodies, capacities and relationships. For the imagined community of white and black, while seeming to be an affirmation of all things European, also serves as a significant critique of European sociality and personhood. The aim, then, is not so much about becoming 'white' or being embodied as European, but rather about bringing the latter back into the context out of which they both arose--Gogodala sociality and the hierarchical relationship between black brothers. Thus, unlike the Urapmin, who seek to overcome their 'blackness' or 'transcend their inferiority' through solidarity with white Christianity, Gogodala aim to bring white people back into Christian country, as both imagined and real space, out of which they arose and to which, all, eventually, will return (Foster 2002:136).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is a revised version of a paper presented at a seminar series at the Australian National University, Canberra, in 2002 and I would like to thank my colleagues and participants at the seminar for thought provoking comments on the paper and useful suggestions for its improvement. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for helping me crystallise some of the central themes of the paper. I deeply appreciate the gracious forbearance of Gogodala communities in the Western Province of PNG, and express my thanks also to the Department of Anthropology at ANU for financial assistance, administrative support and affiliation during fieldwork. A special thanks to Charles, Callum, and Annie for their love and support throughout this process.

NOTES

(1.) Alain Babadzan (1988:217), for example, in an article on "Kastom and Nation building in the South Pacific", argued that the cultural revival was a prime example of what he calls 'cultural folklorization'. Culture, he argued, had become a 'political stake' around which people mobilise in order to gain access to a new source of income (Babadzan 1988:220). Some local people "agree to play the game, to ape themselves, to produce an image of their culture that others in town have conceived as being relevant to their true identity and therefore as being the right way to salvation" (Babadzan 1988:220).

(2.) Although this was only one aspect of the revival, it was certainly an important and continuing impression of the revival's significance for Gogodala communities. See Dundon 1998 for a detailed discussion of the cultural revival and its impact on Gogodala perceptions of both custom and Christianity.

(3.) Foster (1995:2) notes that nation-making encompasses both the production of a collective definition of 'peoplehood' as well as the construction of 'individual personhood' within the terms of the collective peoplehood.

(4.) Elsewhere, I explore to a greater degree the extent to which personhood is related to understandings of the body, internal and external, and relationships embodied in it (see Dundon 1998).

(5.) In the census conducted in 2000, there were approximately 25000 people registered as Gogodala speakers, situated in 28 villages and 5 government/mission stations. Villages contain between 200-800 people, with most having upwards of 400 permanent residents. In the past, Gogodala villages were dominated by huge longhouses that stretched the length of the 'island' but are now characterised by smaller, family dwellings that dot the hillock in patterns according to the distribution of clan lands in the village.

(6.) The effort and effect of consumptive and productive practices on the constitution of certain types of people has also been noted throughout the Pacific (see for example Becker 1994; Knauft 1989; Jolly 1991).

(7.) Although closely connected with women through their production of it, sago is not a gendered food by either association or intrinsic quality. The relationship between women and sago is likened by women to that between a married couple. One woman said that her mother told her that sago was a man and that making sago was so difficult because the sago had to be treated carefully, 'like a husband'.

(8.) On the Fly River, where there are eight Gogodala villages, this is reversed and men are the main fishers.

(9.) See Wilde 2003 for a detailed discussion of the display of clan ensignias during rugby league games in Balimo.

(10.) Only men painted canoe designs on their bodies and wore the dancing masks and plaques that bore the gawa tao. Women, however painted their bodies with red, yellow and white paint and wore heron feathers, chestbands and grass skirts. In the past, when Aida, a male ceremonial hero, came travelling through Gogodala villages, following the path of the original Aida, he wore a certain set of colours on his skin, particularly elaborate on his face. The rest of Aida's body was covered with lopala (layers of grass skirts, paint and feathers) so that he could not be recognised. When he arrived in the village the older men would realise, from the specific colour surrounding his eyes, tao, which clan would prepare for the feasts associated with the ceremonies.

(11.) Frank Hurley, Australian adventurer and photographer, wrote in 1922: 'The women after much persuasion were induced to pose. Those natives who had conspicuously assisted us brought their wives before the all-seeing eyes of camera and cinema. The ladies were extremely shy and nervous, holding on to their husband's hands and shivering violently. This is not surprising as the chief raiment was a coarse net worn completely over the head like a bag [atima] and a few wisps of grass elsewhere' (quoted in Crawford 1981:48).

(12.) Richard Eves (1996) has recently suggested that Victorian ideas and practices were deployed by colonial evangelism in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere in the Pacific, in which a particular form of body was deemed a sign of complete conversion. He writes: '[a]s well as being clothed, clean, neat and orderly, this body incorporated appropriate habits, comportments and gestures indicative of a disciplined Christian, whose interior morality was consistent with his or her outer body' (Eves 1996:85-6).

(13.) See Dundon 2002 and Dundon 2002a for a description of the ways in which Christian country is imagined, challenged and reaffirmed on both a daily and episodic basis.

(14.) In each longhouse they would gather together those who wanted to hear--usually the village population. 'Lit up by his kerosene lantern, Albert would show them a large picture of Jesus on the cross and explain the essence of what he had come to teach ... Everywhere they were well received and courteously listened to' (Prince & Prince 1981:16).

(15.) The connection between yams and masculinity has been remarked on throughout Melanesia, but also for neighbouring groups of the Gogodala. See for example Ayers 1983 for the Trans Fly and Landtman 1927, Haddon 1935 and Riley 1925 for the Kiwai.

(16.) See for example Shirley Home's 1962 publication, Out of the Dark. In mission literature of the time, women were portrayed as little better than 'beasts of burden', while their husbands were characterised as spending their time smoking, carving and planning ceremonial feasts.

(17.) See Dundon 2002 for a discussion of the recent establishment of a breakaway Gogodala Church and its impact on the established local Church that has dominated the Gogodala area since the 1960s when it became a national institution.

(18.) Before colonial contact and during the early colonial experience, the chewing of betelnut was prevalent only in coastal and lowland areas. Hirsch suggests that changes in consumptive practices associated with the chewing of betelnut may be 'the broad outlines of a formative PNG national culture' (Hirsch 1990:19).

(19.) See for example Dundon n.d. A Cultural Revolution! Custom, Christianity and the Good People of Papua New Guinea.

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Alison Dundon

The Australian National University