Table of Contents
Even for the most sensitive of post-colonial consciences, a ‘community without conflict’ is neither a destination objective, nor a socially imaginable outcome, desired by any stakeholder constituency (indigene, government or developer) in Papua New Guinea. Anthropologists, in particular, have long argued that disputes per se are not symptomatic of anomie. Social equilibriums are thus not perturbed by, but rather predicated on, cyclic patterns of grievance management. Notwithstanding its historical roots in comparative jurisprudence, the legacy of anthropological research then is that all cultures possess, or become endowed with, a spectrum of social control mechanisms for processing and settling their disputes.[1] Conflict and conflict resolution characterise all social organisations irrespective of their locale or level of development.[2]
These are salutary lessons for observers of dissension, where attitudes towards emotionally and physically scarred landscapes might otherwise compel us to read ‘friction’ as ‘failure’ — a lack of, or willingness to abide by, rules sanctioned by judicial institutions. Without engaging complex issues of ‘false consciousness’ and the local rhetoric about declining law and order (see Gordon and Meggitt 1985:3), we should remain mindful that in the traditional stateless and acephalous societies of Papua New Guinea, injunctions were rarely encoded in a formal corpus juris. Behavioural precepts were part of an undifferentiated class of ‘correct ways of interacting’ that were not further dissected into discrete categories of legal, social, religious or moral maxims. More often than not, norms were informally expressed through figurative genres of proverb or adage, frequently implicit in consensually arrived at resolutions, and rarely objects of explicit litigation. This does not thereby allow us to infer that rules were ‘weakly’ held, applied or understood. There are, then, no a-regulatory cultures,[3] just as there are no cultures that do not rely on ‘talk’ to express disagreement. The paradox of these universal truths is that while all languages have extensive vocabularies for wrangling, they reference such ubiquitous activity in ‘negative’ terms. Conflict is normal, but, equally, undesirable. Highlanders are agents of order but also disorder (‘Everyone fights but no one wants to’ (Gordon and Meggitt 1985:13)).
More disturbing perhaps (in the context of this volume) is the bystander apathy observers experience when confronted with the cultural truism that for many Papua New Guinea societies fighting is both a recurrent and legitimate means of prosecuting claims or seeking restitution.[4] That is, in what is loosely referred to as the ‘cultural logics’ (Strathern 1993:244) of indigenous conflict systems, fighting forms part of a sequenced set of behavioural responses that may itself constitute a coda, or precipitate closure. Attempting to gloss such commotion as realising an opposition between ‘war’ versus ‘law’ has long ago been rejected as ethnocentric and over-simplistic. More usefully, we need to focus on understanding the differential resort to various recourse options, and the prevalent sequential relationships between physical and verbal conflict (Roberts 1979). We might thus pose two immediate questions: first, what are the politico-economic and risk management strategies for talking and fighting? Secondly, what is the relative efficacy, cost and desirability of recourse to state judicial processes as opposed to, or in tandem with, exercises of power governed by ‘custom’? In formulating these questions we seek to clarify the range of ground conditions and drivers that underpin perceptions of compliance or non-compliance behaviour when individuals operate within the pluralistic normative regimes of court and custom. Most often, such co-existent constraint systems are juxtaposed as an adjudicatory and hierarchical appellate system versus egalitarian self-help regulation.
We know that both the rule of law and custom continue to write the interactional scripts of disputants in the Southern Highlands Province (SHP). What we know less clearly is precisely why their underpinning cultural rationales continue to be in, and produce, conflict; that is, why cannot such formal and informal resolution regimes be mutually reinforcing agencies for stability in the Papua New Guinea highlands context? After more than three decades of concerted think-tank activity, problems of ‘law and order’ in Papua New Guinea continue to present as intractable.
Importantly, our understanding of commotion in SHP communities seems not to be anchored to, or informed by, reliable statistical data for the urban or rural environments.[5] Longitudinal research on conflict occurrence rates and the scale or nature of conflict across the SHP is scarce. The resurgence of tribal fighting is taken as an index of such conditions, but it remains unclear just how far down increased violence percolates through the layers of the social structure. Rather, what passes as ‘conventional wisdom’ is a gestalt, the triangulation of findings, drawn from the related experiences of visitors and workers, from feedback of local inhabitants,[6] from the discourse of Papua New Guinea ‘law and order’ analysts,[7] and from impressions given by national and international media broadcasts of world-wide trends and concerns in the Third World. These voices invariably foreground the plight of Papua New Guinea in terms of the prevalence of violence ‘out of control’. From one vantage point, there may be nothing specious about advocating a position that says, ‘What’s your problem? Conflict is custom’.
Such a position appears untenable for two reasons. First, the nature, place and impact of conflict within the rapidly changing social environment of SHP differs from those circumstances which obtained in the pre-colonial era. Secondly, the now proclaimed and desired goals of development and sustainability appear to all stakeholders as unachievable without changes in the current regimes of conflict management and resolution.
The case, then, for ‘intervention and prevention’ is not easily rebutted by modernist academic arguments concerning the hegemony of Western knowledge, the cultural relativity of ‘conflict paradigms’, or the constrictive problem-solution prisms of applied science. In the SHP context, intervention therapy is very much a collaboratively constructed dialogue between indigenes and concerned outsiders to mitigate adverse risks posed by changing scenarios in dispute practices. Perception is ‘reality’, and interventionism constitutes a key policy objective in contemporary indigenous knowledge frameworks.[8]
This paper explores these contours of social change with respect to the Huli people of the Southern Highlands Province. In the following sections I address some of the key catalysts for ‘violence’ in the context both of the history of transformation in the region, and the options for settlement-directed activity discussed for other provinces, such as Enga. Few analysts who have observed conflict in the highlands over the last three decades would claim that finding magic-bullet solutions is easy. Not only might it be the case that a one-model-fits-all answer will likely drown in the sea of culture-specific conditions, but also the implementation and subsequent monitoring of solutions would likely tax the resources of responsible stakeholders. Progress will thus be pedestrian, but it will also be critically dependent, as we argue below, on achieving real change in the culture of mistrust, antipathy and opposition to government agencies, authority and legitimacy. Unlock the mysteries of fostering ‘community’ social responsibility and participation — i.e. establishing community agency — and you begin to scaffold an effective interventionist system for conflict management.