Table of Contents
This chapter is a sketch drawn from a work in progress about the way a collection of stories which together frame the life of a single heroic figure engender the identity of the Vula‘a, a coastal people of Papua New Guinea. I conducted fieldwork in the Vula‘a village of Irupara in 2001 as part of my doctoral research, and made a return visit in 2005. My doctoral research was concerned with Melanesian Christianity, particularly women’s experiences of the United Church. During the first visit I did not anticipate the project that would be initiated by my male interlocutors. From the outset, the men were eager to tell me about Kila Wari, the great warrior of Alewai. At first I paid little attention to their stories, dismissing Kila Wari for his apparent lack of relevance to my research. Yet I came to realise that the Kila Wari stories were contributing to my historical and cultural understanding, as they have much to say about Vula‘a religion and cosmology.
My investigation of these stories speaks to a number of theoretical concerns which arise in the interstices of the transition from an oral tradition to a written one. These include the relationship between myth and history and the influence of Christianity, the possibility of biography in light of relational theories of Melanesian personhood, and, consequently, the significance of genealogy and place in the constitution of identity. My perspective is both anthropological and phenomenological insofar as my focus is on the particularity of Vula‘a story-telling—its context, intent and existential significance. I recognise, though, the richness of the narrations themselves and so present them as fully as space allows as an invitation to further analysis. Phenomenologically it is important to know who our story-tellers are and to whom their stories are told and why. This edict provides the framework for my discussion in which some similarities as well as differences in Vula‘a and Western story-telling traditions may be discerned.
The Vula‘a occupy six villages on the southeastern coast of Papua New Guinea, four of which are located on the western side of Hood Bay and two on the eastern side. Including those now living in the National Capital District, they constitute a population of more than 4,000. The largest of the Vula‘a villages is known as Hula, a term which also describes the language and which has been widely used to refer to the people. Nevertheless, the so-called Hula people call themselves Vula‘a and I follow their convention. Traditionally a maritime people, the Vula‘a settled in the Hood Point area at the beginning of the 19th century, having migrated from the Marshall Lagoon area, further east. By the beginning of the colonial period they had established themselves as expert fishermen and traders. The Vula‘a first encountered Christianity in the early contact period of the London Missionary Society (LMS) during the 1870s. And it has been claimed that they were the first people in the LMS sphere of influence to enthusiastically adopt Christianity.[1] Further, by the end of World War II the LMS is said to have consolidated its position in Hula village with almost all social activities being undertaken in the name of the Church.[2]
The Hula language forms part of what is sometimes called the ‘Austronesian One’ group which is mainly found in two language patches in the southeast, one in Milne Bay and the other in Central District.[3] Today the Vula‘a use the Tok Pisin term stori when referring to a range of story-telling activities, from anecdotes and local gossip to events of historical importance. Vula‘a enjoyment of stori is noteworthy, as is the fact that conversation is given a high social value. Generally, social interaction begins with the chewing of betelnut, is followed by stori and, on some occasions, concludes with the sharing of food. There is another Hula term, rikwana, that may also be translated as story, but has almost fallen from use. This term was originally translated from the Hula language by Lillian M. Short in the 1930s as ‘story of olden times; folklore’.[4] It is usefully compared with Malinowski’s translation of the Boyowan (Trobriand) word libogwo, a general term for ‘old talk’ which, he suggests, includes historical accounts and myths, or lili‘u.[5]
The stories of the past most frequently told in the Vula‘a villages of Irupara and Alewai recall the important events of the life and death of the great warrior Kila Wari. In the past, the Kila Wari stories would have been classified locally as rikwana. In Western terms they most closely resemble our classification, ‘legends’, and this is how English-speaking Vula‘a would translate rikwana today. Most importantly, these stories traverse the divide between myth and history. They are not strictly ‘myths’ in the conventional sense because they do not have the quality of timelessness which characterised the old stories. They have now been fixed in time—historicised. They do, however, retain other mythic qualities. As myth, they are experiential and demonstrate a tangible connection between place, teller and ancestor. This is aptly demonstrated in the convention of introducing the stories with the teller’s genealogy. And although they are now often invoked in the context of local land claims, the Kila Wari stories have come to serve a quite different Vula‘a concern—the preservation of pre-Christian language, tradition and cosmology in the face of a growing sense of cultural loss.
Even though they focus on the life and death of a local hero, a uniquely identified individual—the Kila Wari stories both are and are not biography. While a number of Vula‘a and non-Vula‘a people know the Kila Wari story, each of them tells their own inherited version. Together these are complementary rather than contradictory and it is only when they are organised by the researcher that we see a resemblance to Western biography. For the Vula‘a, though, they are ‘biographical’ in a different sense and this is related to their ontology—the particular way in which they experience their existence. From this perspective, the biography is not that of Kila Wari, the warrior, but, rather, that of the Vula‘a themselves. For it encapsulates their collective identity as a people and preserves the possibility of a mode of existence which belonged to their ancestors and so is also theirs. Those who tell the story of Kila Wari are also telling the story of themselves. In short, the stories are ‘biographical’ because that is how we read them but phenomenologically, they are not biography in the conventional sense because their intention is not to reveal the life of a single individual. They are a representation of cultural identity. They are existential. This makes sense for a people who, it has been argued, value relation over and above individualism.[6]
It is important to recognise that the distinction between an oral tradition and a written one has become blurred in this part of Papua New Guinea. While oral conventions continue to operate insofar as the flow of certain types of knowledge is controlled through rights of inheritance, a significant amount of information is written down. This is not to say that it becomes public, though. In Irupara the ‘traditional wealth’ or ‘customary treasure’ of a lineage is passed from generation to generation in the form of the poni poni. The term refers to a small woven basket which actually, or symbolically, contains the treasured items. It was explained to me as follows:
A string bag (bilum) can hold many purse-like bilums inside. There could be several. For example, a mini bag for betel nuts, another for cigars and the other for gas lighter parts etc. in different mini bags all in one shoulder-to-waist-bilum. Of all these, one is the sacred poni poni.
Such treasure may include remedies for certain types of sickness, incantations for abundant food, the tooth of an ancestor, special gingers for successful fishing, the rights to land, or it may simply consist of the passing of a ‘genealogical book’ which has replaced the remembered relationships or gulu ai (lit. generation counting) of former times.
The purpose of the genealogical book was explained to me by Wala Iga, a senior man who holds a poni poni, as maino (peace). Its keeper is the designated mediator in matters of conflict. For instance, if there is a dispute between two men, the holder of the genealogical book will use it to link the men to a single ancestor and say ‘You are not foreigners [strangers] but brothers. Why then are you fighting?’
As an anthropological tool, genealogies have the capacity to verify certain types of information, such as the approximate dates of settlements and battles. They help us to situate individuals and, therefore, events in time and place. For the Vula‘a, genealogy attests to identity and endorses a person’s authority or right to tell a story by claiming a connection to ancestor and place.
In the 1960s, Nigel Oram commented on the fullness of Vula‘a genealogies. He wrote that ‘not only wives’ names and origins are known but the shifts in descent group allegiances of various individuals are remembered’.[7] Vula‘a genealogies do not trace blood-lines. Rather, they are mnemonic indicators of the obligations and entitlements constituted in human relationships. They are, in a sense, stories in themselves. Vula‘a genealogies gather. They gather person to ancestor and ancestor to place. It is to village founders that origins are traced. Genealogies may thus be invoked to explain such things as an inter-village alliance, a person’s entitlement to land, or their claim to certain types of knowledge. And so it is that each and every story which constitutes the legend of Kila Wari may be, and generally is, represented by its teller in terms of a genealogical relationship. It we wish to translate the Vula‘a convention into our own we might aptly say that the relationship story serves as a preface.
The accounts of Kila Wari’s exploits, like those of many legendary heroes, have taken on mythic proportions, but there is no doubt that he actually existed. He was the fourth-born son of the founder of Alewai village, a fact which is easily demonstrated in the genealogies I collected. Alewai village was settled at the beginning of the 19th century by Kila Wari’s father, Warinumani Lui, and Vula‘a oral traditions which present the period between about 1820 and 1860 as one of intense warfare along this section of the coast comfortably accommodate Kila Wari’s life span.
The complex of stories that constitute the legend of Kila Wari is thus clarified diagrammatically. The kinship diagram shown in figure 1 identifies the founders of the western Vula‘a villages. It also illustrates that an important connection between Warinumani Lui, the founder of Alewai village, and Kana Vali, one of the founding brothers of Irupara, was established during the early period of settlement. It happened that Kwamala Wari, Warinumani’s third-born son, married the daughter of Kana Vali. Her name was Kopi Kila Kana and Irupara people say that regardless of the custom of patrilocality she persuaded Kwamala Wari to settle in Irupara because it was still a young village and there was a lot of work to be done there. The people of Alewai village claim that Kwamala Wari went to Irupara to oversee land there that had been given in compensation for the death of Kila Wari.
