If the allegedly individual and discrete nature of blockholdings at Sikut is potentially complicated by the tendency of customary ways of thinking and acting to creep back in, then it is perhaps also the case that ownership of customary land back at Matupit has also been complicated by Tolai responses to new economic circumstances. Debates around land tenure in this part of ENB have long centered on the issue of patrilineal versus matrilineal transfer of rights, with many associating patrilineality with a positive move towards ‘modern’ land tenure systems. Most of PNG, however, is classified by anthropologists as having ‘patrilineal’ customary land tenure. What is fundamentally at stake in these debates is an argument about the alleged economic advantages of removing interests in land from cycles of ongoing customary obligation and reciprocal social relations, and instead making land the alienable property of individual persons or household units. In the matrilineal Gazelle, the distinction between matrilineal and patrilineal inheritance has understandably largely come to stand for this debate, with a shift to patrilineality representing the removal of clan-based reciprocal obligations. However, the ways in which Matupi negotiate these tensions today show that characterising land as customary or non-customary is a far from simple matter.

At Matupit today a large proportion of houses are built on purchased land. It is particularly common for fathers to buy land from their own clan to overcome the problems that will arise between their children and their nephews if they build permanent houses on their own clan land. The buying and selling of customary ground is in theory illegal in PNG, unless the buying and selling can be shown to be a customary practice. The custom of ‘buying’ ground is known among the Tolai as kulia. However, Bill Epstein, who conducted fieldwork at Matupit in the early 1960s, was keen to stress that kulia does not neatly equate with the Western idea of an alienable commodity transaction, noting that, ‘[t]he indigenous concept of kul then is translated by the term purchase only at the risk of serious misrepresentation’ (Epstein 1969: 132). Epstein devotes some attention to what distinguishes kulia from Western ideas of buying and selling, as for him the different nature of this transaction is key to illuminating the ways in which Tolai customary land tenure differs from Western property regimes.

Two reasons are given here for why kulia should not be considered equivalent to Western commodity transactions. First, there is the nature of the bonds preceding the transaction, implying that kulia should be seen as a part of an ongoing cycle of customary obligation rather than as a stand-alone purchase of alienable property. Second, the low level of payment, ‘short of the market value’, is provided as evidence that the payment is ‘in recognition of … customary claims’ rather than an outright purchase.^[3]

The conclusion that Epstein draws from this state of affairs is that the kakalei or ‘claim’ to the land ‘remains vested in the vendor lineage’ (Epstein 1969: 104). This non-alienability of claims in the land is a key difference between Tolai customary land and Western landed property.^[4] I have been told that in the past there would often be expectations that the land might return to the vendors at some point after the death of the buyers, that they would be considered to have an ongoing relationship with the piece of ground, and that if the ‘purchasers’ failed to be suitably attentive to their ongoing customary obligations to the vendors then it would be commonplace for the vendors to find a way to reclaim the land. However, even by the early 1960s, Epstein had identified trends that were taking kulia away from this customary ideal. First, the increasing number of land deals with the colonial administration and the large amounts of money involved meant that the clan elders who controlled the land were ‘now encouraged to think of land increasingly as a commodity’ (Epstein 1969: 132). The young men who protested at many of these deals were essentially claiming that the elders ‘had no power to dispose of the land so as to remove it from the sphere of Tolai social relationships and customary obligations’ (ibid). Second, cash cropping meant that ‘many Tolai are beginning to find it necessary to think of land as a commodity even in transactions among themselves’ (ibid). Epstein cites the example of a young man who bought a plot of customary land in the village of Napapar to plant cocoa. When his cocoa was ready to bear fruit, they reclaimed the land. Epstein concludes that ‘[f]or him, as for many Tolai, the traditional system of land tenure was beginning to reveal its limitations in meeting the needs of contemporary situations’ (ibid: 133).

Today, I would argue that although kulia retains features that distinguish it from the purest ideal of commodity transaction, it has continued to change in many respects. Radin (1996) suggests that what is referred to as ‘commodification’ is necessarily an incomplete process, and whether a thing, transaction, or relationship should be viewed as a commodity is therefore a matter of degree, rather than an ‘either/or’ distinction. In my opinion, changes to kulia over the past 40 years can be usefully looked at in this way. Parties to the transaction will tend to be involved in ongoing customary relationships, as almost everyone at Matupit is involved in customary relations with everyone else anyway. Fingleton notes that the flexibility of relations in the village makes it easy to construct customary ties that legitimise a kulia transaction: ‘no land transaction may be mounted without a pre-existing link between the parties, but the relativity of Tolai concepts of group corporateness and kinship facilitates the establishment of a connection between willing people’ (Fingleton 1985: 211). This means that even outsiders with no history of relationship to the community can buy land in the village through the creation of customary ties. Although I was unable to observe the purchase of any land during my time at Matupit, I was told that it was not hard to accomplish. Even as early as the 1960s a number of settlers from the Sepik area had bought land on the edge of Matupit, and their descendants were still living there when I was doing fieldwork. Fingleton makes a convincing case that this plasticity of customary relations is an example of the inherent flexibility of customary tenure that makes it better adapted to rapidly changing social relations than fixed Western property law. From a theoretical angle however, this inexhaustible flexibility can be problematic, because if customary culture is so flexible that it can encompass any kind of relationship then it is at risk of becoming a tautological concept that defines and prescribes nothing.

I found that there were regular disputes as to how customary some manifestations of custom really are, the most frequent examples being criticisms of economically powerful ‘big-shots’ for ‘commercialising’ custom. Custom is at least partly judged by whether or not one’s actions are considered to be embedded in and constitutive of the kind of customary reciprocal relations that Epstein’s young men accused the elders of abandoning by selling land to the Australians. Even if one performs custom as a set of rules perfectly, one’s actions can be considered to be fundamentally non-customary when judged on this basis. This contrast between custom based on ongoing reciprocal obligations, and Western social life as being based on business transactions, although far from exhausting the multivalent possibilities of the word ‘custom’ or kastom, was an often repeated and important part of the definition. If Radin is correct to say that commodification is a necessarily incomplete process, and Gregory (1982: 23), drawing on Sahlins, is correct in arguing that, ‘the distinction between gift exchange and commodity exchange should not be seen as a bipolar opposition but rather as the extreme points of a continuum’, then the networks of social relations that go into making up a transaction can be viewed from more than one angle, and indeed often are viewed as part of a process of assessing the morality of these transactions.

The danger in simply describing the ease with which customary relations can be created to make kulia possible is that this can assume what it seeks to demonstrate — namely, the fundamental difference between kulia as a customary practice and standard Western property transactions as an empirical ‘bipolar opposition’. Just as it is possible for Matupi to view the involvement of big-shots in custom from an angle that declares it to be non-reciprocal and therefore not truly customary, it is also possible that customary links which are so easily and flexibly contracted can be seen from certain angles as a kind of preparation for a kulia transaction that now looks more like a purchase. Kulia may be formally the same as before, but its increasing relative weight and degree of finality may make it appear, in certain indigenous descriptions at least, more like a commodity transaction for which the preceding transactions are preparatory work, rather than part of an ongoing cycle of customary reciprocity. Certainly the description of how custom can ‘hide’ the true value of a transaction suggests that this is one possible indigenous perspective from which kulia can be described today. Some transactions sit so clearly towards one or the other of Gregory’s two poles that the scope for different perspectives to be taken on them is severely limited, but others are more ambiguous. I would not argue, against Fingleton and others, that kulia is a commodity transaction and therefore that Tolai think of land in the same way as Australians. Rather, my argument is that kulia is not simply an uncomplicated customary transaction, but can also be viewed as embodying other, less customary, more commodity-oriented ethics. Changes over the past 40 years, while not totally ‘commodifying’ the transaction (and by implication Tolai attitudes towards land), have moved it further towards that pole of the spectrum by creating more situations in which Tolai find it fruitful to describe land in property/commodity terms. This is perhaps the very process by which partial commodification occurs.

Epstein and Fingleton (especially the latter) do not just stress the importance of establishing customary connections prior to kulia, but also the maintenance and continued recognition of these links after the transaction. For example, after noting the flexibility with which customary connections legitimising kulia may be created, Fingleton goes on to say that:

Although it is the case that there is still a tendency for kulia to be transacted between persons or groups who were already strongly linked — as when a man buys from his own clan on behalf of his children — I found no evidence that kulia transactions tend to strengthen the connections, and in some cases there is little or no ongoing relationship.

One of my closest acquaintances built his house on land that he bought from the last male representative of one of Matupit’s major landholding clans. This purchase was made in 1983, and to my knowledge the purchaser has had no ongoing customary relationship with the vendor, and would give him very short shrift if he came to ask for favours or gifts on the basis of his ancestral links with the land upon which the purchaser has built his house, which is something that vendor is wont to do with some people to whom he has sold land. What is interesting is the attitude of the majority of Matupi to requests such as this. Most people say that it is dishonest as it is an attempt to get money ‘twice for land that you have already sold’. In many contexts in contemporary PNG, such as negotiations with a mining company, landowners are keen to demand the establishment of an ongoing and more customary relationship that goes beyond single payments because of the other party’s long-term presence on the land. Amongst Matupi, however, the idea that a transfer of land can be a way of legitimising such demands is treated with near-universal incomprehension or repulsion. It is clear that Papua New Guineans do not view land transfers according to a logic of inexorable commodification, or according to an unchanging cultural logic of inalienability, but instead are as capable as any other group of people of judging (or disputing) that different kinds of transactions are morally appropriate in different contexts.