How do Tolai people now respond to the statement made by Epstein that kakalei remains with the vendor clan even after kulia (sale). In 2002–04, the response was universally one of incredulity. People would assert that of course kakalei can be transferred, there would be no point in buying something if you didn’t receive the kakalei. This would sometimes be followed by the suggestion any statement to the contrary must be the work of crooked old men who want to get money twice for the same piece of land. Epstein notes that sale by kulia never gives secure ownership as it only takes one member of the vendor clan to stand up a couple of years later, and claim not to have been consulted, for the sale to be undone (Epstein 1969: 131–2). Epstein implies that this is one of the ways in which kakalei remains with the vendor clan, like the case in which the purchaser is remiss in maintaining an ongoing customary relationship with the vendor after the kulia transaction. Today, this ‘problem’ has been partially resolved by a practice that has evolved over the past 30 years, of witnessing the purchase with a statutory declaration which all adult members of the vendor clan must sign before the deal is finalised.

The practice of witnessing purchase with a statutory declaration started in this part of ENB under the Australian Administration in the early 1970s, although T.S. Epstein’s fieldnotes include government records of land purchases in the much less ‘developed’ Tolai village of Rapitok during the late 1950s.^[5] According to Jessep (1980: 123–4), the recording of land sales in ENB was ‘apparently valued for the documentary evidence of the sale and the publicity of the payment made at the office’. Fitzpatrick (1983: 19) cites Tolai evidence in support of a wider argument about PNG in the 1970s:

I was often told that if you have ‘the paper’ (meaning the statutory declaration), then you are safe. One old man explained to me that ‘before we did not know how to buy and sell properly; now that we have the paper, we have more save (knowledge)’. This clearly indicates the perception that the nature of kulia has changed over the years. In this context, as one person described it to me, ‘papers’ do have power to ‘strengthen’ the practice of buying ground, and this is part of the process that Tolai have developed in response to their perceived need to secure land that they were buying for their children. Hence, paper ‘kills the talk’ on a piece of ground — at least between the selling clan and the buyer — although there is always the option for a third party to claim that the vendors never had the right to sell the ground in the first place.

I have no personal experience of the selling clan reclaiming land from a buyer who had a statutory declaration. Of course a registration can be misleading to the outside observer, conflating a number of reciprocal customary obligations into one simple transaction (Fingleton 1985: 184–6). However, registration of the purchase transaction, in Matupit at least, does seem to set a kind of seal on the land transfer, making it harder for alleged oversights in the recognition of ongoing obligations to be used to overturn the transaction. Even if, in many cases, land transfers are unimaginable without a preceding history of relationships and anticipation of ongoing relations, the act of registration does seem to give the transfer a degree of separation from these relations.

The use of statutory declarations is now semi-officially recognised by the Provincial Government: the Lands Division keeps copies of all land purchase statutory declarations and has also put in place official guidelines for the practice. All reports of the origin of this practice claim that its impetus came from the village not the government. According to Fingleton (1985: 181-2), the practice began in Rakunat as a continuation of an aborted attempt by the colonial government to register land in the 1960s, and was carried out by the villagers themselves in order to secure land transfers, not as part of a government plan to reform customary land practices. As he puts it, ‘[t]he most important changes in … land tenure … are those which occurred internally, in transactions within the village community which continued the process of adjustment to changing land demands’ (ibid: 178). This is an important point because great attention is often paid to a history of unsuccessful state-driven changes in land tenure imposed upon an unwilling population, as it was in the case of the Gazelle Peninsula (ibid: iii). This ethnographic description fits into what has become a wider theoretical concern in recent years, namely the ways in which the state needs to organise its subjects and their practices in ways that enable it to ‘see’ and therefore govern them more efficiently (Scott 1998). It is understandable if this history is emphasised to counter the misguided arguments of those who suggest that Western nations should use their disproportionate economic power to force Melanesian nations into land tenure reform. But it is also important to acknowledge that, in an engagement with the global economy in certain contexts, Melanesians are bound to explore the possibility of different ways of transacting land, and that sometimes they will seek the support of the state in making these more secure. To acknowledge that it is just as possible for the state’s subjects to be recognised in a manner that fits their needs, as it is for the state to demand that its subjects be organised in a manner that makes it possible for the state to ‘see’ them, should in no way be taken as an endorsement of overarching schemes to revolutionise village life through legislative action. Quite the opposite: it shows the importance of a careful ethnographic attention to the different details of processes of contested commodification as they occur in different circumstances.

Land that is transacted by this process is still legally considered to be customary land, and although the purchaser, if a man, has the right to pass it on to his children, in the next generation it must follow matrilineal principles.^[6] For this reason Matupi will tend to refer to even ‘purchased’ land at Matupit as customary land, largely in contradistinction to their land at Sikut. However, they are also clearly aware that the custom of kulia and its relationship to wider networks of customary obligation has changed in some respects in the past 40 years. Land disputes at Matupit are not as widespread as they were in the years leading up to the volcanic eruption of 1994, but it was notable that not one of the cases I observed was an attempt by vendors to overturn a land sale that had been registered, and I was told by most Matupi that any such attempt would be fruitless. The Lands Division and the majority of Matupi clearly view kulia today as a transaction that implies the complete alienation of all rights in a piece of land from one group to another. Epstein’s claim that ‘the estate vested by a “purchase” is always regarded as inferior to a kakalei’ (Epstein 1969: 131, my emphasis) has, at the very least, been complicated by changes to Tolai kulia over the past 40 years.

With regard to ‘market value’, I conducted a village household survey and discovered that the average ‘price’ paid for a house had hardly risen at all in the past 40 years. This was in contrast to the prices of other essentials, such as imported foodstuff and materials used to build permanent houses, which had risen dramatically. Although what constitutes ‘market value’ is hard to ascertain in an environment such as Matupit, prices as low as K50–100 (equivalent to the cost of two cartons of beer) seems good value for the outright purchase of a plot of land on which one is going to build a house that will cost thousands of kina. This stability seems to bear out Epstein’s original observations about the non-commodity nature of customary land transactions at Matupit, and to cast doubt on his prediction that trends were emerging in village life that were going to push land transactions in a more commodified direction. Matupi offered a number of explanations for the relative stability of land prices. One was that land had for a long time been a part of the customary system, although that answer was always accompanied by a caveat that this was changing and that prices for land were starting to rise. Indeed, I was often told that the volcano had stopped an anticipated explosion in land prices, just as it had stopped the explosion of land disputes. Another response was that many of the prices that I had been given during the course of my village survey were most likely exaggerated as many of the prices were much higher than I had been led to believe. People would publicly ‘buy’ the land for a small amount of money, but behind the scenes, hundreds or even thousands of kina (or equivalents) would change hands. The larger amounts would be kept secret. It is worth pointing out that there were some at Matupit who angrily denied that such a thing could happen, but the very suggestion demonstrated an awareness on the part of some Matupi that there was something of a contradiction here. On the one hand, the legal registration of a seemingly commercial transaction can mask a web of customary obligations; on the other hand, the low monetary value of a seemingly customary transaction can mask a commercial exchange of greater value. Indeed, a few people told me that custom was a means for ‘hiding’ the value of a land purchase, once again demonstrating that seemingly customary transactions are capable of being viewed from a commercial perspective if one wants to cast them in a certain moral light. We are familiar, in Melanesian ethnography, with a position that stresses how relationships that have seemingly been Westernised or commodified are, on closer examination, still based on a customary ethic of reciprocity. This is undoubtedly often true, but perhaps in stressing such moments we sometimes lose sight of the logical corollary — situations in which what on the surface appears customary and reciprocal can simultaneously embody the opposite ethical values. The ways in which Matupi discuss the ‘commercialisation’ of custom demonstrates that they have certainly not lost sight of these possibilities.

As well, there are tendencies emerging at Matupit today that suggest a more openly commercial attitude towards land sales. During my last visit to Matupit I interviewed a village councillor about land sales in his ward. He told me of a woman who had sold three separate plots of land for houses in the village on behalf of her clan section in the past year. Instead of the one- or two-hundred kina standard land sale price on my village survey, she had sold land for K2–3000, a price much closer to the amount that similar plots would receive on the commercial market in Rabaul. The councillor stressed that such price rises were the result of land registration, and that meant that the purchase was secure. From the point of view of the state and Matupi themselves, although the land remained customary, in contradistinction to the land at Sikut for example, it clearly does not live up to certain ideals of custom as these are expressed in many ethnographic and indigenous accounts.

The performance of customary ritual has always been of great importance to people’s rights to reside on certain pieces of land. A man wishing to stay on his father’s clan land after his death would pay close attention to helping his father’s clan in custom, in particular distributing large amounts of customary shell-wealth on his death. Even someone residing on his own clan land would not expect residence by right, but would be expected to help in custom. Someone remiss in their customary obligations would bring shame on the clan and would likely be given the worst pieces of ground to live and garden upon. Today the picture is slightly different. The declining power of the big men in the clan means that complaints about young men simply building a house on clan land without consultation with elders of the clan are not uncommon. Members of the Matupi community at Sikut have begun performing customary practices from Matupit, such as the namata, a kind of initiation for the first-born son of a family. One of the minority of Matupi who hoped for a return to openly full-blooded ‘customary’ land tenure at Sikut told me that this emergence of custom at Sikut was a sign that his hopes would be realised, just as had happened at Wudal. He was also of the view that the Provincial Government’s attempt to remove customary clan relations from land tenure at Sikut was a continuation of the Australian Administration’s attempts to ‘turn us into white men’ when they tried to enforce patrilineal nuclear family inheritance at Wudal. For most Sikut residents, however, the extent to which the performance of custom heralds the re-emergence of customary land tenure is not clear. As one young male resident at Sikut explained to me in October 2002: ‘When you do custom at Matupit you are concerned with land. When you do custom here it is custom only (tasol).’ He further argued that many Matupit residents who had been heavily involved in custom before they got blocks at Sikut were now involved in the bare minimum required for social respectability. Now that they had their own land, they no longer felt the need to keep the clan happy by performing custom.

Whatever the future holds at Sikut, these examples show that there are problems in defining land as customary or non-customary, and that these may sometimes be overlooked in policy debates. The land at Wudal is still formally regarded by the state as non-customary land, yet it is widely acknowledged to be land where ‘custom has come back in’ to the extent that many people describe it as ‘like customary land’ or even as ‘customary land’. The increasing performance of custom at Sikut, along with trends to acknowledge the importance of customary relations on non-customary land, may well have effects on land use and occupation. The question is how much effect will it have, and how much will be necessary for the inhabitants to acknowledge that the land has become de facto customary. Conversely, the land bought and sold by kulia at Matupit is still in the eyes of both the state and Matupit ‘customary’, yet it is described in ways that make it appear less customary, according to certain glosses of the word ‘custom’, than would have been the case 40 years ago. Custom is as much a position taken on the morality of certain transactions as it is an empirical description of a juridical process to be preserved or reformed in the interests of national development.