An examination of Ipili sociality, both within Porgera and in relation to people outside the valley, quickly indicates that the seven-clan system that exists in Porgera today was not — as a ‘view and translate’ approach would have it — a method of social organisation which pre-existed the mine and the government’s views of Ipili. I will discuss first the difficulties in identifying ‘the Ipili’ as a discrete ethnic group in the wider Enga/Southern Highlands region. Then I will discuss the difficulty of understanding sociality within the valley as being composed of clans.

First, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the idea of discrete, clearly bounded ethnic groups was not common to the wider region in which the Ipili lived (Biersack 1995). The focus of Iplili local organisation was on regional embeddedness and connections with — rather than divisions between — different areas of settlement. Like those of their neighbours, the Huli and the Enga, Ipili genealogies run deep, typically beyond ten generations, and terminate with an eponymous apical ancestor. These genealogies frequently trace the migration of ancestors across the region, leaving genealogically connected communities dotted across the landscape. These mythological accounts of ancestral movement seem to correspond, at least in Enga, to actual prehistoric migrations of clans from one area to another (Wiessner and Tumu 1998: 119–55). The result is what might be called ‘clan diasporas’ — a network of related groups which spread across the Southern Highlands and Enga provinces and which cut across the ethnic boundaries of what are today considered to be the three distinct ethnic groups of the ‘Huli’, ‘Enga’ and ‘Ipili.’ In the past, these ties were used to facilitate long-distance trading (Mangi 1988), to gain access to valuable resources like salt springs (Wiessner and Tumu 1998), and to request hospitality when ecological hardship such as drought or frost meant temporary migration from one’s home (Wohlt 1978). Today Papua New Guineans continue to use these ties to conduct business along the Highlands Highway, to find hosts at areas near mines and hydrocarbon projects where work is plentiful, and to travel safely through areas where tribal fighting occurs.

Thus ethnicity in this area is based on grades or continua of cultural difference in a population criss-crossed by flows of people. It is for this reason that Burton argues that the existence of these clan diasporas

Porgerans are and were, as Aletta Biersack (1995: 7) puts it, ‘centered not on themselves as geographical isolates but on culturally diverse fields in which their mythology, trade routes, and marriage practices embedded them’. As a result, ‘syncretism is not just an artifact of colonialism; syncretism is the ordinary state of affairs … Ipili peoples have always been cosmopolitan’ (ibid: 6). Of course, it is undoubtedly the case that there are coherent and culturally specific practices which characterise people who live in Porgera as being distinctive from their neighbours and entitle them to be considered customary owners of the land surrounding the Porgera mine. But it is important to note that these differences were not sufficiently clear-cut that they could easily be used as a ready-made charter by a government to exclude people from membership in resource-rich groups. So while it is tempting, as Burton (1999: 284) puts it, ‘to uncover as many of them as possible and map them out’, clan diasporas lack precision beyond the mythical level, and even mythological associations were unclear and subject to confusion. Thus Wohlt (1978: 42) recounts that while everyone ‘know[s] the gist of the myth’, in fact, ‘if one asks a dozen informants over [the] age of 40 the particulars of genealogical connection … one gets a dozen different versions’. He concludes that ‘beyond the unity maintained through oral tradition and the ceremonies described above, relationships among tribal members entail little else than hospitality, and that only in need’ (ibid: 54). In sum, what we see is a situation in which individuals justified long-distance travel with reference to genealogical relationships which were enduring but whose meaning was ambiguous. In other words, this was a system in which people had agency to construe the connection between them given a culturally specific form of connection which nevertheless under-determined the exact nature of the relationship between them.

But perhaps these genealogies are the basis of a corporate, descent-based system of clans in Porgera? Not according to John Burton, who argues that ‘we can abandon any pretence at trying to fit the Porgeran lines of descent to the orthodox clan model. In fact, there are no corporate groups we can call “clans” in Porgera’ (Burton 1992: 138). Most researchers agree with him — the Ipili are overwhelmingly described in the literature as ‘cognatic’ (Biersack 1980, 1995; Jacka 2003). Models of Ipili sociality as clan-based run into several problems.^[7]

The first problem with the clan model of Ipili social organisation is that the Ipili do not have a word for ‘clan’ in the sense of a corporate group defined by descent. It is true that the term ‘clan’ is often used to gloss the Ipili word yame. But yame simply means ‘group of people’ or ‘organisation’, and has no connotation of descent, consanguinity, or kinship whatsoever. Ipili use the term indiscriminately to refer to Security Guards, descendants of Tuanda, and Lutherans.^[8] If anything, yame simply means the centre, reason, or principle around which coalitions of people coalesce, a perception of likeness or commonalty among a group of persons. Even in cases where it does refer to cognatic stocks (the technical term for what are often called ‘clans’ in Porgera),^[9] association with such a stock is not exclusive in Porgera, and these stocks do not in and of themselves form the basis for exchange or collective action. Ipili consider themselves to have a ‘portfolio’ of eight stocks to choose from — one from each of their grandparents. They demonstrate their relationship to these stocks by reciting malu (genealogies) that connect them to the apical ancestor after whom the stock is named.

Not only is stock affiliation non-exclusive, it is telling that Ipili do not consider it a virtue to identify strongly with only one of them. Individual Ipili strategies of social placement focus on the interstitial spaces between groups, using multiple affiliations to be ‘in the middle’ of things — to be ‘at the border’ as Biersack (1980) describes it. The ideal politician is a tombene akali — a ‘middle man’ (and it is typically a man) who works the interface between two groups and is thus to the Ipili ‘at the center of the action’, even though in Western terms we would consider him marginal to both. Thus, when mining executives doubt indigenous people’s claims to being ‘real landowners’, they are mistaking their own ideologies of lineal purity for those of the Ipili. For instance, it was occasionally said by mine employees that a group of people descended from a prominent alluvial miner were ‘not really Maipangi’ because their father was originally from Enga and was related to the Maipangi ‘clan’ in Porgera through an embarrassingly tenuous set of connections. When I tried this out on one of my informants he looked surprised and remarked that if anyone was Maipangi it was these people, since they had no other groups to claim affiliation with. As far as he was concerned those people were Maipangi because they had used their agency to activate and maintain ties to that stock-cum-residential group, and this singular affiliation was thus seen as an unfortunate impoverishment of a potentially much richer and wider set of relationships rather than a positively valued ‘pure’ and exclusive group membership.

We can agree, then, with Sturzenhofecker when she writes of the nearby Duna that ‘what is articulated in malu genealogies is a principle not of group recruitment but of individual entitlement’ (1993: 79–80). In Porgera, as in Wohlt’s Yumbisa:

Vertical, descent-based relations often come to be used to label coalitions of people mobilised through collateral or other means.

As Burton (1992) has pointed out, despite having an ideology of lineage, Ipili social organisation resembles that of the Garia as described by Lawrence (1984), although they lack the Garia attachment to territory described by Leach (2004). When viewed in this light, Porgeran kinship is less a matter of corporate groups than of a large mesh of egocentric personal networks. An individual’s ‘security circle’ is composed of ‘persons with whom he has safe relationships and towards whom he should observe stringent rules governing marriage, diet, and political obligation’ (Lawrence 1984: 28), of which consanguineal ties are merely a part. This realisation helps to clarify the meaning of the term yame. ‘Daniel yame’, for instance, does not refer merely to the descendants of Daniel; it refers to all those people whose mutual affinity is a result of his presence in their social networks. So while you can refer to Pulumaini yame to mean ‘everyone whose apical ancestor is Pulumaini’, you can also use it to mean ‘those five people who use a common tie to Pulumaini as an excuse to go out drinking on Thursdays’, even though the five people in question do not include all of Pulumaini’s descendants.

For Ipili, finding and mobilising these connections is thus an art, and Ipili are networkers not only in a social-structural sense, but also in the more prosaic sense of the term: they are inveterately social, always on the lookout for new allies and potential ways to expand who they know and where they know them. Ipili enjoy discussing the twists and turns of their malu and those of prominent people in the valley in the same way that Americans dwell on the statistical minutiae of professional baseball players. In both regional movement and local sociality, then, the situation in Porgera was one of entrepreneurial agency.