Saltwater Sociality A Melanesian Island Ethnography [Hardcover]

The inhabitants of Pororan Island, a small group of saltwater people in Papua New Guinea, are intensely interested in the movements of persons across the island and across the sea, both in their everyday lives as fishing people and on ritual occasions. From their observations of human movements, they take their cues about the current state of social relations. Based on detailed ethnography, this study engages current Melanesian anthropological theory and argues that movements are the Pororans predominant mode of objectifying relations. Movements on Pororan Island are to its inhabitants what roads are to mainlanders on the nearby larger island, and what material objects and images are to others elsewhere in Melanesia.

List of Tables
A note on languages
Preface
Acknowledgements

Introduction

• Pororan and Buka, 2004
• Movements: an ethnographic focus
• Studying movements: some methods
• Movements as objectification

Chapter 1. Fishing people

• Anywhere, anytime, anybody
• Gardening and fishing
• Fishing methods
• Going around: opening up space and time
• Return from the sea
• Sia and Hulu

Chapter 2. Kin on the move

• Watching, discussing and eliciting movements
• Mothers and children
• Pinaposa gatherings
• Fathers, or making grow
• The ninja
• Matrilineal kinship: a view from Pororan

Chapter 3. Mobile places

• Buka history: an overview
• Ancestral settlement
• Colonial gathering
• Present-day pulling
• Leitana and the little thing
• Stones

Chapter 4. Pinaposa

• Matrilineages by the hair
• Pinaposa relations across Buka
• The Pororans on ancestral roads
• Orchestrating movements, and going around in the bush
• Migration storil³Ÿ