ROAD BELONG DEVELOPMENT. CARGO CULTS, COMMUNITY GROUPS AND SELF-HELP MOVEMENTS IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA. Rolf Gerritsen R.J. May Michael A.H.B. Wal ter Working Paper No 3 Department of Political and Social Change Research School of Pacific Studies Australian National University August 1981 (£) Rolf Ge rritsen , R.J. May an d Mi chael A.H.B. Walter This work is copyri ght. Apart from any fai r dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criti cism, or review, as permi tted unde r the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permi ssion. Inquiries should be made to the publishe r. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication entry Gerri tsen, Ro lf, 1947- . Road Belong Development. Bibliography. ISBN 0 86784 044 7. 1. Papua New Guinea - Poli ties and gove rnment. 2. Papua New Guinea - Economic conditions. I. May, R.J. (Ronald James}, 1939- . II. Wa lter, Mi chael A.H .B. (Michael Ali Harold Burgoyne), 1938- . III . Aus tralian National Unive rs ity. Dept. of Poli ti cal and Social Change . IV. Title. (Series: Working paper (Australian National University. Dept. of Politi cal and Social Change ); no. 3 ISSN 0157-2776) . 320 .995 CONTENTS Aspects of the political evolution of rural Papua New Guinea: towards a political economy of the terminal peasantry Rolf Gerritsen 1 Self-help movements: a new mode l for local developments? R.J. May 61 Cu lt movements and community deve lopment associations: revo lution and evolution in the Papua New Guinea countryside Mi chae l A.H.B. Walter 81 References 107 Contributors 117 PREFACE 'Cargo cults' have long attracted the scholarly attention as well as the ill-informed curiosity of observe rs of Me lanesia . More recently the prolife ration of a variety of spontaneous local movements and the emergence of mo re spe cifically focus sed interest groups have been the subjects of several studie s and a point of departure for investigations into questions of social stratification and class formation in Papua New Guinea . This volume brings toge ther three pape rs which have contributed to the recent lite rature in this area. The fi rst, by Rolf Gerritsen, was presented to the Canberra Marxist Discussion Group and to a seminar at the Australian National University in 19 75. The analysis was extended in a Ph.D. thesis presented to the Australian National Unive rsity in 1979 but although the 19 75 paper has been wide ly referred to, up till now neither it nor the thesis has appeared in published form. The paper is reproduced here with only minor revi sions to the original . Shortly befo re Gerritsen 's pape r was presented R.J. May published a paper ('The micronationalists: problems of fragmentation', New Guinea, 10 (1) 19 75) which commented on the pro liferation in Papua New Guinea of locally and regionally based popular movements with broad and often poorly articulated economic, social and political ob jective s, to which May attached the te rm 'micronationalist' . This article foreshadowed a more de tailed study, by several authors, of a number of these movements, the collected results of which are in press (Micronationalist Movements in Papua New Guinea, fo rthcoming). In 1978 May pre sented a paper to the Waigani Seminar whi ch drew on some of the earlier material and attempted to assess the significance and achievement of a group of what he de scribed as self-help deve lopment movements . The pape r was subsequently published in a collection of the semina r proceedings (Premdas an d Pokawin 19 78) and it is reprinted he re . The third paper take s up some of the questions raised in earlier papers, particularly that concerning the link betwe en 'cargo cults ' and ii community development associations , and their common revolutionary aspe ct. The author , Michael Walter , was appointed to IASER in part to continue the work on local mo vements initiated by May . Since its acceptance for this volume the paper has been publi shed as IASER Discussion Paper 36 . ASPECTS OF THE POLITICAL EVOLUTION OF RURAL PAPUA NEW GUINEA: TOWARDS A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE TERMINAL PEASANTRY Rolf Gerritsen Homo Hierarchicus: The Me lane sian big man seems so thoroughly bourgeois, so remini scent of the free enterprising rugge d indivi dual of our own heritage. He combines wi th an ostensible intere st in the genera l we lfare a more profound measure of self-interested cunning and economic calculation. His gaze , as Veblen mi ght have put it, is fixed unswervingly to the main chance. His every public action is designed to make a competitive and invi dious comparison wi th others , to show a standing above the masses that is product of his own pers onal manufacture (Sahlins 196 3: 289). The persistence of Homo Hierarchicus: Old people in Dar-es-Salaam are reporte d by the Daily News to have told Tanzania's Prime Minister , Rashi di Kawawa , that they do not want to be known as 'ndugu' (Swahili for 'comrade') be cause it is 'undignified'. The elders have asked the Prime Mi nister to take the matter up wi th President Nyerere following approval of the use of the wo rd by the Executive Committe. e of the ruling TANU. An old person considered himself an 'honourable elder' and not 'ndugu' the newspaper reported. 'Ndugu' was suitable only for the younger generation. The Prime Minister said the word, as used in Tanzania ha d nothing to do with age or rank but was used to portray equality and human re spect within the context of Tanzania's socialist policies (West Africa No. 3023, 2 June 1975) . My Theme: One of the mo st striking pieces of evidence that do gmatism is no t the exclusive prerogati ve of Marxi sts is the extraordinary re sistance that still exists to the idea that there are classes and class struggles in Afr ica, let alone that they may be of central importance (Leys 1975 : xii) . The Theme illustrated from Tanzania: Ujamaa was also introduced as a challenge to the co-operative move­ ment, whi ch had been subject to a special commission of enquiry in 1966. The movement was plagued by mismanagement, and did not even realise the socialist principles of co-operation. These shortcomings in co-operative institutions we re the pretext for a radical inter­ vention in the whole mo vement through the policy of ujamaa. The base of the mo vement would eventually be ujamaa vi llages , whose establish­ me nt would undermine the power of the petty traders and kulak farmers who had dominated the co-operative unions and societies (Hyden 1975 : 55 , my emphasis). 2 To pre-empt the critics: I decided to publish my provi sional findings , partly as a demonstration that provocative socio-economi c fieldwork may sometime s be done ve ry rapidly , even where , as in this case , background anthropological ma terial was scanty and where the investigator (who was obliged to work through an interpre ter) had no previous experience of the society in question (Hill 1970 : 30) . Introduction This paper seeks to provide an explanatory generative framework upon which to evaluate Papua New Guinean rural politics . Broadly it argues that during the 1950s and 1960s the re began a process of strati fication into a rural mass and a rural elite class of big peasants . This develop­ me nt tied in with the political changes then occurring, as the big peasants utilized externally-introduced political structures to secure their 1 persona 1 a d vancement . Th e f•ina 1 pro d ucts , b'ig peasants 'in I'inte rest I associations and (in a certain sense their antithesis) the 'dynami c communal ' associations, are important in contemporary politics in rural Papua New Guinea. As a part explanation of this evolution , a parti cular interpre tation of the pre-colonial socio-economic system wi ll be fo llowed. Thi s interpre tation of the pre-colonial Me lanesian system suggests itself 2 as a logical precondition of the argument for elite evolution . 1 The usage of 'peasant' may be di sputed. I do not use it in the sense of a feudal-originated peasantry as in Ethiopia. The concept is used in the same sense as by Hunter, who first drew attention to the growing tendency fo r an African peasantry to appear as customary tenure and subsistence economy gave way to individual ownership or 'control ' in mi xe d subsistence and cash economies (Hunter 1969) . The 'peasant ' of this paper evolved from a tribal rather than a feudal base (for further di scussion of thi s concept see Fallers 196 1: 108-110; Dalton 1967: 543-544 ; and Dalton et al . ibid.: introduction) . 2 Th is is not very di fferent from Finney 's argument that there were certain va lues in Eastern Highlands society that predisposed people towards entrepreneurial activity (Finney 19 73) . 3 The analysis concentrate s upon the big peasants as a class and how they emerged and seek to influence government . The intere st associations dealt with below are the latest political form the big peasants ' class interests have taken. The communal associations are mentioned only insofar as they cast light upon the politics of the development of the big peasantry . 'Vertical' differentiation in politi cal conflict is a worthy object of study (see Brookfield and Brown 1963) . But for this paper horizontal stratification and the politics thus created are seen as being of paramount importance for th e future of rural Papua New Guinea .