Bettina Beer

Stonhet and Yelotop: Body Images, Physical Markers and Definitions of Ethnic Boundaries in Papua New Guinea

The Wampar of Papua New Guinea are an ethnic group with contested boundaries and a strong ethnic identity and consciousness. Since their first contact with White missionaries, government officials and anthropologists, body images have changed and become more important. ‘Foreign’ migrants from other PNG provinces are now coming in great numbers into Wampar territory, where they find wealthy Wampar make good marriage partners. From peaceful relations with ‘foreigners’ in the 1960s and 1970s, the situation has changed to the extent that Wampar now have plans for driving men from other ethnic groups out of their territory. Within two generations, ideas of changeable cultural otherness have developed into stereotypes of unchangeable bodily differences. In this paper, I describe (1) changes in the perception of foreigners, and in the definition of ‘foreigner’ itself, (2) body images of the Wampar, and (3) conditions for these changes.

Causal inferences about others’ behavior among the Wampar, Papua New Guinea – and why they are hard to elicit

As social beings, people need to be able to interact intelligently with others in their social environment. Accordingly, people spend much time conversing with one another in order to understand the broad and fine aspects of the relations that link them. They are especially interested in the interactive behaviors that constitute social relations, such as mutual aid, gift giving and exchange, sharing, informal socializing, or deception. The evaluations of these behaviors are embedded in social relationships and charged with values and emotions. We developed tasks to probe how people in an unfamiliar socio-cultural setting understand and account for the behavior of others conditional upon their category membership – by trying to elicit the basic categories, stereotypes, and models that inform the causal perceptions, inferences and reasoning people use in understanding others’ interactive behaviors – and we tested these tasks among the Wampar in Papua New Guinea. The results show changes in the relevance of social categories among the Wampar but also, and perhaps more important, limitations in the translation and applicability of cognitive tasks.