by Faun Rice
host of metaperson powers-that-be, whose numerous rules of order are enforced
by the highest authorities, often through the offices of the lesser personages in
their aegis.
Among the Central Min peoples, where this regime achieved its most in-
tegrated form, it was dominated by the cosmocratic duo of Afek, mother of
humans and taro, and the serpentine Magalim, who preceded her as the au-
tochthonous father of the numerous creatures of the wild (Jorgensen 1980,
1990a, 1998). Parents of all, Afek and Magalim were themselves children of
none. The beginnings of their respective reigns were marked by violent breaches
of kinship relations, giving them the independence that was the condition of
their universality. Afek was notorious for committing incest with her brother,
whom she later killed (and revived). Magalim was born of himself by interven-
ing in the sexual intercourse of a human couple. Emerging as a serpent, he was
subsequently rejected by his would-be mother, swallowed his foster-father, and
killed his father’s brothers. Magalim has been likened to the Rainbow Serpent
11. I am especially indebted to Dan Jorgensen for his unstinting, generous, and
informative replies to my many questions about the ethnography of the Telefolmin
and of Min peoples in general. His knowledge and interpretations of this material,
as of anthropology more broadly, are extraordinary—though, of course, I take
responsibility if I have misconstrued the information he provided. I have also relied
heavily on several of his writings, especially Jorgensen (1980, 1990a, 1990b, 1990c,
1996, 1998, 2002). Also most useful have been Barth (1975, 1987), Wheatcroft
(1976), Brumbaugh (1987, 1990), and Robbins (1995, 1999, 2004).
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
47
figures of Aboriginal Australian traditions: among other resemblances, by his
habitation of subterranean waters, from which he rises when irritated to cause
destructive floods (Brumbaugh 1987). Afek adds to the analogy by her own
resemblance to Australian Dreamtime ancestors, creating features of the land-
scape and endowing the customs of the human groups she gave rise to in the
course of her travels. Thereafter Afek’s presence would be mediated primarily by
the human ancestors whose cult of fertility she established, whereas Magalim as
indwelling “boss” of the land acted through the multifarious inua of its creatures
and features. Although in effect they thus organized complementary domains—
Afek the human sphere and Magalim its untamed environs—through their re-
spective human and metahuman subjects each extended into the jurisdiction of
the other—often there to do harm.12
Much of Min cultural order, including the taboos that sanction it, is the
codification of the legendary doings of Afek in the mode of mandatory custom.
“Since that time,” Tifalmin people say, “men and women have known how to do
things” (Wheatcroft 1976: 157–58). The precedents thus set by episodes in the
epic of Afek’s advent include the different social and sexual roles of men and
women and the rituals and practices of menstruation, initiation, childbirth, and
death. Indeed, death itself was initiated by Afek along with the westward jour-
ney of the deceased on the underground road to the land of the dead—whence
in return come life-giving shell valuables, hence Afek is also the originator of
wealth, exchange, and long-distance trade. Afek bore the taro plant that iconi-
cally distinguishes the Min people, making a complementary schismogenesis
of it by destroying the swamps in the Telefolmin region, thereby marking the
contrast to lowland sago peoples. Along her journey, she established the men’s
cult houses where the remains of the ancestors of each Min group and the as-
sociated initiation rituals would guarantee the growth of their youth and their
taro. Afek’s ritual progress culminated in the construction of her own great cult
house, Telefolip, in the Telefolmin village of that name.
12. As a civilizer who carved a human cultural existence out of the wild, displacing
its “nature spirits,” Afek’s story is similar to stranger-king traditions. A further
similarity is her union or unions with local men (or a dog). Although the Min
peoples are generally known as “Children of Afek,” there are alternate local
traditions of the autochthonous origins of certain groups from animal ancestors.
The same sort of opposition between indigenous “owners” and the incoming rulers
is in play in the domination of the area by the Telefolmin people, who arrived at
their present location and achieved their superior positon by early military feats.
48
ON KINGS
Afek’s house became the ritual center of the Mountain Ok region, thus giv-
ing the Telefolmin people a certain precedence over the other Min groups. Rit-
uals performed in connection with the Telefolip house radiated Afek’s benefits
in human and agricultural fertility widely among the other Min communities.
If the house itself deteriorated, the growth of taro in the entire region would
decline in tandem. The several Min groups of a few hundred people each were
thus integrated in a common system of divine welfare centered on the Telefolip
shrine. The overall effect was a core–periphery configuration of peoples in a
tribal zone with the Telefolmin custodians of Afek’s legacy at the center. As
described by Dan Jorgensen (1996: 193): “The common linkage to Afek locates
Mountain Ok cults in a regional tradition. Myths concerning Afek not only
account for the features of a particular ritual system or aspects of local cosmol-
ogy, but also place groups relative to one another in terms of descent from Afek
(or a sibling)” (cf. Robbins 2004: 16–17). “A surprisingly ambitious ideology,”
comments Robert Brumbaugh, “because it does not link up with any economic
or political control from the center” (1990: 73). Here is another instance where
the superstructure exceeds the infrastructure. What does link up with the su-
periority of Telefolmin, as Brumbaugh also says, is Afek’s continued presence:
In Telefolmin religion, Afek remains present and accessible. Taro fertility is a vis-
ible sign of her power, just as her bones are the visible signs of her presence. . . .
Thus the Falamin, when addressing the local ancestors in ritual, consider that
they are heard by Afek as well. When stronger reassurances are needed, the local
ancestor is bypassed, new personnel take charge of the ritual and Afek is invoked
directly. Groups without access to bones of Afek—it seems that not all groups
have them—are covered by Afek’s promise to hear and respond when she is
called upon for taro. (1990: 67)
But “Magalim always ruins Afek’s work,” Telefolmin say, breaking her “law” by
deceiving men into killing their friends, seducing women, driving people mad,
causing landslides and floods, and wrecking gardens (Jorgensen 1980: 360). Ca-
pricious and malicious, Magalim is oftimes (but not always) the enemy of peo-
ple: a menace especially among the Central Min, where he is the father, owner,
and thereby the common form in the persons of the animals, plants, rocks, riv-
&
nbsp; ers, cliffs, and so on, that inhabit and constitute the environment—where hu-
man persons hunt, garden, and otherwise traverse with disturbing effects. “All
things of the bush are Magalim’s children, Magalim man,” Jorgensen was told.
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
49
“If you finish these things, Magalim is their father and he will repay you with
sickness, or he will send bad dreams and you will die” (ibid.: 352).
The wild has its own hierarchy: at least three levels of Magalim-persons,
encompassed by the archetypal All-Father serpent. Jorgensen notes that cer-
tain species-masters of distinct name “look after” marsupials and wild pigs,
even as Magalim himself looks after snakes. But all are in turn encompassed in
Magalim, as “All these names are just names. The true thing is Magalim” (ibid.).
Likewise for Urapmin, Joel Robbins refers to intermediate species-masters con-
trolling their particular animal-persons; these “owners” being in turn subsumed
in the greater Magalim-Being. Certain “marsupial women” are guardians of the
many marsupial kinds that people hunt and eat. Taking a fancy to a hunter, a
marsupial woman may have sex with and marry him. Thereafter she comes to
him in dreams to inform him about the whereabouts of game. But marsupial
women have been known to become jealous of their husband’s human wife, es-
pecially if the latter is too generous in sharing marsupials with her own relatives.
Then the hunter has accidents in the bush or falls sick, or even dies if he does
not leave his human spouse (Robbins 2004: 210).
In any case, where Magalim reigns, the principle holds that all particular
inua, whether of living creatures or natural features, are also forms of him. The
individual Magalim-persons who cause Feramin people trouble may be treated
as acting on their own or as agents of Magalim All-Father. The people may say,
“Tell your father to stop making thunderstorms—and not to send any earth-
quakes either” (Brumbaugh 1987: 26). Magalim, however, is not always caus-
ing trouble for Feramin. Without changing his notorious disposition, he may
turn it on strangers, whom he is reputed to dislike, and thus become protec-
tor of the local people. Indeed, he defends Feramin tribal territory as a whole.
The Feramin were divided into four autonomous communities (“parishes”); but
Magalim’s remains were in the care of a single elder, and when ritually invoked
before battle, they made all Feramin warriors fierce and their arrows deadly.
“Without subdivision by parishes,” Brumbaugh writes, “the territory of Feramin
as a whole is considered under the influence of Magalim, who watches over its
borders and the well-being of the traditional occupants” (ibid.: 30).
Protector of the entire territory from an abode within it, a subterranean be-
ing who can cause earthquakes, Magalim is the indwelling inua of the land itself:
“boss of the land,” the people now say. Indeed, if all the creatures and prominent
natural haunts of the wild are so many aliases of Magalim, as Jorgensen puts it,
it is because he is “identified with the earth and its power.” “Everything depends
50
ON KINGS
on Magalim,” Jorgensen was often told, including Afek and all her people who
“sit on the top of the ground” (1998: 104). Kinship to territory: the self-born
Magalim, slayer of his foster-kin, becomes god of the land.
Hence add gardeners to the tragic predicament of the animist hunters. The
Urapmin, according to Robbins, are constantly aware they are surrounded by
“nature spirits” ( motobil) who are original “owners” of almost all the resources
they use (2004: 209–10). Consequently, “every act of hunting or gardening
causes some risk,” even on non-taboo grounds, should it disturb the metaper-
son-owners—who would thereupon punish the person responsible “for failure
to observe their version of the laws” (ibid.: 211). Interesting that New Guin-
eans and Australian Aborigines, although without any native juridical institu-
tions as such, have been quick to adapt the European term “law” to their own
practices of social order. In other contexts, Robbins speaks of “the law of the
ancestors,” apparently referring to the numerous taboos based on traditions of
Afek that organize human social relationships. The Urapmin term here trans-
lated as “law”— awem (adj.), aweim (n.)—maps a moral domain of prohibitions
based “on kinds of authority that transcend those produced simply by the actions
and agreements of men” (ibid.: 211). Otherwise said, these laws are “sacredly
grounded prohibitions aimed at shaping the realm of human freedom” (ibid.:
184). Given the range of social relationships and practices established by Afek,
it follows that the laws were “complex” and “left everyone laboring under the
burdens of at least some taboo all the time” (ibid.: 210–11). Although Urapmin
boast of having been the most taboo-ridden of all Min people, it could not
have been by much. Among others, the Tifalmin knew taboos that were like-
wise “very powerful . . . sustaining and interpenetrating many other normative
and ethical aspects of everyday life” (Wheatcroft 1976: 170). This could be true
virtually by definition, inasmuch as by following Afek’s precedents, the entire
population would be ordered by taboos marking the social differences between
men and women and initiatory or age-grade statuses. Negative rules predicate
positive structures—and at the same time uphold them.13
In Telefolmin, Urapmin, and probably elsewhere, violations of Afek’s ta-
boos were as a rule punished occultly, without Afek’s explicit intervention. On
the other hand, in Tifalmin the metaperson-powers of both the vil age and
the bush were actively engaged in sanctioning the many taboos of “everyday
13. I am indebted to Dan Jorgensen for this point: which, as he observes, derives from
observations of Lévi-Strauss.
THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL SOCIETY
51
life.” Often punishments emanated from the prominent ancestors whose re-
mains were enshrined in Afek’s cult house. Alternatively, they were inflicted
by the “vast congresses” of thinking and sentient animal “ghosts” ( sinik), inua
who struck down people with disease or ruined their gardens. The last sug-
gests that even people who adhere to Afek’s food taboos may thereby suffer
the vengeance of the species-masters—that is, for killing and eating the lat-
ter’s children. As Don Gardner observed for Mianmin, since every animal has
its “mother” or “father,” human mothers and children become vulnerable to
an equivalent payback for what was done to the species-parent’s child. And
among the Central Min, where the parent is an Al -Father like Magalim, the
threat is apparently constant as wel as general in proportion. Brumbaugh
writes of Magalim:
All smells connected with women and children bring danger from Magalim. He
may make women pregnant, eat an unborn child and leave one of his own, or
come unseen between a couple having intercourse in the bush to give his child
instead; it will then be a contest betwe
en the power of the man and the power of
Magalim that determines the future of the child. (Brumbaugh 1987: 27)
It follows that to the extent people are socially objectified in terms of the wild
foods they could or could not eat, they are in double jeopardy of suffering
harm: whether magically or indirectly from Afek, mother of humans, for eating
wrongly; or from the mother or father of the animal for eating it at all. Here
again are “cosmic rules” of human order, enforced throughout the social territory
by metaperson authorities to whom it all “belongs.”
DETERMINATION BY THE RELIGIOUS BASIS
Of the South American lowland people, the Piaroa, Joanna Overing writes:
Today, Masters of land and water own the domains of water and jungle . . . both
of whom acquired their control over these habitats at the end of mythical time.
These two spirits guard their respective domains, protect them, make fertile their
inhabitants, and punish those who endanger their life forces. They also cooperate
as guardians of garden food. The relevant point is obviously that the inhabitants
of land and water are not owned by man. (1983–84: 341)
52
ON KINGS
Since, as a general rule, the peoples under discussion have only secondary or usu-
fructuary rights to the resources “owned” by metaperson-others, it follows that
their relations of production entail submission to these other “people like us.”
In conventional terms, it could justifiably be said that the spirits own the means
of production—were it not that the “spirits” so-called are real-life metapersons
who in effect are the primary means-cum-agents of production. Fundamental
resources—plants, animals, celestial and terrestrial features, and so on—are con-
stituted as intentional subjects, even as many useful tools are “person-artifacts.”14
Marked thus by an intersubjective praxis, this is an “economy” without “things”
as such. Not only are metahuman persons ensouled in the primary resources,
they thereby govern the outcome of the productive process. As intentional be-
ings in their own right, they are the arbiters of the success or failure of hu-
man efforts. For theirs are the life-forces—which may be hypostatized as mana,
hasina, wakan, semengat, orenda, nawalak, or the like—that make people’s gardens grow, their pigs flourish, and game animals become visible and available
