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Journal of Pacific Studies, vol. 23 no. 1, 1999

The personification of
social totalities in the Pacific
Alan Rumsey

Abstract
Marshall Sahlins derives his account of Polynesian heroic history in part
from the fact that Maori and Fijian chiefs used the pronoun I (first person
singular) in reference to their entire tribe or lineage. But similar usages are
also attested from Melanesia. The Ku Waru region of the New Guinea Highlands
provides one such case, from which I develop a set of comparative dimensions
that allow us to see what is similar and different among versions of heroic I
attested from around the Pacific. A description is offered of a Ku Waru
oratorical event in which it was used in a radically new way, and by women
at that. I argue that this mode f pronoun use is best understood not as an aspect
of specific cultures or cosmologies, but rather as a referential practice allowing
for the projection and contestation of an open-ended range of social identities
and forms of agency.

Introduction
In our book Ku Waru and in other publications based on fieldwork in the
Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG), Francesca Merlan and I
have explored the politics of what we call segmentary uses of personal
pronouns. An example would be the use of the first person singular I in
reference to the entire clan or tribe with which the speaker is identified
The Journal of Pacific Studies, Volume 23, no. 1, 1999, 4870
by School of Social and Economic Development, Editorial Board (USP)

Personification of social totalities

49

(Merlan & Rumsey 1991; Rumsey 1986, 1989). Marshall Sahlins (1981,
1985a, 1991) has capitalised on similar pronoun use among Polynesian
peoples, taking it as evidence for a particular mode of practice that he calls
heroic history. This paper compares Ku Waru usages with the Polynesian
ones cited by Sahlins and briefly discusses some other attested Melanesian
cases, before proposing some additional dimensions of comparison that are
needed in order to specify what is common to the Polynesian and
Melanesian usages and what is specific to each. The paper proceeds to
discussion of some startling new ways in which the Ku Waru segmentary
forms have been adapted for use in contemporary Papua New Guinea, and
draws out some conclusions for theories of culture and social change.

Heroic history and the kinship I

In support of his claim that Polynesian cosmology may lend itself in an
especially powerful way to stereotypic reproduction, Sahlins cites the fact
that he has heard a Fijian elder narrate the doings of his ancestral lineage
over several generations in the first person pronoun (Sahlins 1981:13,
emphasis in original; cf. Sahlins 1962:254). Similar usages among the Maori
had been noticed and discussed by J Prytz Johansen under the rubric of the
kinship I . For example, Johansen cites a Maori oral account (and Sahlins
Johansen) as follows:
According to our knowledge the reason why the Ngatiwhatuwa came
to Kaipara was a murder committed by the Ngatikahumateika. This tribe
murdered my ancestor Taureka. The tribe lived in Hokianga. This
country was theirs, the tribes. My home was Muriwhenua, it was my
permanent residence because my ancestor lived there. Later I left
Muriwhenua because of this murder. Then I tried to revenge myself, and
Hokiangas people were defeated and I took possession of the old
country. Because of this battle the whole of Hokianga was finally taken
by me right to Maunganui, and I lived in the country because all the
people had been killed.
All the events described [Johansen comments] took place long
before the narrator was born. (Johansen 1954:36, cited in Sahlins
1981:1314)

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Journal of Pacific Studies, vol. 23 no. 1, 1999

By 1985 Sahlins had worked up his interpretation of such examples into the
concept of heroic history. Drawing again upon Johansen, and upon
Dumonts (1970) notion of hierarchical encompassment, Sahlins says:
ethnography shows that the Maori chief lives the life of a whole tribe,
that he stands in a certain relation to neighbouring tribes and kinship
groups, and that he gathers the relationship to other tribes in his
person (Johansen 1954:180). The chiefs marriages are intertribal
alliances; his ceremonial exchanges trade; as injuries to himself are
cause for war. Here history is anthropomorphic in principle, which is to
say in structure. Granted that history is much more than the doings of
great men, is always and everywhere the life of communities; but
precisely in these heroic polities the king is the condition of the
possibility of community. (Sahlins 1985a:356)

Now Johansens kinship I becomes Sahlinss heroic I. Sahlins cites

other examples from Tonga and as far afield as Luapula, Northern Rhodesia.
He concludes that [b]y the [use of this] heroic Iand various complements
such as perpetual kinshipthe main relationships of society are at once
projected historically and embodied currently in the persons of authority
(Sahlins 1985a:47). He comments that [t]he heroic I is found in Maori,
Tonga, Fiji, among Yoruba as well as Luapala, and probably numerous other
hierarchical orders (Sahlins 1985a:47, n.19).
In a later publication Sahlins adduces a Fijian example from the
transcript of a government hearing on fishing rights in 1947. The disputants
are the sacred ruler of Verata (Na Ratu) and a spokesman (mata) from Bau
representing the war king (Vunivalu):
The Ratu of Verata (responding to question by the Bau representative
[mata]): I never heard of our meeting at Naivonini in 1750 . . . I dont know
any Tunitoga [Bau herald] named Sainisakalo that you say I killed at the
beach at Walu [late 1830s] . . . I dont know when you burned Natavatolo
[this was in 1839: Cross diary, 30 October 1839] . . . I know of no such
set of 10 whale teeth that you say were offered on my behalf by Nagalu
to Ratu Cakobau and Ratu Mara [probably in the 1850s]. I only know
we are true kinsmen, myself and both these chiefs [Cakobau and Ratu
Mara]. (VQ 1947:2434, as quoted with parenthetical remarks by
Sahlins, in Sahlins 1991:65)

Personification of social totalities

51

The Bau mata (responding to questions of the Verata ruler): From long
ago until 1750 you were the owner of all the reefs we are disputing here,
but I seized them from you in 1750 when I defeated you in our war at
Naivonini . . . I know that I destroyed you [literally, clubbed you,
mokuti iko] the third time I took your town . . . I never heard that you
were able to take or destroy a single land in all of Fiji. You never captured
a single place in Fiji because of your weakness: the reason you never
made war on another state is not [as you say] because you are the first
born [i.e., the senior line of Fijian ruling aristocracies . . . ] (VQ 1947:284
8, as quoted with parenthetical remarks by Sahlins, in Sahlins 1991:65)

Before comparing Sahlinss heroic I with Ka Waru usage in the Papua

New Guinea Highlands case, I would make four general statements.
First, as Sahlins (1981:14) realises, this form of person reference is
used not only for recounting history but for speaking of present and future
events as well. For example, the Maori chief Kairangatira is quoted in
Whites Ancient History of the Maori as having said, when alone and
surrounded by his enemies: Ma koutou, ko au; ma taku iwi, ko koutou, a
maku te whenua You will kill me; my tribe will kill you and the country will
be mine (White 188790:vol. 6, p.43, cited in Johansen 1954:36). Johansen
comments: in this mine he [Kairangatira] is the tribe, not only now, but
in future after his death (Johansen 1954:36).
In another account Te Rauparaha, when travelling with a small party
consisting mostly of women and children, met with an enemy army. He
bluffed them into thinking his party were warriors instead; but the plan was
nearly spoiled when a small child began weeping. Seeing that it was a
question of life and death Te Rauparaha said to the childs father, My
friend, you must strangle the child, for this child is I (ko au hoki tenei
tamaiti). The child was strangled and the others were saved (Johansen
1954:37). Johansen comments:
The words used here by Te Rauparaha give cause for reflection . . . I
is both Te Rauparaha and the kinship group. His words This child is
I have two aspects. They partly mean that the fate of the kinship group
at the moment is concentrated in this child; but they also mean that even
if the child is killed, or rather, exactly by its being killed, its kinship I will
survive the others. (Johansen 1954:3738)

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Journal of Pacific Studies, vol. 23 no. 1, 1999

Second, as Sahlins also realises (1985a:47, n.19), chiefs were not the
only people who used the first person singular in reference to noted
ancestors or entire clans. Best (1924:397) notes this regarding the Maori,
and Johansen cites a case where it is even used by a womana chiefs sister
who in lamenting his death says, I wish I could encircle the river at Ahuriri
/ and my food, Te Wera, be caught (Johansen 1954:36). Sahlinss own
Fijian example (reproduced above) shows one of the contestants, a mata or
representative, himself using the heroic I in such a way as to set up a
complex relationship between himself as spokesman, the Bau chief for
whom he is speaking in the first person singular, and the social totality that
the chief personifies.1
Third, the kinship I and the personal I are not entirely distinct from
each other, but often shade imperceptibly into one another:
You were born in me says a Maori. Yes, that is true,: admits the other,
I was born in you. Here there is an interplay between the kinship I and
the individual I, and the same interplayto us a little shimmeringis
also seen [in Johansens examples cited above]. But this shimmering
appears from the fact that in each case we shall attribute to au I either
the meaning I (the individual) or the tribe. Actually the difference is
not very great, the stress being laid on the qualitative, not on the
quantitative element. I always means kinship I, sometimes as
represented by the whole tribe, at other times colored by the special
personality of the individual; but the greater a man is, the stronger the
kinship I is in him. Therefore we particularly hear I with the whole
fullness of the kinship group when spoken by the chief. (Johansen
1954:37)

Fourth, although both Sahlins and Johansen in their exegetical remarks

talk only about totalising uses of the first person category, it is clear from
their examples that there are reciprocal totalising usages in the second
person as well: I was born in you says the Maori; I destroyed you says
the Fijian mata, You never captured a single place, etc.

Personification of social totalities

53

Ku Waru segmentary person

In the Ku Waru area where Merlan and I have done fieldwork it is common
in the oratory used at inter-group events for the orators to use the first
person singular in reference to their entire tribe,2 even in reference to
events they have not personally participated in, just as in the Polynesian
cases discussed above. Examples occur in the text fragment below, which
comes from a speech given by a big man, Kujilyi, at an inter-group exchange
event where compensation was being presented in connection with an
incident of warfare in which his group had been involved (for the full
context, see Merlan & Rumsey 1991:12255; 245321):
pilyikimil el turum-uyl topa-kin epola-alya-sil lyirim-a

you know that when there was fighting Epola-Alya [tribe-pair] took
(sg.) it up
pi tepa oba na-nga kangi-na nosinsirum

then he came and put it on my skin

jika-kungunuka sirid

I gave it to Jika-Kungunuka [tribe pair]

( Merlan & Rumsey 1991:290)

Here, Kujilyi is talking not about the recent fighting from which the present
exchange transaction arises, but about a much earlier war that happened
when he was a small boy. Nonetheless, he refers to his entire tribe, the
Midipuor possibly to Midipu together with its paired tribe Kusikain the
first person singular. (This occurs in the last line, where the verb si- to
give, referring to the act of recruitment whereby his tribe-pair brought
Jika-Kungunuka into the fighting, is marked for first person singular
subject.) The orator also refers to his entire tribe or tribe-pair in the first
person singular in the previous line, where put it on my skin is used to mean
make me liable for, Kujilyis tribe (or tribe pair) (Kusika-)Midipu having
been recruited as allies (na-nga is the first person singular pronoun na,
followed by genitive postposition nga3).
A second text fragment produces the following, this time a second
person example:
midipu kujilyi nu-n yi kare aki-yl-nga suku tekin turun-kiyl

Midipu Kujilyi, you (sg.) have killed some of the men within [this
tribe]
(Merlan & Rumsey 1991:304)

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Journal of Pacific Studies, vol. 23 no. 1, 1999

This example is from the same exchange event as the previous one, and
alludes to the same earlier bout of warfare. The man who was the speaker
in the first example, Kujilyi, is here the addressee, referred to by the second
person singular pronoun nu (followed by the ergative marker -n). The
referent is not only Kujilyi, but his whole tribein fact a whole congeries
of five fairly small tribes within which Kujilyi is one of the leading big men.
Kujilyi himself could not have actually killed anyone in the fight alluded to
since he was just a young boy at the time.
Furthermore, in Ku Waru, the use of singular person for entire social
units is not confined to the first and second persons: third-person examples
occur as well. For example, in the first line of the first text fragment
presented above, the expression epola-alya-sil the pair of Epola and Alya
occurs as the singular subject of the verb lyi- take, describing the
recruitment of those tribes into the war. In the second line, where this tribe
pair is again the grammatical subject, all the verbs agreeing with it (te- do,
o- come, nosi- put) are again explicitly marked for (third person and)
singular number.
Elsewhere (Merlan & Rumsey 1991; Rumsey 1986, 1989) we have
shown that these segmentary uses of the singular and dual number are a
regular feature of Ku political oratory, correlated strongly with certain other
prosodic and paralinguistic features of the genre. Similar usages are attested
in published transcripts of oratory among the neighbouring Melpa people (A
J Strathern 1975:199) and the nearby Huli (Goldman 1983:134, line 294),
and also reported for the Enga (Larson 1970), and Wahgi (M OHanlon pers.
comm. 1996; cf. OHanlon 1989:946).
In these Ku Waru examples it is fairly clear that the individual orators
who are referred to cannot be identified as the sole referents of the I or
you. More commonly, however, it is ambiguous whether the speaker is
talking about himself or a whole segmentary unit. This can be illustrated
from the following (for the full context, see Merlan & Rumsey 1991:139
41; 2712):
el ya naa telybolu i kupulanum ilyi, ime-nga pansip tep, imenga pansip tep

we two do not fight on this road [i.e., within the Kopia-Kubuka-PoikaPalimi alliance]; we do it together all over the place

Personification of social totalities

55

na nanu poika-palimi-sil-kin molup telyo

I myself stay with Poika and Palimi

(Rumsey & Merlan 1991:271)

These lines come from a speech by a Kubuka man who is trying to justify
not paying any compensation to Poika-Palimi people for the blood they have
shed fighting alongside the Kopia-Kubuka. The underlying idea is that it can
be taken as a matter of course that Kopia-Kubuka and Poika-Palimi will fight
together as allies rather than against each other, since they live together.
When the Kubuka orator, Tamalu, says I myself stay with Poika and
Palimi, it is a moot point whether he is referring to himself alone, his entire
tribe the Kubuka, or Kopia and Kubuka combined. For in his role as an
oratory-wielding big-man, he is projecting himself as a segmentary identity
on the order of Kubuka or Kopia-Kubukapersonifying a social totality
while amplifying his own personso that precisely insofar as he stays with
Poika and Palimi, Kopia and Kubuka stay with Poika and Palimi.
In other words, here in the New Guinea Highlands, just as in Johansens
account of the Maori kinship I, the Kubuka orator presumes to live the
life of a whole tribe, and to gather the relationship to other tribes in his
person. But if the Ku Waru segmentary person thereby resembles
Sahlinss heroic I, the example shows that it would be wrong to identify
the latter exclusively with hierarchical social orders of the kind discussed
by Sahlins in Islands of History. In the general model of heroic history
developed there (and in Sahlins 1991) it is seen to be related specifically to
forms of divine kingship:
The historical implications [of the idea of heroic history] follow from
the presence of divinity among men, as in the person of the sacred king
or the powers of the magical chief. Accordingly, the principle of
historical practice becomes synonymous with divine action: the creation
of the human and cosmic order by the god. (Sahlins 1985a:35)

But in Ku Waru there is certainly no such notion. The segmentary order,

the units within it, the transactions among them, and even the human bodies
that people the world, are all seen as the products of arduous human labour
(Merlan & Rumsey 1991:415; 22144). As argued most famously by
Sahlins himself (1963), leadership of segmentary units in the highlands as
elsewhere in Melanesia contrasts with Polynesian chieftainship in being a
personal attainment rather than a political-structural privilege of position.

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Journal of Pacific Studies, vol. 23 no. 1, 1999

Segmentary person meets the heroic I

How then are we to understand the deployment in these very different social
regimes of what seem to be such similar rhetorical devices? In order to
answer that question it is useful to be as precise as we can about what the
commonalities actually are. In all the Polynesian (cum Fijian) cases cited
above, as well as in the Ku Waru one, the first person singular category,
which is normally used to index the speaker as referent, is in certain contexts
used in reference to a larger social totality with which the speaker is
identified. In Ku Waru, Fijian and Maori at least, there are parallel uses in the
second person, and in Ku Waru at least, in the third person and in the dual
number as well. But the contexts and protocols for the use of the Polynesian
heroic or segmentary forms are very different from the Ku Waru ones.
One of the differences seems to be in the degree of restriction on who
may use such forms. Notwithstanding the exceptions noted above, the
Maori sources agree that the kinship I was used more commonly by chiefs
than other people. Sahlins (1985a:47, n.19) implies that this is even more the
case for Tonga and Fiji, but the evidence is inconclusive, since in only one
of the relevant ethnographic examples he adduces (the Fijian land dispute
quoted above) is a user of the heroic I explicitly identified as a chief (and
even there the other user of it is not). But if we can generalise from the Maori
case, it seems that for every segmentary unit, at least at a particular level of
segmentation, there was one specific person, the hereditary chief, for
whom the use of the heroic I was most appropriate.
This is decidedly not the case in Ku Waru. At nearly every segmentary
level there are multiple aspiring big men, each of whom feels fully qualified
to speak at inter-group exchange events using segmentary person forms.
For example, at the exchange event from which the above examples are
taken, fulsome speeches (as opposed to short procedural interjections)
were made by eight Kopia men (out of a total Kopia population of 443) and
eight Kubuka men (out of a total Kubuka population of under 400). Most of
these speakers made at least some use of segmentary person forms in
reference to the whole of Kopia, Kubuka, or both together (a full transcript
of the oration is presented in Merlan & Rumsey 1991:245321).
If Ku Waru segmentary person forms are thus less restricted than the
Polynesian heroic I with respect to who may appropriately use them, they
are apparently more restricted with respect to other aspects of the contexts

Personification of social totalities

57

in which they are used. None of the Polynesian sources I have found
mentions any such restrictions, and the examples given include:

for Maori: a request by one chief to another for permission for his tribe
to come and live with the others (Johansen 1954:36, citing White 1887
90 vol. 6:33); a lament song sung by a woman (Johansen 1954:36, citing
Tarakawa 1900:136); a remark by a chief to his enemies when he was alone
and surrounded by them and they were about to kill him (Johansen 1954:36,
citing White 188790, vol.4:43); a chief talking to one of his own tribesmen
when they were surrounded by enemies (Johansen 1954:37, citing White
188790, vol.6:20); a chief recounting old tribal history, presumably to his
Pakeha amanuensis Percy Smith (Johansen 1954:36, citing Smith 1897:48);

for Fiji: in the narration of tradition (Sahlins 1962:254) by a an elder

concerning the doings of his ancestral lineage over several generations
(Sahlins 1981:13); in evidence by contestants arguing their case before a
government land tribunal (Sahlins 1991:65);

for Tonga: in an account to an anthropologist by a man of a chiefly

lineage concerning the doings of his great-great-great-grandfather (Bott
1981:23); in a kind of speech event called a fakamatala, in which men with
titles recount the history of the title and its holders (Heather Young Leslie,
pers. comm. 1996).
In Ku Waru by contrast, none of the oral historical accounts we were
given contains segmentary person usages. Nor did we ever note instances
of them in everyday conversation among Ku Waru people, or in any kind
of discussions among fellow clansmen. The only contexts in which we
noted them being used at all were in speeches at inter-group events where
the kind of social units indexed by segmentary person forms were involved
as a basic dimension of the social interaction that was taking place. These
events were of two kinds, which are closely related in Ku Waru social life
(as elsewhere in the New Guinea Highlands; see A M Strathern 1985),
namely, ceremonial exchange and warfare. In warfare they are used in
harangues shouted from just behind the battle line to taunt the enemy side.
We have published elsewhere a transcript of such a speech (Merlan &
Rumsey 1991:3456): it opens with a series of insults concerning the enemy
tribes, which are addressed throughout in the second person singular.

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Journal of Pacific Studies, vol. 23 no. 1, 1999

Segmentary identities are every bit as strongly in focus (albeit in a less

deadly way) at ceremonial exchange transactions, the main items in which
are pigs and nowadays money. Most such transactions have an interpersonal aspect to them as well, in that they depend upon, and can be seen
to comprise, multiple subsidiary transactions among particular trading
partners, who are often related as affines or matrilateral kin. Inter-group
exchange is always liable to shed that particular aspect of its significance
and be construed as patently or primarily a matter of inter-personal
exchange.
Elsewhere, we have argued that what ceremonial exchange events are
largely about is the construction and contestation of the meaning, and
therefore the material consequences, of exchange along these two distinct
dimensions of significance (Merlan & Rumsey 1991). Many aspects of the
staging of these events and the speech genres used at them are finely adapted
to three purposes: the reproduction of forms of pairing, which we have
argued is the most basic schema in terms of which the segmentary order
is structured; the representation of the transactions as inter-group ones;
and, accordingly, the construction of segmentary-level social identities as
the relevant actors at play in the events. Segmentary person forms play a
key role in this process, more subtle and more powerful than any of the
many linguistic devices that explicitly refer to segmentary identities,
precisely because they presuppose such identities as a ground for the
present interaction, rather than bringing them into focus as explicit subject
matter.
Besides these differences in their typical contexts of use, there is
another difference between Ku Waru segmentary person usages and
Sahlinss heroic I. In using them, Ku Waru orators do not thereby invoke,
personify or refer to any specific ancestors identified with the segmentary
identities, as they do in Polynesia. The Kopia orator Tamalu may, for
example, say I stay with the Poika and Palimi to mean The Kubuka tribe
stays with Poika and Palimi. Yet if, in an otherwise equivalent clause, he
uses a segmentary person form with a remote past tense verb to talk about
a state of affairs obtaining before he was born, the I would never, as far
as I know, conflate the identity of the Kopia tribe with that of any specific
ancestor. (Indeed, genealogical memory among Ku Waru people is quite
shallow and their social segmentation is not even notionally based on
descent (see Merlan & Rumsey 1991:368)). Rather, the reference would

Personification of social totalities

59

be to past Kopia in general, construed as continuous with the persona of the

present orator Tamalu in particular.
In sum, the Polynesian heroic I and Ku Waru segmentary person
usages are interestingly similar in that first and second person singular
forms are used in reference to a social totality with which the speaker or
addressee is identified. In neither case is there any explicit formal marking
of the difference between the totalising usages of these person categories
and the more usual individuating ones. Indeed, in both cases there is a
considerable grey area between the two, as I have exemplified above for Ku
Waru, and as Johansen makes clear regarding the Maori case. In the Ku
Waru case at least, the ambiguity of these usages is not just a matter of
whether or not they refer to social totalities, but in the scope of the totalities
being invoked: tribe, tribe-pair, larger alliance, etc.
But the Ku Waru and Polynesian cases also demonstrate important
differences in the kinds of social totalities being invoked and in the relation
between the particular hero and the social whole for which he stands. If
Sahlinss interpretation is correct (but see Rumsey (forthcoming)), this
relationship is, in the Polynesian case, a matter of hierarchical encompassment
whereby certain persons are literally entitled to stand for a specific group.4
In the Ku Waru case, on the other hand, men vie with each other to amplify
themselves in the act of personifying a social totality of more-or-less
inclusive scope based on the logic of segmentary pairing.

Forms of personification and the socio-cultural order

Given these similarities and differences, what are we to conclude about the
generality or specificity of the phenomenon in questionthe personification
of social totalitiesand its relation to other aspects of the sociohistorical
settings in which it is found?
One thing we can conclude is that if, like Sahlins, we take the uses of
totalising I as evidence for a form of life in which it is possible to include
the existence of others in ones own person (Sahlins 1991:64) then we
cannot identify the latter exclusively with Dumontian forms of hierarchy,
as Sahlins seems to do (ibid.; cf. Sahlins 1985a:35; 47, n.19), since, as the
Ku Waru example shows, the use of totalising I is not limited to what
Sahlins and Dumont would consider to be hierarchical orders (ibid.; cf.
Rumsey (forthcoming)).

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A second conclusion is that, in order to understand what is specific to

the Polynesian cases, we need to distinguish in principle between the use of
personal pronouns to personify an ancestor, and their use to personify a
social collectivity. I have demonstrated that the Ku Waru use does the latter
but not the former. Conversely, there are other cases reported from
elsewhere in Melanesia in which I is used to speak as an ancestor without
thereby invoking a social collectivity.
One is among the Telefomin (Mountain Ok Region, PNG), of whom
Dan Jorgensen reports that there are narrative situations in which:
a man shifts to first person when describing the actions of an ancestor
(I killed them all and chased them through the bush, for example) and
is clearly identifying himself with the ancestors deeds, rather than
merely reporting them. A sort of grey area involves what we often view
as genealogical telescoping, as when the deeds of a number of different
individuals are all credited to a single prominent ancestor (whose
putative activities, for example, span what is demonstrably a period
covering several generations). (D Jorgensen, pers. comm. 1996)

Another variant occurs among the Iatmul (middle Sepik, PNG), of whom
Eric Silverman reports that they:
often use the first person pronoun in reference to totemic ancestral
namesakes; I did such-and-such (created this or that feature in the
landscape), where I refers to the person and also the mythic-historic
ancestor who had the same totemic name. In some cases, this I
(totemic name) is also the name for, say, a lineage or descent group. At
the same time, any threat to the totemic referent (e.g., the group) is at
once a personal threat on that particular individuals identity. For
Iatmul, however, this system pivots on the role of totemic names rather
than, say, a particular political organization (other than totemic descent
groups). (E Silverman, pers. comm. 1996; cf. Bateson 1958:434)

First-person personification of ancestors is also attested from the Trobriands

by Malinowski (1922:412; 1935) and from nearby Kalauna, where its use
in the telling of myths has been sensitively explored by Michael Young
(1983), in what is perhaps the fullest treatment of ancestral personification
anywhere in the ethnography of the Pacific. About one such performance
Young says that the teller in identifying with his ancestors represents
himself as embodying [his] clan as an entity (Young 1983:188), but in most

Personification of social totalities

61

of his other examples of ancestral personification there is no group

reference, or it remains in the background.
Further afield, in Tanna (south Vanuatu) people speak in the first person
in reference to a specific ancestor whose name they bear. This has a
collective dimension in that [i]n its titular aspects a name conjoins a person
with others and endows him with resources, situating him in the midst of
a larger structure of group/land relations. The entitling appellative, however,
serves also as a name identifying singularly a particular individual, disjoining
him from others (Lindstrom 1981:323). In a discussion that is interestingly
complementary to the present one, Lindstrom distinguishes the Tannese
ancestral usage of the first person as the everymans I as opposed to
Sahlinss heroic I (ibid.), and Tanna by contrast to Polynesia as a
panheroic society.
By comparison with all these Melanesian cases, the most distinctive
feature of the Polynesian ones discussed by Sahlins seems to be the fact that
the personification of ancestors with I and the personification of social
totalities with I are so thoroughly bound up with each other as to constitute
one and the same act. This combination, rather than either characteristic
alone, would have to be taken as definitive of the category of heroic I if
is it is not to become too general a category to be useful for comparative
purposes. If so, then the heroic I is not unique to Polynesian polities, as
Sahlins acknowledges with his African examples. It may well not be
ubiquitous among Polynesian polities either, even in their ancient form: there
is, as far as I know, no such usage reported from Hawaii, and it is doubtful
whether there could be. For even if examples did come to light of I being
used by Hawaiian ruling chiefs in reference to a collectivity of their subjects,
it would not necessarily also refer to an ancestor, since the chiefs were not
tied to their lands in such a fixed way (Sahlins 1985b).5
More generally, I think it would be a mistake to try to relate totalising
pronominal reference per se to any particular type of social order,
culture, or polity6 (cf. Rumsey (forthcoming)). For at least in the Ku
Waru case, the totalising person forms have proven amazingly adaptable
to new uses, from new sorts of speaking position in radically changed
sociopolitical circumstances.
All the Ku Waru examples I have used were from speeches by men at
an inter-group exchange event of a fairly traditional sort, where compensation
was being paid by one tribe-pair to another for coming to their aid in a battle

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that had been fought a year before, in 1982. But if that battlefought with
bows and arrows and wooden shieldshad taken place along fairly
traditional segmentary lines, what ended it was a startlingly new historical
development: the intervention on the battle field, between the opposing
sides, of a womens cooperative work group (wok meri), who presented
gifts to both sides and enjoined them to stop fighting. Both sides accepted,
the men went home, and the Kopia-Kubuka have not been involved in any
tribal fighting since.
At two subsequent exchange events where each of the principal
combatant sides gave compensation to their allies, payments were also
presented to the womens group, in return for the ones they gave to either
side when stopping the fight. Thus accepted as an actor within the
previously all-male realm of segmentary level transactions, the womens
group was entitled to be heard on the display ground when receiving the
payments. Examining the womens speeches in detail, Merlan and I (1991)
have shown how they drew upon both the newly established rhetorics of
government law and business, and upon features of traditional male
oratory. In this way they created for themselves a new, hybrid speaking
position, one that was both subversive of the segmentary order and
complexly entangled with it. One of the features of traditional oratory drawn
on was the totalising use of personal pronominal categories, as in the
following lines from one of the four speeches by women from the group:
elti el tiringl-kiyl-o kanilka-o

you two fought, and I, seeing it

kapola naa mel tirim kanap-o

seeing that it was a good thing

el kani-yl yi te-n mol-o

that fight, no man [ergative case]

na-ni gai punya-na konturud-o

but I in the sweet potato garden stopped it

(Merlan & Rumsey 1991:186)

Remarkably, these lines and the entire speech from which they come were
delivered in the special prosodically marked el ung style, with line terminating
vowel -o (Merlan & Rumsey 1991:98102), a style which, as far as anyone

Personification of social totalities

63

could recall, had never been used by a woman before this occasion. Merlan
and I have demonstrated statistically that in mens speeches the style is
strongly correlated with segmentary person usages, for which it serves as
a keying device (Merlan & Rumsey 1991:10002, cf. Rumsey 1986).
Indeed, the excerpt above contains, in the first line, a segmentary second
person dual reference you two fought, referring to whole tribes, and in the
second and fourth lines, first person singular forms that can be taken, in the
characteristic segmentary person manner, as referring both to the speaker
and to the social totality with which she is identified.
But exactly what is the social totality of identification here? In this case
the indeterminacy is not just a matter of the scope of the social identity in
question (tribe vs tribe-pair, etc.), but of its very nature. To be sure, the
womans group has a segmentary identity, Kulka, but not because the
women themselves are of the Kulka tribe. They are not. Rather, it has that
identity because all of the women are married to Kulka men and, residence
in the Ku Waru area being predominantly virilocal, live in Kulka territory,
where their work groups operations are also based. The groups action on
the battlefield was possible in part because the Kulka tribe as such was not
involved in this particular conflict, and was neutral with respect to it. In that
limited respect, the Kulka identity could momentarily be aligned with the
new voice of government law (gabman lo). This voice opposes tribal
fighting in general as inimical to national unity and economic development
the very values promoted by the womens group and displayed by them on
the battlefield in the form of produce from their cash-cropping ventures, the
PNG national insignia, which they all wore on their tee-shirts, and the
national flag, which they planted between the opposing armies.
The work groups action also drew upon aspects of the traditional
position of Hagen/Nebilyer women in general. This is well described by
Marilyn Strathern in her (1972) book Women in Between (and in the
common Melpa/Ku Waru expression from which its title comes): women
are links between men in chains of cross-sex exchange relations. Nevertheless,
their interests in the inter-group aspects of exchange are more muted, and
they tend to perceive themselves as more strongly opposed to fighting than
are men, and less interested in the issues that give rise to it.
Given this range of interests and identities in which the Kulka womens
groups action is grounded, Kopils totalising I shimmers (as Johansen
would put it) between at least the following sorts of identifications:

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I, Kopil, a leader of the Kulka womens group

We the Kulka womens group
We, the forces of government law
We women

The fact that there was an established Ku Waru genre in which segmentary
person reference was a standard feature provided a way for Kopil to cast
her person references as totalising ones. Yet the fact that the references
were being spoken by her in these particular circumstances meant that the
social totalities being invoked could not be of the usual segmentary sort: they
must instead be construed in novel ways such as the above.

Conclusions
In conclusion, we may ask what are the implications of these new usages
for our general understanding of sociocultural orders and how they change.
Responding to what he calls poststructuralist litanies about the
contested and unstable character of cultural logics, and to the currently
fashionable idea that there is nothing usefully called a culture . . . since the
limits of the supposed cultures are indeterminate and permeable, Sahlins
wrote:
In order for categories to be contested at all, there must be a common
system of intelligibility, extending to the grounds, means, modes and
issues of disagreement. It would be difficult to understand how a
society could function, let alone how knowledge of it could be
constituted, if there were not some meaningful order in the differences.
If in regard to some given event or phenomenon the women of a
community say one thing and the men another, is it not because men
and women have different positions in, and experience of, the same
social universe of discourse? Are not the differences in what men and
women say expressions of the social differences in the construction of
gender? If so, there is a noncontradictory waydare one say, a
totalizing way?of describing the conditions, a system of and in the
differences. (Sahlins 1993:15)

Personification of social totalities

65

Every society known to history is a global society, every culture a

cosmological order. And in thus including the universe within its own
cultural schemeas the Maori or native Australians include the order
of nature in the order of kinshipthe people accord beings and things
beyond their immediate community a definite place in its reproduction.
(ibid. 16)

Elaborating on the latter proposition, Sahlins (n.d.) argues that it is wrong

to see indigenous cultures of the world as disappearing before the onslaught
of the world system. Rather, the colonised have adapted to the impositions
of colonial regimes by motivated permutations of their cultural traditions:
And how else can the people respond to what has been inflicted on them
except by devising on their own heritage, acting according to their own
categories, logics, understandings? I say devising because the
response may be totally improvised, something never seen or imagined
before, not just a knee-jerk repetition of an ancient custom. (Sahlins
1993:18)

I heartily agree with the main thrust of these remarks, and especially with
Sahlinss injunction not to throw out the baby of system with the bath
water of boundedness and stability. Nevertheless, I think he has in some
ways set too strict a threshold requirement for what can count as system.
To see why, let us reconsider the heroic I and the Kulka womens actions
in relation to these claims by Sahlins.
To the extent that totalising pronominal usage played a part in the
reproduction of a particular social order in the various Polynesian cases
discussed by Sahlins, it did so not as a cultural category, or form of
understanding, but as a practice.7 What makes it specifically an aspect of
Polynesian cultures for Sahlins is what we can call, following Bill Hanks
(1992; cf. Hanks 1990, 1996), the implicit indexical ground against which
its deictic reference is figured: an interactional space in which the relevant
actors are certain kinds of segmentary social identities, which are susceptible
of being summed up in the personae of the chiefs and their ancestors.
What appear on the face of it to be similar forms of person reference
among the Ku Waru people and other New Guinea Highlanders have
traditionally been used against a somewhat different implicit ground. In this,
the relevant actors are also segmentary social identities, which can be
summed up in the person of a single (male) speaker, but without his thereby

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identifying himself with any specific ancestral personage. To an apparently

greater extent than in the Polynesian cases, these totalising Ku Waru usages
are limited to certain specific interactional contexts in which the relevant
kinds of segmentary actors are present not only as speaker but as addressee.
Further, in these contexts, other formally marked genre features of the
utterance provide clear metalinguistic cues for the special totalising values
of the singular and dual number categories of the language.
In adapting these Ku Waru practices of totalising segmentary reference
to circumstances in which she was placed at the Kopola exchange event of
17 August 1983, there is no doubt that Kopil engaged in a brilliant
improvisationsomething never seen or imagined before among Ku
Waru people (cf. Merlan & Rumsey 1991:1927). But in doing so, she was
not merely devising on their own heritage, acting according to their own
categories, logics, understandings, but doing something that she and other
Ku Waru people understood to be a departure from their own heritage
something that, as one of the (nonetheless approving) male speakers pointed
out, could in traditional terms only be described as mad:
now we are living in changed conditions
in new and different conditions
now we are changing the law and doing things differently
mad women, along with you before we did something different and
put the flag up
and now we people, according to your different way of proceeding
we are coming in bringing the flag
(from speech by Kulka Pokea, in Merlan & Rumsey 1991:170; cf. pp.
2830, 21014)
The sentiments expressed by this manthe contrast between bo (indigenous)
and kewa (exogenous) ways of doing things and the sense that bo people
should and must engage with and adapt to the new and differentwere ones
we heard many times from men and women alike, even in speeches
at the exchange events of the most traditional sort (Merlan &
Rumsey 1991:1525).
In the form of mediation between the bo and the kewa engaged in by
the Kulka womens group, they were able to draw upon established
segmentary person usages, not as an element of a cosmological order, or

Personification of social totalities

67

even of culture as constituted. Rather, it operated as a kind of referential

practice that was well suited to the projection and instantiation of novel
forms of social identity and agency while leaving open for further exploration
a considerable area of indeterminacy as to how they might fit into any
existing scheme of things. In this respect these referential practices meet
Sahlinss basic requirement of providing grounds and means . . . of
disagreement while showing that the pursuit of it need not presuppose a
whole cosmology or universe of discourse as common ground.
Perhaps further research in light of this Melanesian example might
reveal similarly interesting transformations in the use of the erstwhile
heroic forms of person reference elsewhere in the Pacific and beyond.

Acknowledgments
The argument of this paper has benefited greatly from comments received on an
earlier version presented at the 1996 annual meeting of the American
Anthropological Association, and from responses to my internet queries, by Dan
Jorgensen, Elizabeth Keating, Heather Young Leslie, Eric Lieber, Lamont Lindstrom
and Eric Silverman. For their helpful comments on earlier drafts, I also wish to thank
Steve Feld, Bill Hanks, Les Hiatt, Francesca Merlan, Michael OHanlon, Marshall
Sahlins, Andrew Strathern, Marilyn Strathern, Borut Talban, Greg Urban and
MichaelYoung.

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Notes
1 In response to this formulation Sahlins (pers. comm. 1997) has commented to me
that A Fijian mata . . . is a voice of the chief. Your use of the Fijian example to
show other people than chiefs can use it is structurally misleading. This would
certainly be true if I were claiming that the matas use of I directly instantiates the
social totality. But I am not. For me the relevant fact is that the mata, even while
speaking as the voice of the chief, is also a mata.
2 To simplify the exposition I use the term tribe here in accordance with standard
ethnographic practice for the region, to mean named segmentary social identity of
the most inclusive order. This usage is quite problematical, for reasons discussed in
Merlan and Rumsey (1991:38), where we generally use Ku Waru terms instead, but
it will do for present purposes.
3 For an account of these postpositions and other aspects of Ku Waru grammar, see
Merlan and Rumsey (1991:32243).
4 Compare Bott (1981:23), who says that in Tonga a title is the embodiment of its
people.
5 In response to a query I put to him about this Sahlins has said that he has never
seen any examples of heroic I from Hawaii, and since there were no corporate
groups, one wouldnt expect any heroic I. The Hawaiian equivalent would be to call
any constellation of people constituted for a longer( e.g, a household) or shorter
period (say, a fishing party) as So-and-so ma, So-and-so being the leading person
present or the constitution of the group, ma a bound suffix meaning something like
people of, thus people of So-and-so (M Sahlins, pers. comm. 1998).
6 From Micronesia, Elizabeth Keating (pers. comm. 1996) reports a pattern of
pronoun usage in reference to paramount chiefs that is very different from the ones
discussed by Sahlins, but common elsewhere in the world (cf. Brown & Gilman
1960), namely the use of the third person plural in reference to a single person.
Consultants say this is because he represents the entire group of ancestral deity/
chiefs.
7 Compare Sahlins (1991:65), who speaks of the heroic I as an aspect of a certain
mode of historical production, a kind of historical practice.

Personification of social totalities

69

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