Alice Pomponio, David R. Counts, Thomas G. Harding, guest eds. 1994. Children of Kilibob: Creation, cosmos, and culture in Northeast New Guinea. Pacific Studies Special Issue, vol. 17, no. 4. Laie: The Institute for Polynesian Studies, Brigham Young University—Hawai‘i. 216 pp. $15.00.

One of my most memorable, and intellectually challenging, conversations during my fieldwork in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), in 1976 was a discussion of how the huge disparity between the relative political and economic status of Europeans and Papua New Guineans came about. My interlocutor, a good-hearted, elderly Numbami church leader who shared my penchant for moral philosophizing, suggested an explanation along Biblical lines: Europeans descended from Jacob, while Papua New Guineans descended from Jacob’s elder twin brother Esau, who lost his birthright to his deceitful younger brother. (My own attempts at an explanation along the lines of specialization and increasing technological complexity were not entirely satisfactory either.) Children of Kilibob (CK) puts that conversation in a much broader perspective.

Kilibob and Manup are the names (as rendered in Peter Lawrence’s seminal work Road Belong Cargo) of two hostile brothers who feature prominently in the mythology of Northeast New Guinea. Kilibob is the trickster, the traveler, and the creator (like Jacob) who always seems to come out on top, while the more stolid and sedentary Manup (like Esau) regularly loses out. The trickster/creator hero goes by many different names depending on the peoples involved in the events described (variations of Mala, or Aragas, Ava, Titikolo—perhaps even Jesus), with some storytellers consciously changing the names of the protagonists as locales change within a single story (115). (This recalls the shared mythology of Latins and Greeks, wherein Zeus = Jupiter, Aphrodite = Venus, Ares = Mars, and so on, not to mention rougher Germanic equivalents in Woden, Freya, Tiw, etc.)

Among the non-Austronesian (NAn) Waskia and Austronesian (An) Takia who share residence on Karkar Island in Madang Province, Kulbob is said to be "a fine hunter and carver" and "tall and fair in contrast to Manub, an industrious fisherman of stocky build and dark complexion" (15). This opposition harks back not just to the most recent one between innovative, intrusive Europeans and traditional, indigenous Papua New Guineans, but also to the earlier one between An and NAn forebears, for "the [NAn] Waskia claim their descent and language from Manub, while the [An] Takia claim theirs, with their culture (ultimately widely adopted in Waskia), from Kulbob" (14). Similarly, the equivalent of Kilibob in the islands of the Vitiaz Strait (where he is called variously Mala, Male, Namor, or Molo) is considered a progenitor and culture-hero among the An Siassi (53–91) and a visiting benefactor by the An Sio (29–51), but an interfering outsider (a "city slicker"?) by the NAn Kowai of Umboi Island (93–107). The swift incorporation of newly intrusive elements of Judeo-Christian ritual (like churchgoing) and of European material culture (like rifles) into this mythological narrative is one of many indications that the traditional cultures of Papua New Guinea were far from static. In fact, Dorothy Counts stresses the role of mythology in exploring tensions with the outside world: "The myths explore the difference between Us and Them and ask what kind of relationship is possible between Us and the Others with whom we must interact, trade, and marry if we are to survive" (115).

For me, the most intriguing aspect of this collection is what Alice Pomponio calls the use of "mythical metaphors to chronicle historical realities" (in contrast to Marshall Sahlins’s characterization of Hawaiian accounts of Captain Cook’s reception and demise as "historical metaphors of mythical realities") (61–62). She finds that many of the "legendary events mirror real episodes in Siassi genealogical and migration histories" (74). For instance, in the Mandok Siassi account, "the villages Mala visits [on Umboi Island] are [NAn] Kowai communities known to the Mandok to be safe havens among otherwise hostile [Kowai] ‘bushmen’ [farther inland]" (74). This hints that the biggest cultural divide is between coastal peoples and inland peoples rather than between An and NAn peoples. In fact, Anton Ploeg, who worked among the NAn Kowai, expresses doubt about whether "a category of non-Austronesian cultures exists" and cites Ken McElhanon’s conclusion that the Kowai language "has been so influenced by neighbouring Austronesian languages, that I have not attempted to determine a family status for it" (94).

There are several indications of cultural [or linguistic] cross-overs between An and NAn peoples. On Karkar, the traveling An progenitor Kulbob is a hunter while the stay-at-home NAn progenitor Manub is a fisherman (14). Among the NAn Anêm of northwestern New Britain, the trickster/creator Titikolo appears to be regarded as a direct ancestor, not an intruder from the outside (188, 198). However, he later flees the wrath of villagers outraged by his violations of local mores, taking his special powers with him and apparently teaching them to the Europeans. (William Thurston offers a wonderful account of early local lore about Europeans, who "do nothing recognizable as work" [200], "act as though they are uncannily unconcerned with and ignorant of sorcery" [200], "eat less than required to sustain human life and never seem to get hungry for taro" [201].) Nevertheless, "unlike many of the surrounding speakers of Austronesian languages, the Anêm have no oral literature relating the settlement of their ground by people from some other area. They inhabit the ground where all humans, regardless of the color of their skin, were created by a more powerful human and where Titikolo abandoned them to become progressively more powerless as a portion of their knowledge is lost with each generation" (183). In contrast, for the Mandok Siassi and other speakers of Austronesian languages, "what seems to require explanation is not ‘how humans got created’, but ‘how and why they came here’" (64). If this is a consistent difference between An and NAn cultural traditions in PNG, then the presence of (pre-Christian) creation myths among any An-speaking community in that area (or arrival myths among NAn-speakers) constitutes a prima facie case for language-shift—or at least a significant degree of ethnolinguistic hybridization.

If these myths mirror historical realities, as Pomponio suggests, then there is ample evidence of a high degree of geographical mobility, community dispersal, and intergroup contact in the past. In the neighborhood of the Vitiaz Strait, Thomas Harding and Stephen Clark note the myth of Kulambi,

the name of an "ancient" multivillage population of bush people who inhabited Sio’s immediate hinterland ... [and] exploded in a social cataclysm that dispersed migrants throughout the larger region. ... Sio itself was a recipient of Kulambi migrants who thus formed one component of the reputed mixed ancestry of bush peoples, beach dwellers, and maritime wanderers and visitors. ... The theme of Sio history is unity out of diversity. Culturally and linguistically differentiated groups and settlements joined forces on an offshore island to form a large compact village that became a monolingual and culturally homogeneous society. (36)

It is unclear whether this Kulambi dispersal coincides with the tremendous eruption of Arop (Long Island) in about the mid-17th century. This eruption, "among the biggest in the last thousand years" (69), spewed ash "well over a hundred thousand square kilometres" and "was cataclysmic enough to be recorded in the oral histories of at least fifty-six societies located from Wewak to Menyamya and as far inland as ... the Southern Highlands Province in the form of time of darkness stories" (70).

By comparison, the first trickle of Austronesians into the area was hardly noteworthy. This work makes it clear, in any case, that once An speakers arrived, they did not just settle down where they landed. They and their NAn neighbors and kinfolk continued to circulate, relocate, dissociate, and amalgamate—right up to the present. For this reason, CK should be required reading for anyone working on the linguistic history of Papua New Guinea.

Joel Bradshaw
University of Hawai‘i at Mânoa