The Advent and History of Miyanmin identity

Draft
Don Gardner
Archaeology and Anthropology,
Australian National University

Introduction
The history of central New Guinea’s Mountain Ok peoples comprises a
complex and shifting constellation of peoples, languages and cultural practices. In
fact, Fredrik Barth was so struck by the cultural differences between populations in
the southern Ok area that he made them the explanandum of his Cosmologies in the
making (1987). Yet, of course, such differences only gain their significance in a
broader context of similarity, as the very use of an identifying label like “Mountain
Ok” indicates, but it is nevertheless true that the constellation of similarities and
contrasts in language, subsistence production, settlement patterns, mythology and
ritual forms presents anthropologists working in the region with a daunting challenge.
For, in many parts of the area for which we have data, the past, even on the scale of a
human lifetime, has been one in which various modalities of interaction between
social units—differentiation and integration, assimilation and accommodation,
conquest and loss—have all played crucial roles in shaping the historical trajectories
of populations, communities and territories. These processes implicate, but are also
affected by, issues of social identity in the region, as these confront both local social
units and the ethnographer.

Historical processes relevant to social identity in the Ok region were not

subject to the same degree or rate of transformation; just as turbulence in the great
rivers that flow out of the area is most marked on the margins of the stream, so the
groups on the fringes of the region show a more tumultuous history than those in the
centre. This is especially true of the northern area (see maps below) discussed in this
paper, where Ok speaking peoples1 abut very different groups. Nevertheless, if we
consider the region as a whole, community fission and fusion, displacement (forced

1 They are also sometimes referred to as the “Min,” on the basis of the almost universal suffix -min
(“people”) appended to the ethnonyms of the region.
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 2

or unforced), expansion, shifting alliances and the transformation or attenuation of

key cultural practices have all acted to present a bewilderingly complex human
environment.

A recent and compelling addition to the stock of notions that facilitate the
discourses of different primary social categories is that of tribal or cultural identity
itself, or so I shall suggest: “recent” because it was introduced (but not necessarily
imposed) by the Australian administration, and “compelling” because post-colonial
developments made this form of identity relevant to action in a number of crucial
social fields. In this paper, I want to describe, for one part of the northern Ok region,
how conceptions of identity responded to the establishment of Australian
administration. In short, this paper aims to show that in the Mountain Ok region, as
elsewhere, identities, including those we think of as cultural identities, have histories.

The history of the people now bearing the ethnonym “Miyanmin”2 speaks
persuasively against all abstract analytical essentialisms, and foregrounds the sheer
continuity of the processes that constitute it. Consequently, an understanding of local
and regional identities has to be sought through an examination of the contingencies
that inflect social relations at the most basic, quotidian level. Accordingly, I aim here

2 Miyan is the basic ethnonym; Miyanten (literally, “Miyan people”) is, nowadays, the term Miyan
speakers use to refer to themselves. Their neighbours call them Miyanmin, which form the PNG
government also uses (following the earlier Australian administration), but renders as “Mianmin” in
its documents. Throughout this paper, I use “Miyanmin.”
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 3

simply to track a historical process that has transformed Miyan ideas about their
identity, including the promulgation of “Miyanmin” as an ethnonym.

I shall proceed by discussing the identity of the people in question from the
bottom up, as it relates to the individual’s bodily constitution and the different basic,
named “kinds” of people that divide populations. I want to underline the historical
fluidity of territorial and settlement patterns and group membership in a context
where personnel were the most important political resource. Having described the
pre-existing context, I discuss the impact of Australian colonial intervention, which
introduced and sought to define the ethnonym “Miyanmin” in line with administrative
conceptions of small-scale social existence, but also in conjunction with the
categories of Telefolmin, from whose territory administration officers pushed into
areas controlled by the Miyan speakers. Finally, I describe the post-colonial contexts
that made the current ethnonym relevant to those to whom the administration applied
it.
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 4

Pre-colonial identity and social processes

If we begin by using the labels loosely, or as they are used today, we can say
that some 2,200 Miyanmin live in the valleys of the Hak, May and August rivers in
the Telefomin Sub-Province of Sandaun Province (see map 2). Their territories are
flanked on three sides by other Mountain Ok peoples: to their south live the more
numerous, more prosperous, and ritually more “senior” Telefolmin; to the west,
across the Sepik, live the Atbalmin, while to the east live a mixture of smaller Ok and
Ok-like peoples; to the north live Upper Sepik and various small groups speaking
languages of the Left May phylum. The history of the northern Ok region over the
last three hundred or so years has been dominated by the steady expansion of Telefols
from their salubrious central valleys into areas to their north. This expansion met with
a variety of responses from their inhabitants, but, it is fair to say, the most frequent
response was armed resistance.

At the most general level, pre-colonial social identity in the northern Ok area
was one we might dub “pronominal,” in which speakers could designate only a vague
and situationally defined totality through the use of an inclusive “we,” or by more
complex indefinite referential constructions, such as “the descendants of such-and-
such,” or “the occupants of so-and-so valley.” People used proper names to designate
neighbours who differed in language, subsistence or particular practices, but used
proper names only for subsets of population with which they identified themselves.
Thus, “Miyanmin” was the ethnonym that Telefols used to refer to their northern
neighbours, while the Miyan speakers had no proper name more inclusive than those
designating various “kinds” of people, whose interactions constituted a local field of
sociality. (Speculative etymologies of the name “Miyanmin” suggest either the gloss,
“people of the dog,” or that of “people who have many sons but few daughters”
(Healey & Healey 1977:129).) I am not suggesting that people, through the use of
pronouns and other referential constructions, gestured towards a totality that they
could not name. On the contrary, I suggest that these constructions, indefinite as they
are from the point of view of demarcating “the Miyanmin” as now understood, served
pre-colonial purposes perfectly well, since there was no interest in such an identity.
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 5

Bodies

Miyan beliefs concerning the somatic constitution of the individual define a

fundamental aspect of individual identity. The basic account holds that semen creates
bones, while blood derives from the mother (other tissues result from the coalescence
of semen and female genital secretions). It immediately follows from this that
patrilineal kin share bone, and matrilineal kin blood, and, for any ego born of an
exogamous union, that the social universe can divided into four fundamental classes
(those who share both ego’s bone and blood; those who share bone; those who share
blood; those who share neither). Despite the conception theory’s potential to project
links of consubstantiality across remoter regions of genealogical space, this is
undermined by a kin terminology (Iroquois) that focuses upon the relative sex of links
only in proximate generations.3 In fact, within the genealogical field closest to ego,
the vocative use of kin terms often elides even the cross/parallel distinction (and,
thus, gives it an Hawaiian cast). Nevertheless, despite this terminological
homogenisation of the field of relatedness, there are experts on genealogical matters
who can spell out connections, and there are specific ancient connections that,
because of their political salience, are commemorated by those involved over many
generations.

“Kinds”

Even though all Miyan--indeed, all Mountain Ok peoples--share a single

primordial ancestor, they, like other Mountain Ok groups, use the term miit to refer to
named “kinds” of people (the term also means “origin” or “base”). In practice, these
miit names are used most frequently, and most saliently, to refer to territorially
localised communities (which may or may not be internally divided into separate
residential groupings identified with a particular leader). So, while the western Miyan
population I have worked with most closely is divided amongst a number of named
settlements, the first way I learned to divide it was in terms of a set of miit names:
Sebaiten, Kimeten, Namaweten, Futibinten, etc,. The ready division of the population
into these originary kinds assumes a deeper ontic significance in the absence of any
inclusive name for the population as a whole. Furthermore, because, in this usage,

3. Thus, for any ego: FBCh=FFZSCh=FMBSCh=FMZSCh=FFBSCh="sibling" and

FZCh=FFZDCh=FMBDCh=FMZDCh=FFBDCh="cross-cousin". Corresponding equivalences exist
among matrilateral kin (Scheffler 1971; Gardner 1981).
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 6

these names designate autonomous and widely dispersed territorial groups, it begins
to appear that the Miyanmin, like the Atbalmin, "are not one people, but many"
(Bercovitch 1989:4), and the Australian administration's former practice of
designating such groups as "sub-tribes" has some justification.

Nevertheless, members of a given miit may occupy a single settlement, as do

the Mabwaiten, or more than one settlement within a single territory, as do the
Wameiten, or more than one territory, as do the Usaliten, Temselten and the
Kimeilten. In addition, some “kinds” are represented in different language groups.
For example, the Urap and Temsel miits are found in both Miyan and Telefol
communities. The landscape, then, like the population, is divided in ways that involve
miit names, but the neat association of both people and land with miit names, which a
simple enumeration of local populations might suggest, is highly misleading.

Other features of Miyan social life seem to support the “many peoples”
perspective: for example, many, many hours walk separate settlements of different
territorial populations, even neighbouring ones, and the isolating effects of physical
distance are compounded by a stated (and frequently satisfied) preference for local
endogamy, which tends to produce communities wherein members’ relations are
massively overdetermined by both kinship and the routine face-to-face interactions
that co-residence entails.

A straightforward question about a person’s miit will usually be answered

with the name associated with the community with which he or she is primarily
affiliated. The notion of miit, however, is intimately connected with the model of
somatic constitution discussed above. Accordingly, when it is clear that the discussion
is not just about residential affiliation, Miyan give their father’s miit when asked,
regardless of where they were born or currently live. In fact, there are grounds for
thinking of miit as it is commonly used as a contraction of aleb miit (father miit); a
synonymous alternative, also used commonly, is on miit (bone miit).4 To take a
concrete example: the territorial community routinely designated by the miit name

4. Bone has a very strong association with continuity and strength, and it plays a key role in the
imagery of the sacred cult. Men will often say, moreover, that the side of the father - of bone, as
opposed to blood - is the strongest and there are jokes and disparaging phrases about women that
suggest a concern with continuity through the male line comparable to that elsewhere in PNG.
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 7

Serawania comprises adults of ten different aleb miit, only 5% of whom had
Serawania fathers.

Facts like these have led ethnographers working among the central and
northern Mountain Ok to stress kinship and co-residence as the twin principles of
social organisation, rather than descent as such. Morren, writing of eastern Miyanmin
populations, has suggested that descent is not important in understanding the miit
(1986:175), and he prefers a term with definite territorial connotations, "parish," to
designate the local group, which:

is a matter...of residence and recruitment with

individual parishes, as corporate entities, acting to
conserve and expand their populations through
endogamy, reciprocal interparish marriages, invitations
for outsiders to contract uxorilocal marriages, or the
taking of captives in war. (175)
Others have been prepared to see descent as relevant to Ok social
organisation, but only in its cognatic form (which must always underdetermine social
organisation). Ruth Craig, in discussing a Telefolmin group in the Ifitaman Valley,
writes of the miit name as designating either a cognatic descent unit or a local
territorial group, depending on context (1969:177). Jorgensen has stated that “there
are no descent groups” among the Telefolmin (1988:261), a claim he later amplified
thus:

Although there exist named cognatic descent categories,

these do not govern marriage, have no corporate
characteristics and do not form a matrix for collective
life (1991:261).
I would argue that the notion of miit does provide at least part of the thread
that forms the “matrix for collective life,” just because doctrines of bodily substance
can map on to conceptualisations of miit to produce a coherent somatic rationale for
the differentiation of people into fundamental “kinds,” and are sometimes used
rhetorically for just that purpose. Yet, these colleagues are right to stress that miits do
not regulate recruitment to particular local communities, access to resources or
marriage patterns; nor, of themselves, do they provide the basis for corporate action
or corporate ownership. So while this deeply essentialising notion, and the conception
theory underpinning it, plays some role in the constitution of identity, we need to
know more if we are to grasp the wider picture. (And when we do, we will see that
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 8

the miit’s essentialism is used to connect peoples that the vicissitudes of history have
separated.)

People

A clue to the wider picture is given in Morren’s statement, quoted above:

Miyanmin communities are constrained by circumstance to try to augment their
populations. Although population densities in the Mountain Ok region vary (in the
Miyanmin case from about 0.5-1.0 persons per sq. km.), and are much higher in the
valleys of the central ranges than on the fringes (see Hyndman & Morren 1990: 16-
17), all these peoples pursue a low-density, low-intensity, land-extensive mode of
subsistence that contrasts with subsistence systems elsewhere in the New Guinea
highlands. Hunting practices, horticultural techniques, the preference for local
endogamy and the need for military security, all entail that—other things being equal
—small groups face more difficulties than larger ones. Accordingly, Ok communities
were effectively in competition for personnel, a fact reflected in the openness of
Miyan groups to new members (individuals, families and even whole segments of
other communities), the frequent occurrence of dual residence (50% of a 1986 sample
of 123 nuclear families had a secondary residence in another settlement), serial
residential shifts and other facets of social organisation. Almost any kind of
connection with a settlement group, or one of its members, will usually suffice as a
basis for a welcome to a parish.

A striking example of the search for personnel is the demographic raiding the
northern Ok used to carry out with the explicit aim of bringing back marriageable
women and children (as well as the flesh of those not in these categories). In the mid-
1960's, when George Morren conducted his first field-trip among the most powerful
Miyan group, 14% of extant marriages involved a partner taken captive during
raiding, while 11% of all living members of that group were born of a captured
woman (1974:122-125). In the mid-seventies, I collected genealogies from less
powerful western Miyan groups, but there too 15% of one group’s living members
were either Atbalmin captives or their offspring. A household-by-household
genealogical survey, conducted in 1995, indicated that approximately 60% of 1,365
living eastern Miyanmin have at least one ancestor (within the last 4 generations) who
was taken captive during a raid; 3.3% of those born before 1955 and still alive in
1995 were themselves captives. The picture looks much the same when viewed from
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 9

the perspective of those whom the Miyanmin raided: 85 of the 600 deaths in the
genealogies I recorded from the Owininga were attributed to raiders in the last two
generations, and of these 67, amounting to more than 10% of all deaths, were at the
hands of the Miyanmin, who often took women and children captive on these raids. 5
At least nine captured Owininga women were still living in Miyan communities in
1995. It is worth noting, in this context, that the Miyan had no more qualms about
raiding the settlements of unrelated—or, if sufficiently angry, related—groups of
Miyan speakers than they did other linguistic groups (Gardner 1999).

In all there are about a dozen Miyan parishes with substantial numbers of
captives, and, of these, four are—or were, until recently—led by a man taken from an
enemy settlement as a child. (Moreover, one of the most pre-eminent men of one of
the two lowlands Telefol communities is a captive.) Although the figures do not
definitely establish that captives are over-represented in the ranks of leaders, they
should be sufficient to dispel any suggestion that they are accorded any sort of
second-class status. In support of this line I should also point out that the gifted
stranger from afar—who visits, marries into and then leads a community—is a motif
commonly encountered in stories and group histories. It is important to the case I am
making that such memorable individuals do not lose their original identity as people
from elsewhere; indeed, part of their heroic status derives from their success in
establishing a segment of their original “base,” or “kind,” in a new territory. In the
often-used botanical image of a growing vine, such heroes establish a thriving shoot
of their “kind,” still connected to the main stem. Although not every neolocal resident
achieves such renown, it is nevertheless true that people face no pressure to forget
their original “kind.6

So, assimilation to a new community does not create any effective pressure
for migrants, or their descendants, to deny their origins. When personnel are the most
valued of resources, stigmatising or exclusionary practices are self-defeating.
(Although, this is not to say that all a community’s members, all of the time, offer an

5 The Owininga (with, in 1995, a population of just 330 individuals) are but one of the small
interfluvial lowlands groups the Miyan raided.

6 Movements of portions of communities to other settlements (usually under the leadership of a man
whose standing had caused friction with a longer-established community leader) and simple
community fission are also important factors in the distribution of people over the landscape, but
space does not permit me to discuss them here.
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 10

unqualified welcome to immigrants, nor to say that the migrants themselves never
feel their status to be something less than optimal.) Certainly, someone who was
raised in a community, marries there and has children is regarded as having “come
inside,” irrespective of his or her parents’ origins. Accordingly, the 25% of men who
reside neolocally have no practical qualifications on their membership to their
community. Indeed, having ties to other communities is often of considerable value,
both to the individual and his or her neighbours. So, despite the preference for local
endogamy (which could never in fact be consistently realised), Miyan (and other
northern Mountain Ok) communities represent locally dense parts of extensive
networks of genealogical and other social relations (which are also sustained by
extended visiting, dual residence, and so on).

The joint effects of inter-community mobility, the statistical tendency for

males (75%) to patrifiliate and high levels of local endogamy produce communities
that have the character of cognatic descent groups. (Because even a neolocal couple’s
children will normally marry a member of the miit into which their parents were
assimilated, almost every one can trace patri- or matrifiliative links to the core
membership.) Accordingly, miit identity is as much a matter of context and strategy--
of, in short, of identification with a social unit--as of somatic constitution. Indeed, as
Dan Jorgensen has said, the northern Ok notion of social being makes it possible for
someone to claim with complete authenticity to be both a Telefol and a Miyan. A
claim such as this tends to strike us as unusual, for nothing seems more basic to
cultural identity than language. So let us look briefly at social relations between
linguistic communities.

Languages

If their past indicates that deep-rooted enmity and murderous raiding have
sometimes characterised relations between Mountain Ok communities sharing a
language and social institutions, it also shows that relations between the different
language groups in the region have not been one-dimensional, for all the salience that
raiding and warfare have in their histories. Both Miyan and Telefol oral historical
accounts suggest that speaking the same language was neither a necessary nor
sufficient reason for good relations between groups, and, conversely, that speaking
different languages did not—of itself—prevent groups from forming important
alliances. For example, Miyan elders affirm that before Telefol expansion northwards
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 11

out of the Elip Valley, eastern Miyan and western Futaman peoples enjoyed very
close relations to the extent that the Miyan abandoned their language in favour of that
of their close friends. This close relationship is attested by the fact that two Miyan
“kinds” living many days walk from the Fu Valley trace their origins to that area.
Indeed, in 1975, the first very low altitude western Miyan group I censused were the
Futibin—“the people of the Fu headwaters.”

Marriages between communities speaking mutually unintelligible languages

were frequent, providing good relations obtained, and this occurred even between
Telefol and Miyan communities. Bilingualism was (and remains) common. It is worth
reiterating that general ethnonyms were not a crucial aspect of identity before
colonisation. Each language group was divided into a number of primary “kinds,” and
many accounts detail how miits from different language groups formed alliances
against a mutual enemy speaking the language of one of the allies.

Friendly relations even existed across the major linguistic and cultural
division between Mountain Ok and non-Ok peoples in the area. For example, the
most northerly eastern Miyan group, the Hoiten, formerly enjoyed a neighbourly
relationship with the Owininga people who today occupy the interfluvial plains to the
north of the mountains. Only a few generations ago, the Owininga occupied the
Usake River area, to the east of the May River, while the Hoiten occupied the western
banks and the Abei River Valley. But, after a fight between two women (over the
possession of some trapped fish), which resulted in the death of the Hoi woman,
relations between the neighbours broke down. An alliance of Hoi and more powerful
southern Miyan groups succeeded in pushing the Owininga out of the Usake Valley
and down onto the interfluvial plains to the north, where, thereafter, they suffered the
depredations at the hands of Miyan raiders mentioned above.

Later, the Hoiten gave refugees expelled from the Nena Valley by the
expanding Telefols permission to occupy the Usake Valley. The identity of this
group, known as Ontou, was in the 1990’s to become a matter of great moment in the
wrangling about the “ownership” of the Nena mineral deposit discovered by
Highlands Gold (now Highlands Pacific), which may be developed in the near future.
For now, though, it remains to point out that the Ontou were later themselves driven
from the Usake Valley by the same alliance of groups that had annexed it from the
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 12

Owininga. Many Ontou were killed, some were incorporated by capture into the
victorious Miyan and some seem to have been driven northwards into the Owininga
area. (Subsequently, as a result of the discovery of the Nena deposit, and the
possibility that the adjacent Usake Valley would become the site of considerable
ancilliary developments, the history of the Usake became an issue between Miyan
groups [as well as between the Miyan and Owininga] in much the same way that the
history of the Nena Valley became an issue between Miyan and Telefol groups
[Jorgensen 1997, Gardner in press].)

Inter-community raiding set up broad frontier areas between enemy

settlements, for even the decisive routing of one territorial group by another did not
automatically enable the victors to enjoy effective control over the vacated territory.
For example, even after being driven from the Usake, the Owininga continued to hunt
there and to kill lone Miyanmin if the opportunity presented itself. (Indeed, on one
occasion a group of Owininga hunters unwittingly killed a man who had been
captured from their own settlement as a child.) A good example of how the frontier
region between enemies was used is provided by the Upper Seniap stone quarry, just
over the watershed from the Usake Valley. This was an important site for stone used
in the manufacture of tools until pacification. After their victory, the Miyan enjoyed
more or less unmediated access to this area, yet the Owininga also continued to enjoy
access to the quarry, provided they made sure no large Miyan parties were nearby.
Indeed, the Owininga also continued to supply the May River Iwam, to the north,
with blades from the Seniap quarry. In addition, the Miyanmin victors had to take
special precautions at the quarry; informants told me that successful extraction of the
valuable stone depended upon the use of spells in the language of the previous
occupants of the area.7

The members of southern Miyan groups, who were prominent in the

displacement of the Owininga and Ontouten from the Usake, continued to make the
many-days’ journey to the Usake area, for shorter or longer periods, to obtain stone,
hunt, plant gardens and tree crops and join or mount the occasional raid on the
Owininga (Morren 1986). Indeed, some members of those southern groups set up

7. This point raises an important dimension of conquest and loss in the area that I cannot go into here.
For human victors could never through mere force of arms evict or pacify the non-corporeal denizens
of a newly-acquired territory. They, therefore, had to take precautions in an effort to establish
working relationships with ancestral ghosts and other spirits associated with an area.
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 13

permanent enclaves in the area associated with the Hoiten, so that the local
community spoken of by government and socially distant Miyanmin as of the Hoi
“kind,” contains within it very significant segments of the Kimeil, Temsel and Usali
miits.

Lowlands Telefols, like the northern Miyanmin, maintained their territories in

the area only with the help of their southern kin, who responded in times of offensive
and defensive necessity. Similarly, these southern, central Telefols and their
descendants also maintained links with those residing more permanently in the lower
altitudes, and hunted, gardened and maintained tree crops there.

All in all then, northern Ok communities were both expansive and remarkably
open. And although they fought to defend and extend their sovereignty over precious
resources, nothing served to induce exclusivity in membership. Because persons were
themselves among the most prized of valuables, communities tended to be as
inclusive as possible, and employed many strategies to augment themselves. So,
despite the tendency of the notion of endogamy to make us imagine inward-looking
communities, the northern Ok, through a variety of means, maintained extensive and
remarkably strong inter-community ties that enabled even weak communities to
organise large raiding parties. And this is where we can locate the significance of the
deeply essentialising conception of individual and categorical identity: it is an
important part of what links communities that are otherwise subjected to mostly
centripetal forces--in short, it is a vital part of what connects peoples that the
vicissitudes of history have separated.

Colonial intrusion
As elsewhere in PNG, the establishment of effective administration control in
the northern Ok area froze the hitherto fluid distribution of local sovereignties over
land. And, again as elsewhere in PNG, this has led to disputes that can no longer be
resolved in the pre-colonial manner. One example of the challenges the new context
presents is provided by the difficulties that arose in the mid-1990’s concerning the
Usake River Valley. This area was, at least at one stage, seen as a possible site for
large-scale ancilliary elements of the Nena mineral development. Even the
developer’s preliminary investigations in the area involved clearing sites for camps
and helipads, and, hence, posed questions about the payment of compensation. The
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 14

company, taking things at face value, confined its attention to the nearby Miyan
settlement around the Hotmin airstrip, where a prominent man claiming descent from
an Ontou captive, and some powerful Hoiten leaders who supported him, made strong
and successful claims for compensation. Unsurprisingly, the developer’s actions
brought protests from the nearest Owininga settlement. They felt they had a strong
claim to the valley given their ancient occupation of the area, and even claimed that,
had pacification not intervened, they would have driven out the Miyan and re-
established themselves in their ancestral territories. (The Miyan, for their part,
claimed that had pacification not intervened they would have extinguished the
Owininga altogether.) But colonial intrusions into the northern Ok area had extremely
significant effects long before effective administrative control was established.

I have already noted that, over the last 300 years, the Telefolmin have been
slowly expanding their territory at the expense of other groups (Hyndman & Morren
1990:21-2). But this expansionary pressure, though opposed by the Miyan of the Hak-
San area, only really affected their relations with groups living to their north after the
disastrous Miyanmin attack on the Hagen-Sepik Patrol of 1938. The Miyanmin of the
Hak-San area paid dearly for their mistake in thinking that the Hagen-Sepik Patrol
was a Telefol raiding party. After two attacks, during which a number of Miyan were
killed or wounded, policemen and carriers from the patrol seeking to avenge the death
of Patrol Officer Jim Taylor's cook mounted a dawn raid on an Usaliten settlement
that resulted in the death of eight people and the wounding of many more. Many of
the Miyan groups who took part in the raids interpreted this disaster as an initiative of
the Telefols (for there were Telefol carriers with Black and Taylor’s party) and began
to move further from away from Telefol territory by crossing the watershed into the
upper May. This led the refugees into intensified relations with Miyan groups already
there: marriages and (by Miyan standards) large-scale prestations between the groups
aimed at securing access to land preceded a deterioration in relations, which resulted
in raids by the southern migrants to annex land in the May Valley. As a result, several
Miyan communities were pushed westwards out of the May system altogether by
more powerful groups from the Hak-San area (Morren 1986: Chap. 10). This, in turn,
soured relations between groups to the west and north and produced a protracted
series of raids between formerly friendly groups.
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 15

Another upshot of the attack and its aftermath was the notoriety among
Australian administrators of the Telefol name for their northern neighbours,
“Miyanmin”. After WWII, when Telefomin Patrol Post was set up, and
administrative patrols began establishing control over the peoples of the area, it was
thought necessary that those entering Miyan territory had to be maximally armed.
Colin Simpson wrote an account of his visit to Telefomin in early 1953 in which,
under the title “The murderous Miyanmins,” he summarised administration officers’
views of Miyanmin (Morren 1986). A widely publicised Miyanmin raid on an
Atbalmin community in 1956 (to which the administration responded with a ruthless
punitive patrol), and another on an Owininga community in 1959, consolidated the
‘murderous Miyanmin’ image. The judge who tried those responsible for the raid on
the Owininga recorded that the Miyanmin were “well known as being amongst the
fiercest and wildest natives in the Territory” (Gardner 1999). Western Miyanmin
territory was a “restricted area” until 1972, when the category itself disappeared from
administration usage.

But if “Miyanmin” connoted cruel and inveterate raiders to their neighbours

and Australian administrators, how did it come to play a role in Miyan social life? As
many people, from existential philosophers to symbolic interactionists and exponents
of cultural studies, have pointed out, identity is always recursively established and
sustained in social interaction. Fundamentally, each of the interacting parties
construes the other, yet how A construes B is significantly affected by how she takes
B to be construing her; symmetrically, B is significantly affected by how she
perceives A to be construing her; so, for A, how she construes B will be effected by
how she construes B’s construal of her, which she knows will depend to some
important extent on how B construes A to be construing B. Inevitably, these
potentially infinite recursive loops are short-circuited by boot-strapping conventions,
and it is here that devices like stereotypes help. The logic of these negotiations is, of
course, drastically inflected by the power differences between the parties involved. As
I have already indicated, the power of the Miyanmin to perturb the local
administration was considerable (and many thought it might even be sufficient to
preserve their autonomy--until the 1956 punitive patrol, anyway), but, of course, they
had eventually to come to terms with the administration’s view of them as
“murderous Miyanmin.” Stereotypification depends crucially upon the fundamental
act of naming, for, as Bourdieu points out, and Miyan history attests, “By structuring
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 16

the perception which social agents have of the social world, the act of naming helps
establish the structure of this world, and does so all the more significantly the more
widely it is recognized, i.e. authorized” (1992:105).

Prior to pacification, the geographical extent of the Miyan language was not
precisely known to any who spoke it, even though there were social relations,
stemming from movements of personnel, linking communities separated by six or
seven days’ walk. Even in 1969, a Namawe man of the western lowlands, imprisoned
on the coast for killing his wife, was surprised to find a dozen or so fellow-prisoners
whose language was identical to his own; these men (gaoled for a raid on a
neighbouring Miyan settlement in 1967), from a mid-altitude settlement several days’
walk east of his area were similarly surprised to learn of Miyan speakers living so far
from their own area. The administration was still unsure of the extent of the
Miyanmin as late as 1975, when I first went to what the government had thought was
the north western border of their territory.

Once instituted, administrative structures and procedures did create a realm of

social interaction in which Miyanmin identity was relevant. Indeed, naming cultural
units or tribes was a constitutive aspect of administrative power. On the basis of
language alone, people were censused and entered into government records as
Miyanmin (more precisely as East or West Miyanmin8); were asked to carry for
patrols into areas whose inhabitants were unknown to them, but with whom they
discovered they shared a language, and, sometimes, ancestors; learned of what their
identity as Miyanmin meant to Telefol and administrative personnel, who now visited
or were stationed among them; were expected to contribute to administration projects
that were conceptualised as being for the benefit of all (East or West) Miyanmin, such
as the building of airstrips, government stations and schools. Adjudications were
made by administrative officers concerning the ownership of certain border areas, and
these were made in terms of broad administrative categories (Miyan versus Atbalmin,
Telefol or Abau land, for example). Missionaries set out to convert them, as
“Miyanmin,” while SIL linguists sought to learn the language they shared in order to
facilitate this conversion, and two anthropologists appeared who wished to study

8 Actually, the most northerly Miyan speakers were censused from a patrol post north of the Sepik
River, (Green River: part of Amanab District) rather than Telefomin, and were not recognised as
such. These Miyan speakers appear in early government, and some linguistic, accounts as “Blimo” or
“Wagarabai.”
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 17

“Miyanmin culture.” When a Miyan woman was given in marriage to an Abau man,
in explicit compensation for the death of his brother during a raid in the early 1960’s,
all adult Miyanmin who interacted with him addressed him “brother-in-law.”

The changes wrought by the Pax Australiana (in the 60’s for the East
Miyanmin and in the 70’s for the West Miyanmin) produced much improved
communications between different areas within the territory Miyan speakers had
hitherto occupied without being conscious of the fact that they did so as bearers of a
common language. These changes also brought more news and ideas about the
peoples beyond the boundaries of their own area, so that differences between
themselves and others came to be represented as contrasts between Miyanmin and
other comparable peoples. In 1977, by which time East Miyanmin pastors were
working among the West Miyanmin, news reached the lowlands communities of a
fight over land that had occurred between East Miyanmin and Telefolmin, and there
was considerable consternation about Telefols stealing “our” land. Towards the end
of the 70’s, labour recruiters began visiting Miyan territories, looking for labour for
plantations in Madang and the Western Highlands. Men who left on two year
contracts found themselves sharing experiences (sharing living quarters, fights with
other labourers or locals, and so on) as Miyanmin, in contradistinction to Telefols
who also went, but sometimes also along with Telefols and Atbalmins, as descendants
of the same primordial ancestor-heroine, in contradistinction to other peoples. In the
nature of Miyan sociality, Miyan men from different communities could frequently
trace remote genealogical connections, or links to mutually known third parties, even
if they were from communities very distant from one another. This was not invariably
the case, but their shared language, and the availability of the shared ethnonym,
“Miyanmin,” greatly facilitated their sense of a significant oneness in the face of
cultural others.

The same kind of processes operated in the context of the local Baptist
mission. The Bible Schools set up by the Australian Baptist Missionary Society (later,
the Min Baptist Union) were particularly significant here. In fact, the Baptist Church
has played a very important role in the post-colonial history of the central and
northern Ok. Practically all peoples of the area assert their allegiance to the Church,
and the network of local pastors that it sustains has played a major role in fostering a
sense of local and regional identity. (It is noteworthy that almost every community I
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 18

visited in 94-5, in connection with the possible development of the Nena deposit,
demanded that the developer and government prohibit the entry of other churches into
the impact area should a mine be developed.) As noted already, the Miyanmin
identity that has developed over the last 50 years is one that gives those who share it
not only a sense of their difference from Atbals, Telefols and other “Min” (Mountain
Ok) peoples, but also of their similarity to them vis-à-vis non-Mountain Ok,
notwithstanding keen memories of old fights. In this connection, it is worth noting the
sustained--but ultimately unsuccessful--campaign for a Min Province, which stressed
the shared heritage and interests of the Min as against others (Jorgensen 1990).

If language was the main diacritic of this new identity, older practices, which
suggested that sharing a language was not necessary to a shared identity, did not
disappear entirely. In the mid-1980’s, for example, a whole set of Kofelmin local
groups came from West Papua to Yapsiei (the administrative centre for the West
Miyanmin area) in fear of Indonesian soldiers. Although, like many others who
crossed the border at that time, they came as refugees, the Kofelmin were denied
recognition as such by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (which
meant that they were ineligible for resettlement or relief). Yet, they were hailed as
“sister’s children” by western Miyan groups on the grounds that a Miyan woman had
many generations ago been given in marriage to a man of one of the groups: the
Kofel refugees, now known as “numba tu Miyanmin,” have remained in PNG, living
on Miyan land, and there are now several new marriages linking them with their
hosts. The long term future of the relations between Miyan hosts and Kofel refugees
is unclear, but if similar past alliances are a guide, they may well reach a point where
Kofel is simply one miit among the many that make up particular local communities,
and those who claim it as their own are no less “Miyanmin” than anyone else.

How might we summarise this history of the Miyanmin and “Miyanmin”

identity? Anthropological talk of identity is sometimes rather imprecise. So, I shall
devote a few words to spelling out my position.

Consider Marx’s well-known distinction between a class-in-itself and a class-

for-itself: only when members of a class became conscious of their shared position
can they take action in their class-interests on the historical stage, and thereby
constitute a class-for-itself, rather than just a class-in-itself. Actually, though, the
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 19

transitions—and their sociological ramifications—between a group’s simply having a

given identity and its taking socially consequential action in terms of that identity is
rather more complex than Marx’s formulation suggests. A group of people’s having
an identity relies merely on the linguistic meaning of the identifying term and the
properties of the individuals to whom it properly applies (thus, all human beings are
properly identified as members of the species Homo sapiens, even though most
people that have ever lived were unaware that they were); beyond that, individual
members of a group may be aware that they have a given identity, even if each
member is unaware that others are aware of the identity they share; but members of a
group may also be aware that they share a given identity, in that each is aware of the
identity and aware that the others are similarly aware; finally, a group’s shared
awareness of their common identity may give them a collective interest which
collective action will further.9 If we characterise these transitions roughly, we may
say that a group can a) share an identity; b) share awareness of a common identity;
and c) take collective action on the basis of a shared awareness of a common identity.
Only the last would seem to capture the idea (modelled on Marx’s notion) of an
identity-for-itself. (To give a concrete example, we all share, and most readers of this
will be aware that we share, the identity “earthling,” but this—to date, anyway—is
merely an identity-in-itself, while, for example, “American” is a prominent identity-
for-itself on the world stage.)

With this distinction drawn, it seems appropriate to say that a pre-colonial

Miyanmin identity simply did not exist for the people so identified, or that it did not
exist any more than “the descendants of mitochondrial Eve” does for most humans.
To be sure, there were people whom Telefolmin, Atbalmin and others referred to as
Miyanmin, but those who were so designated had heterogeneous cultural forms and
by their own testimony did not always share a language. Moreover, those who were
so identified had no definite ideas about themselves as a category of persons. There
was a mythic account, shared among most, but (I think) not all, of the groups labelled
as Miyanmin, that they were descended from a sister of the woman who bore the
Telefolmin, but even those who shared that account were unaware that they all did so.
The only time I ever heard Miyanmin expressly consider the question whether a

9. Formally, then, a politically effective social identity requires a) that people share a salient
attribute; b) that nearly all are aware that they share it; c) that nearly all are aware that nearly all are
aware that they share that attribute; d) that nearly all realise that, in virtue of a, b and c, they share an
interest that can be promoted by appealing to and acting in terms of what they share.
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 20

people were “truly Miyanmin,” and suggest that they were not, even though they
spoke Miyan, it was because the people in question had effectively abandoned taro
gardening: taro, most Miyanmin say, is their bone.

It would probably be unwise to suggest that the incorporation of the Miyan

population into the Australian colonial regime was sufficient to produce an identity-
for-itself. It was, however, necessary for the emergence of a shared consciousness of
a common identity, which, in turn is necessary for the creation of an identity-for-
itself. I said earlier that pre-colonial identity was pronominal, and that it could only
serve to underpin indexically narrow or indefinitely vague identities tied to particular
contexts. In imposing the Telefol name “Miyanmin,” and making language the
effective criterion for its proper application, the Australian administration fostered the
emergence of Miyan identity because they also produced a social context to which
that identity was relevant. Miyan speakers became aware of their Miyanminness, and
the mutual identification of groups of people with that ethnonym was an aspect of
social action in their transformed environment. Yet there was no real context that
demanded Miyanmin collectively organise in terms of that identity, which is what is
needed if we are to speak of an effective identity-for-itself. Events of the last few
years, however, have come close to doing so.

The Nena deposit and its challenges

In the early 90’s, geologists working for Highlands Gold discovered the Nena
gold and copper deposit, on land that local Miyanmin people regarded as their own.
This claim, though, was disputed by local lowland Telefol communities that had
established their presence in the area through force of arms 100 years or so ago. The
dispute had to be resolved because the powerful external institutions involved
(Western companies, the PNG government and so on) operated with a notion of
ownership rather than sovereignty as the basic form of legitimate possession.
Consequently, the northern Ok, as individuals and as communities, were faced with
the practical necessity of responding to these new imperatives in the terms in which
they were being couched. And that was not easy.

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that local identities were

sometimes reconfigured. I argued earlier that the “kinds,” which marked differences
in origin, nevertheless formerly constituted part of the skein of relations that linked
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 21

communities to one another. Under the pressure of determining who “owned” the
Nena deposit, the same conceptions sometimes became the basis for differentiating
between members of a local community. In other cases, the links and alliances
between communities that in the past had been actively maintained were subjected to
a variety of strains by the new context. Conversely, consanguineal links between very
different communities created by demographic raiding showed signs of becoming the
basis for alliances, especially in the complex politics that grew up around the
representative “landowner” bodies negotiating with the developer and government
departments. For example, when the son of an Owininga woman captured by a
southerly Miyan community sought a place on the landowner organisation officially
recognised by the developer, the Frieda Mine Landowners’ Association (FMLA), he
was strongly supported not only by many (but not all) the members of his own
community, but by the majority of Owininga.

I cannot go further here into the complexities of the different sorts of

problems communities faced (see Gardner, in press), but I do want to examine the
broad characteristics of the dispute between the Miyan and Telefol communities
immediately involved.

Throughout the dispute, everyone agreed that at least one of the

autochthonous groups that had occupied the Nena valley was the Ontou; but what
became the subject of a protracted dispute was which side, the local Telefolmin or the
local Miyanmin, could legitimately lay claim to that identity. On one side were the
two lowlands Telefol settlements, whose members claimed that they had wiped out all
the Ontou except those they had captured and integrated into their own populations;
on the other side were the Miyans of the Wamei miit. The Wamei Miyans, by their
own and other Miyanmin accounts, have occupied the upper May and Nena valleys
since the time of the original ancestors, except for periods when strategic withdrawals
were necessary, whereupon the area became a frontier zone that could be used, with
caution, but not settled. They claim to have been related to Ontouten inhabitants of
the lower and middle Nena, even that Ontou was a shoot of the Wamei stem, and to
have absorbed into their own community the remnants that fled from Telefol raiders.
George Morren and Dan Jorgensen collected—from the Miyan and Telefol,
respectively—long, detailed accounts of the history area, but it proved hard to
reconcile these, even in relation to quite recent events.
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 22

The dispute between the Telefol and Miyan claimants was much more
involved than I have suggested, but, for our purposes, what matters is what they
shared: both sides claimed a decisive continuity with the former inhabitants, and both
were faced with the difficult question of how each could constitute as “landowners” a
subset of all those who, in pre-colonial times, were connected with the area in
question. For, on both sides, there were many people who might easily have been
living, gardening and raising children in the communities contending for “ownership”
status, but who happened not to be. Moreover, both sides had only maintained what
sovereignty they enjoyed in the area because of the social relations that bound them to
people in other places and entailed their military support. Yet, the occidental
institutions now posing questions about land demanded answers that would produce
an exclusive, determinate and projectible set of “landowners:” a set of named persons,
or an unequivocal criterion by which they could be enumerated. In effect, then, this
meant that the communities on each side, at least for the purposes of the official
definition of a “landowner,” had to disregard the social relationships that had been a
sine qua non of their reproduction.

The leaders on each side were acutely aware of the difficulties they faced.
They knew that, in a very real sense, their community’s very identity could not be
defined except by reference to the relations with people in other places in which they
were enmeshed, yet these could not be accommodated in the terms being presented to
them by the developer and the state. In the event, and after a protracted dispute, the
leaders of the immediate communities proposed the same solution (which was, in
truth, the only one they could propose). What we might call the “synecdochic
solution” forced upon them meant that the territorially localised part a wider network
of relations would be designated by the neologistic term, “landowner,” and then,
when the resources made available by the new arrangements began to flow, these
would be made available to the whole network through existing social relationships.
Of course, those to be excluded by this definition feared that, rather than being
merely the registration of an aspect of existing social relations, it represented the
promulgation of new social entities, with new conditions of social reproduction, from
which they would be effectively excluded, the continued use of old “kind” names
notwithstanding.
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 23

Yet, which of the protagonists had the best claim to Ontou identity remained
unresolved. Interestingly, the issue of language loomed large in the Telefol case
against the Miyanmin. They argued strongly that the Ontou had spoken a language
other than Miyan. Wamei leaders, for their part, did not stress a common language,
but concentrated instead on the shared genealogical origins of the Ontou and the
Miyan. On two occasions, however, young Miyan men claiming descent from the
Ontou expressed to me the view that “Ontou were not Miyan,” though they were
quickly corrected by older men present (see below).

At the height of the dispute, there was talk on each side of the iniquities of the
other, defined ethnonymically. There was a definite sense of it being a case of the
Miyanmin versus the Telefolmin: victories over their enemies were retold frequently
in terms of a general "us-them" opposition, even in areas very distant from the
deposit. This growing sense of cultural identity among the Miyanmin was expressed
in a small but significant way by several men, who told me that I should write in my
reports that they were Miyanten, not Miyanmin. The suffix -ten is the Miyan
equivalent of the Telefol -min, and people expressed displeasure at the continued use
of the Telefol version of their name, even though, while they were making these
claims, it was possible to hear Miyan speakers persist in referring to themselves as a
whole as “Miyanmin.” I had never heard the usage “Miyanten” in earlier trips,
whereas the older miit identities, likewise rendered in the Telefol form in government
documents (e.g. Oboblikmin), were most usually referred to in Miyan terms
(Oboblikten).

Despite the widespread readiness to oppose counter-claimants to Nena in

terms of ethnonyms, and the development of at least the potential for collective action
in those terms, nothing eventuated. Although, initially, there were many on the
Telefol side who insisted both that the Wamei Miyan and the Ontou were different
“kinds,” and that it was untrue that survivors of Telefol raiding had been assimilated
into Wamei communities, George Morren’s investigations, and my own, spoke
unequivocally against this view. On the other side, while there were many Miyan who
were reluctant to acknowledge that the lowland Telefols had any claim at all to Ontou
status, the Wamei Miyans, who had formerly enjoyed close relations with the Telefol
communities, knew better; they were well aware that a number of Ontou captives had
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 24

been incorporated into the Telefol communities and knew that many living there now
could trace their descent from these.

After some years of pressure from government agents and the developer for a
resolution of the dispute at the local level, during which time anxiety grew about the
judgement an administrative investigation might deliver, the protagonists reached an
agreement that was officially signed and ratified in July 1997. As far as I can tell,
events unfolded as follows: in 1996, leaders of the Wamei Miyans obtained from an
on-site manager at Nena a copy of the report Tom Moylan had produced, in 1979, for
the Carpenteria Exploration Company, the company that had pioneered exploration in
the Frieda system. Moylan’s genealogical investigations among both Telefol and
Miyan communities in the area encouraged the Miyan to approach the local Telefol
leaders and propose a solution: since the Ontou “kind” was distributed between both
communities, and was, in effect, still in existence, the Ontou should be declared the
“landowners.” Initially, there was some stiff opposition to the proposal from within
the Telefol ranks, for those who can claim Ontou descent is a subset of the Kialik
“kind” that preponderates in both Telefol settlements in the lowlands as well as in
many southern Telefol areas. Eventually, though, this proposal was accepted. In July
1997, compensation payments that had been frozen for several years because of the
dispute were released and split evenly between the Telefol Ontou and Miyan Ontou.
So an old device, which formerly had the effect of linking whole—often distant—
communities through the sharing of “kinds” that constituted parts of each, has now
been pressed into service as a means for carving out those parts and forging a new
(presently somewhat nominal) unity. I have no information on how the considerable
sums of money released were divided among the Ontou and non-Ontou segments of
the respective communities, but, I imagine, there is now scope for new alignments of
interest that will cut across old divisions in highly consequential ways.10

Conclusion
In closing, I would like to muse briefly on what the history of the general
northern Ok area suggests about its forms of sociality. It seems to me that the
importance of bilateral filiation, the intermixture of “kinds,” and the movements of
individuals and groups that result in the forging of new communities, all suggest that

10 In the last few years development of the Nena deposit has been drastically scaled back because of
unfavourable economic conditions, but I no data on how local communities have reacted.
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 25

the social life of the area cannot be viewed simply as an aspect of the relations
between groups constituted by a given cultural or ethnic identity; it is at least as
accurate to say that cultural or ethnic identity was (over the medium term) a mutable
and, perhaps, provisional aspect of relations between social groups of smaller
compass. Let me illustrate the point I am trying to make with a final anecdote.

In 1995, on my first visit to Iae, an Owininga settlement on the Seniap River,

I was surprised to find there three young men from the Soga Miyanmin community in
the Uk Valley, many, many days walk away. They had been there for about a week,
enjoying the hospitality of the Owininga (Yanfatmin) people, in raiding whom their
fathers and elder brothers had formerly expended so much time and energy. They had
walked there--over a two-week period--from the Nena site, after a six-week stint of
work on the project’s labour line, subsisting on what they could hunt and gather on
the way. Relations between the young men and the Owininga inhabitants of Iae were
evidently friendly--even warm.

In explanation of their presence, the young men told me that they had wanted
to visit their Owininga kinsmen. Puzzled, I asked them for more details. To cut a long
story short, they were descended from a man named Biikere, who had been adopted
into Soga after the fighting in which the Miyanmin won the Usake Valley (see
above), and hence were related to the dispossessed Owiningas. I responded that I had
understood it to be the Ontoumin who were driven from the Usage in the round of
fighting under discussion, and that the Ontoumin were a Miyan rather than Owininga
group. The essentialist way in which people like me habitually think about such
questions was highlighted when my interlocutors responded by making it clear that
the either/or presumption behind my question was unfounded. How could anybody be
sure that there were fundamental differences in kind between the Ontoumin and the
Owininga? The Owininga leaders present confirmed all this and, in support, added
that an elderly descendant of Biikere, who had died just before my arrival, was fluent
in the Miyan language. The young men left while I was there, laden with gifts from
their long lost Owininga kin, amid much sorrow and promises of return visits.

Obviously, this is an isolated, small-scale event. But these three young visitors
to Iae may well have laid the foundation for new relations between the Owininga and
the Miyan as such visits between unrelated groups in the past have done. Perhaps, ten
 The advent and history of Miyanmin identity: page 26

years from now, marriages and children that are not the result of raids will for the
first time link these two populations. And in a few generations, perhaps, the
interlinking of “kinds,” and an appropriate mythopoetic rendering of its occurrence,
would mean that the “true” identity of the Owininga was as contestable as that of the
Ontou. Yet had one of the young men contracted, say, cerebral malaria, and died
shortly after his return home, it is possible that his Owininga hosts would have been
divined as responsible, and an intensified enmity between the two groups would have
been the outcome. Such contingencies, however, are a fundamental factor in northern
Ok history.

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