Edited by Francesca Merlan with additional introduction by Marilyn Strathern. Canberra: ANU Press, 2022. vii, 298 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, coloured photos.) US$55.00, paper; free ebook. ISBN 9781760464707.
Only from the late 1920s did a trickle of gold prospectors, Australian colonial officials, missionaries, and the very occasional anthropologist first enter the mountainous interior of Papua New Guinea. There, in the wide intermontane valleys, the incomers encountered large unsuspected populations of sweet potato farming, pig-raising agriculturalists—perhaps the last really major populations to be “discovered” by the outside world. However, it was not until the 1950s, after the pause imposed by World War II, that anthropologists in any number arrived in the Highlands to carry out extended fieldwork. Marie Reay, already experienced as an anthropologist of Aboriginal Australia, was part of this first “wave” of Highland ethnographers. She was almost unique at the time in being a woman working alone in the Highlands, rather than as part of an anthropological husband and wife team. She based herself in the Wahgi Valley, where she was to continue long-term fieldwork from her initial stint in 1953–1955 until after her retirement in 1988. She is best known to Highland ethnographers from her early monograph The Kuma (Melbourne University Press, 1959).
Wives and Wanderers—Reay’s second monograph on the people whom she originally called “Kuma,” but here refers to as the “Minj people”—is an unusual book. We owe its publication, long after Reay’s death in 2004, to painstaking excavation among her papers by Francesca Merlan, whose editor’s introduction describes how the book was pieced together from different drafts of the various chapters, the latest composed perhaps in the mid-1960s, and places it in the context of later anthropological focus on women’s lives in the Highlands. The book also incorporates an illuminating second introduction by Marilyn Strathern, which reflects on the experimental “storytelling” mode Reay adopted in these now-published drafts. The book further includes five appendices, ranging from fragments of Reay’s fieldnotes, to letters from Reay to Canberra friends, to Michael Young’s obituary of her.
The backdrop against which Reay’s “storytelling” accounts unfold is the Minj people’s social system, in which women were treated essentially as counters in the relationship between often closely intermarried clans. In adolescence, girls had the freedom to summon courting partners from different clans; on marriage, they became essentially goods packed off to satisfy a complex network of obligations and debts in brides between clans. Some girls accepted their fate, conscious of the bridewealth and other life-cycle payments which their natal clans would receive, and despite the hostility that an incoming wife was likely to face from existing co-wives of her designated husband. Later, such in-marrying wives would combine with others in-married from the same clan of origin to funnel brides back to their common natal clan. Other girls vigorously rejected their intended fate but were violently forced into it, sometimes with the connivance of their mothers, ran away (so threatening to undo the complex exchanges of valuables initiated by marriage), were re-captured, beaten, and once more consigned to the husband selected for them. Occasional girls succeeded in avoiding this fate, escaping more than once, sometimes to enemy clans, and became the “wanderers” of Reay’s title, the antithesis of the “good wife.” By the early 1950s, however, the Australian colonial administration had introduced a policy of laik bilong meri: “favouring women’s wishes,” which was beginning to undercut men’s control of women’s marital fates.
Reay’s first monograph had already provided an outline of this system. What Wives and Wanderers now gives us is an instantiation of the drastic pressures the system placed on women, presented through a series of colourfully entitled chapters (“A girl is marked,” “Lothario gains a bride,” etc.). These often include lengthy passages of dialogue, in direct speech, in ways which invite us into the world of the people involved; so, to take one example, people say things “resignedly,” “sneeringly,” “heavily,” “aghast” (147). As Strathern observes in her introduction, these are less “case studies” and more “something bordering on a ‘reconstructive fantasy”’ (46), reflecting Reay’s interest in writing and in poetry, which this book also documents. In places, Reay’s prose is perilously close to Mills and Boon (“his broad shoulders and slim hips, and the rippling muscles of his arms and legs were beautifully proportioned” 96). Even for its time, this was unconventional for academic writing and one can understand why Reay might have hesitated to publish the volume, as Merlan notes.
Nevertheless, the full range of tensions vividly realized in Wives and Wanderers rang historically true for this reviewer, carrying out fieldwork a generation later in another Wahgi-speaking community (Michael O’Hanlon, Reading the Skin: adornment, display and society among the Wahgi, British Museum Publications, 1989). It would, however, have been easier to follow Reay’s dramatic retellings had the book included diagrams to illustrate the interwoven kinship relationships and the different levels of group segmentation involved—especially given her decision to conceal the identities of the dramatis personae by giving them distracting English back-translations of their local names. The book also provides intriguing glimpses of how the Minj people were using interpreters and coastal policemen in the area as sounding boards to judge the likely reaction of colonial authorities in advance of formal court cases. Additionally, the book is a partial autoethnography of the anthropologist herself and her times, revealing both her long-term commitment but also, on occasion, her unsettling direct physical engagement (“I insisted on taking her to the bathhouse and scrubbing her myself,” 277: this in a letter home, of a Minj woman whose hair dyeing had horrified Reay). Incomplete, flawed, but also original in its presentation, and definitely of its time, the book remains valuable historical evidence both of the people and of its pioneering and prickly author.
Michael O’Hanlon
University of Oxford, Oxford