JAMES LEACH

Situated connections. Rights

and intellectual resources in a
Rai Coast society

In this article I will provide some ethnographic material to add to the ongoing debate
about the ownership of and rights in intellectual property.1 Some of this debate has
appeared in the pages of this journal (Born 1996; Strathern 1996b; Strathern et al.
1998). I agree that there is much to be done in thinking through the relevance and
applicability that issues surrounding intellectual property rights (IPR) have on anthropological practices and interventions.
Here I attempt to outline the ways in which knowledge can be owned by particular persons or groups in a non-western context. In doing this, I follow the lead Harrison
has set in thinking about ritual knowledge in Melanesia as exactly a form of intellectual
property (Harrison 1992). Harrisons point is that in a Melanesian gift economy, the
things people give in exchange are inseparable from their identity. This makes a parallel
with Euro-American IPR in which the potential future use of a persons creative work
may be ascribed to them through the granting of a patent or copyright. A connection is
maintained between the person who had the original idea and brought it into being as
an invention or application, and the potential future (in terms of profit) of that idea.
This is achieved through limiting the use other persons may make of the embodied idea.
I present a case in which the limitations placed on who may use others intellectual resources are played out through different assumptions. Although people in
Melanesia have forms of ownership over intellectual property that have even been
described as copyright (Gunn 1994), the conceptual domains within which they are
able to limit the use of resources are of course very different.
We start, however, with a similarity. In certain Melanesian and certain western
contexts, knowledge is defined as a certain kind of resource (Strathern et al. 1998:
110). Strathern points out that the new interest in IPR in the west comes from the
possibility that there are new ways in which knowledge may be exploited for economic ends. Knowledge enters the market place. Thus the idioms, or discursive routes,
1 Fieldwork among Nekgini speakers was carried out during 19945 and 1999 with support from the
ESRC. My thanks are due to Reite community, and especially in this context, to Poiyong and
Salong, Palota and Nangu, Porer, and Peter Nombo. This article was written while the author was
Leverhulme Special Research Fellow in the department of Social Anthropology at the University
of Cambridge. Grateful acknowledgement is also made for the support of the Isaac Newton Trust
in Cambridge, and of the department. In a previous incarnation, this article benefited from the criticism and advice of Simon Harrison, Michael OHanlon, Marilyn Strathern, Eric Hirsch and Don
Gardner. I am grateful to them all.

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people are able to follow in establishing a connection, subsequently sanctioned in law,

to such knowledge become of prime importance. Coombe, in a recent stimulating
account, gives an in-depth analysis of the basis of such claims in the US, as well as a
critique of the political implications of allowing idioms of ownership over images to
have a life of their own in cultural terms (Coombe 1998).
But here is exactly the move that the people in the case I discuss do not make.
People on the Rai coast of Papua New Guinea do not make a habitual distinction
between ritual, procreative and economic spheres of practice. Knowledge there is a
certain kind of resource also. But an economic one? The parallel and distinctive move,
whereby knowledge itself can be defined through its potential in economic terms, is
not made. As I hope to outline below in an extended ethnographic case study, knowledge is intimately bound up with the production of persons and identity. As those
who write on the growing importance of heritage and cultural property will testify,
this connection brings its own forms of essentialisation (Stolcke 1995). But we must
remember that they are forms of essentialisation fostered by the particular connections
Euro-Americans uncover between persons and things when forced into doing so by
among other things litigation.
This article seeks to uncover a different mode of making such connections. That is,
it looks to outline mechanisms that work to limit claims to knowledge in a context until
now beyond the purview of international treaties on IPR.2 In a sense, then, this article
is an effort to identify what kinds of connection can be sustained, rather than severed,
when people on the Rai coast of Papua New Guinea make objects out of knowledge.
One source of interest in all this is the fact that we too must work to keep
separate the domains of economy and procreation; increasingly so, under a regime of
technological innovation which promises to provide body parts as commodities on the
open market. Margaret Jane Radins recent work on the notion of the commodity
makes plain the increasing difficulty we have in maintaining previous distinctions
between such domains. Hers too is a political critique, but her argument about a
dialectic of contextuality in some sense serves to highlight the problems faced by
people who think the same actions in different domains have completely different
moral weight. Her book shows the struggle needed to keep the commodity and its
idioms of market transactability from family relations (Radin 1996).
Georgina Borns work on intellectual property in the information technology (IT)
industry (Born 1996) illustrates how the struggle to limit the life of ones creative work
is played out in an IT research group. Her case is a fascinating ethnography in which
a complex sociology of explicit and hidden modes of limiting the usefulness of a
person or groups knowledge to others, is made apparent. It is with a hope of trying
to provide some more ethnographic alternatives with which to think through IPR
issues that I offer the following. I come back to Born, Strathern and others at the end.

Owning stories
During my fieldwork among Nekgini speakers in Reite hamlets3 during 19945 and
2 Although this seems unlikely to remain the case for long.
3 Nekgini is a non-Austronesian language of roughly 800 speakers. Reite hamlets, around one quarter of this population, are situated between 8 and 10 km inland and at between 300 and 500 m a.s.l.
on the Rai Coast. This coast lies within Madang province in Papua New Guinea, to the south and
east of Madang town, and backed by the steep and rugged Finisterre mountain range.

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1999, people were concerned to only tell me of knowledge that they themselves
owned. This was not for them an issue of concern at providing inaccurate accounts
to an anthropologist, but rather concern that they would be liable, in a local legal
sense, for passing on to me any knowledge they claimed to own. People have clear
ideas about who owns certain knowledge, and therefore who has the right to elucidate
it. I make the argument that passing on knowledge, ritual forms or designs, is open to
challenge for a specific reason. That is, expressing knowledge amounts to claiming
inclusion in the relationships (including those to land and spirits) which generate that
knowledge.
The history of colonial power and missionary activity are worth briefly outlining.
Missionaries and government representatives (often seen as the same thing) claimed
connection to a powerful deity (Christianity), and Rai coast people interpreted this
connection as the source of their wealth in weapons and food. Unsurprisingly, when
Nekgini claims to such connection were either denied by mission workers (natives
were satanic in their beliefs) or yielded no material results (the failure of colonial
development programmes; see Lawrence 1964), local people became resentful and
banished mission workers from their villages. For Nekgini people the ownership of
stories is a claim of connection to the source of power spoken of in those stories.
Hence we see both a jealous protection of Nekgini stories and claims made in them for
connection to western goods and knowledge (these things figure in Nekgini myth).
Missionaries denied Reite peoples connection to their stories (the Bible) as fiercely as
Nekgini people deny others access to (expression of) their myths. This denial by
mission workers may well have looked to Nekgini speakers like an attempt to deny
their relationship with the source of power whites evinced.
Some practices Reite people engage in are either so quotidian that they are not
considered knowledge in the above, restricted-access sense, or are commonly owned
by all hamlet groups. Such knowledge is described as public ( pablik in Tok Pisin4).
Everyday practices, such as scraping coconut to cook with or building bush shelters
to sleep in, are not owned in the sense I am talking of here. Specifically, the kinds of
knowledge and practices that are parts of, or arise from, what anthropologists call
myth, are jealously guarded.
In Nekgini, there is a term patuki which translates well as myth. It is the generic
term for all stories of creation and change. Patuki is also the general term for a category of ancestor that appears in stories of discovery or innovation what Lawrence
describes as deities [who] created the important parts of the material culture
(Lawrence 1964: 16; 1965: 204). It also translates well as knowledge. In fact, patuki
means many things. It is what happens when people sit together and discuss an issue;
it is the word for an ancestor beyond the five-generations depth Nekgini speakers
claim as their history; it is the word for the narrative of a story told to children in the
evening, or for that matter the narrative of a story told to an anthropologist seeking
information about the past or the present. Patuki are also present in the landscape of
Reite hamlets as physical features.
Nekgini speakers in Reite village then distinguish knowledge from its source, its
placement or its revelatory medium only by context. In myth, the personification of
knowledge, its discovery and the characters who passed it on, are run together.
Although it is acknowledged by people there that a vital part of each patuki from the
4 Tok Pisin is the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea.

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past is the secret name (paru) of the character involved (it being the name, and
perhaps the tune or voice which goes with that name, which allows people to use a
patuki to aid their endeavour), even the narrative of each patukis doings is jealously
guarded.
Lawrence (1964: 2256) discusses an ideology in which human innovation is
absent from history among the Ngaing, eastern neighbours of Nekgini speakers.5 He
argues that all innovation and discovery was attributed to deities (tut, or patuki in
Nekgini), and that these deities were tied to particular areas of land. While, as will be
seen, it is wrong to say there is no innovation in Nekgini practice, it is a part of the
conception of knowledge I wish to explore here that many aspects of Nekgini
speakers innovation (new ideational forms, i.e. designs or songs), as Lawrence tells us,
are still attributed to the influence of powerful entities beyond normal human consciousness.
How is ownership of stories established, and how is it validated? What use are
stories that they should be the subject of such restrictions? These are interesting intellectual property issues. As will emerge in the rest of this paper, I wish to examine the
possibility that the weight of emphasis placed on the ownership of ideational forms in
Nekgini practice derives from a link they make between land, the history of social
forms (kinship) and creativity. Parallels might be seen between such a position and
current debates in Europe over human substance; as creative in its own right, and as
the object of innovative modification.
What follows is a somewhat detailed discussion of the formative aspects of
Nekgini speakers placement in a network of relationships which generate nurture
(through kin), identity (through affines) and resources (knowledge, land and spirits).
What begins as a discussion of social organisation, moves into descriptions of placement, the creativity placement implies and the languages of belonging this generates.
A concrete system of ownership is outlined focusing on an example (a spirit voice). I
then widen the frame with some comparative discussion of ownership, IPR, and
metaphors or idioms of connection, ending on a cautionary note.

Palems and social or ganisation

A description of Nekgini social identity and personhood involves looking at practices
of exchange and display whereby persons become visible to others as significant social
actors. In the image of a hamlet group produced on such occasions one has a group of
persons appearing as one entity, as the producers of one ritual body. People are either
part of the kin group who make a production or they are the viewers and receivers of
it. It is the history of these groupings that gives people social identity. Though their
5 Nekgini and Ngaing languages are acknowledged to be similar by both groups. There is a degree
of mutual comprehension between them, although they appear distinct to an outsider. There has
been and remains fairly extensive trade, intermarriage and cooperation between Ngaing speakers
living on the western borders of Ngaing territory, and Nekgini speakers from the hamlets of
Serieng and Reite. Ngaing are a far larger population with territories that extend 20 km east of
Reite. The two groups speak of their similarity they are both middle people, belonging neither
to the high forest nor the coast. Languages above and below their territories are incomprehensible
to them. They share also a form of tambaran activity specific to these foothills. Lawrence did not
complete his analysis or presentation of Ngaing data (Lawrence 1984: 1), although others more
recent work is now available (Hermann 1992; Kempf 1996).

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make up and names change over time, these groups embody, as it were, the principles
of growth, production, recognition and identity a Nekgini sociality.6
Reite people belong to social groupings called palem. Palems are both a ritual construction made for affinal payments and the name given to a group of people who contribute labour, wealth or expertise, to produce this construction. When people make
payments to affines for a wifes body or her childs bones,7 they construct a palem
which is literally the platform on which taro is piled and wealth is hung. In doing so,
they become a palem, a social group that is named after the piece of land on which
this construction is built. A palem is constructed anew for each and every affinal presentation, but is only accepted by the recipients if the payment given is for a body. The
platform may only be constructed at the very door of the person who is making the
payment.
The gathering of wealth, garden food, labour and meat for the staging of an affinal payment in the form of a palem is a huge undertaking. It involves the full co-operation and participation of as many people as a man can call upon to aid him. The limits
on who may be called upon are given only by the divide in his own personal relationships between kin who are cognates and those who are affines (ie those who will give
and those who will receive this particular payment). Many people could be both, as
there are no moieties in Nekgini social organisation, and people often marry within
the prescribed limits of exogamy, relying on ritual violence and payments made after
the event to generate enough separation for marriage to appear acceptable. Thus the
construction of a palem crystallises for a moment peoples affinities, connections and
separations along a simple divide between the members and supporters of a newly
fashioned group who make a payment for a wifes body and the receivers of this payment. Each time a palem is made, a different crystallisation of kin relations is possible.
In many cases, those who qualify as both affines and cognates may choose which side
to join (cf Chowning 1989, on the cognatic Molima). I give an example of palem formation below.
A palem as a ritual construction is a decorated platform with garden food and
wealth piled on it. Construction requires support from the spirit cult (tambaran in
Tok pisin/kaapu in Nekgini8) of the person building it. It is usually built between the
cult house of the hamlet and the house of the named donor. Significantly, all other res6 The influence of colonial and post-colonial changes in the Nekgini world are apparent in more and
less visible ways on the make-up of, and positioning of, palem groups. Colonial authorities
required centralised villages for ease of administration, and such settlements to some degree persist, but more so, interestingly, among their Ngaing neighbours than on Nekgini lands. Ngaingspeaking residents of Maibang village are self-conscious modernisers who have adopted
Christianity in place of kastom (customary ways). Reite villagers however turned away from the
Christian missions after some years under their influence in the 1940s and 1950s. It does not
amount to proof, but the tendency for Reite hamlets towards dispersed, small, land-based residence
groups while Maibang is a centralised village clustered around a road, suggests that these differences are more than superficial. There are other influences such as cash-cropping (minimal in Reite)
and (even more minimal) labour migration. Yet I do not believe the absence of these influences
from what follows is particularly significant omission in the context of the present comparison.
7 The Nekgini idioms for bride payments and child payments respectively.
8 The term tambaran is a word in the lingua franca of PNG, Tok Pisin. It generally denotes a male
ancestral cult. I use it here interchangeably with the Nekgini term kaap/kaapu. The full polyvalent
referents of these two terms, used interchangeably by Nekgini speaking people today, will become
clear in the text.

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idents of the hamlet that constructs a palem are classed as one door with the maker
of that construction. The structure is at their door also. These people are not only one
door, but become one palem through their part in the production of the presentation. Future reference to all the residents of this hamlet (whether they are agnates,
cognates or strangers) will be in the name of the land on which the palem was constructed. Their future identity, and that of their children, remains that of the palem in
which they reside until they move away and are involved in the construction of a
palem on another named piece of land. Children of people who co-operate in constructing a palem as an affinal payment will use sibling terms to address one another
from this moment on. While it is usual for brothers (land is controlled by men) to
make a palem together, there are also many cases of palems made by cross cousins, or
even by more distant relatives.
There is a history of palems, and people will remember past co-operation in the
construction of palems, and refer to those made one palem through previous palem
association as siblings. Descendants who can trace their ancestors membership of a
single palem are thus linked as the descendants of siblings. They ought not marry one
another. People do not forget past associations in this form, thus although there are at
present six hamlets that go under the administrative name of Reite, there are many
more names of palems that people associate through from the past. Reite itself is the
name of a palem from the distant past. Land ownership is not simply associated with
palems it is not a palem that owns land. Rather, members of palems who have
inherited land, usually from their fathers, bring these lands into the service of producing or reproducing a palem as a named social unit alongside others.
I maintain that the palem, which Nekgini speakers unhelpfully translate as clan in
Tok Pisin,9 is the basis of a complex and generative kinship network. As Andrew
Strathern (1973) has pointed out, co-residence often creates kinship in PNG (see also
Weiner 1988), and this created problems for analysts such as Lawrence, working with
an African lineage model (Barnes 1962). Strathern concludes that the essence of the
problem faced by analysts of PNG highland societies lay in the tension between
society and biology, or between social relationships and genealogical relationships, in
anthropological accounts. It seems for Nekgini speakers that substance is something
that accumulates through co-residence and sharing. Pre-given genealogical connection
(in the sense of biogenetic substance) does not figure prominently in their reckoning.
Male landholding and virilocal marriage result in hamlet sites, and therefore palem
sites, that do not necessarily change rapidly. It is both acceptable and in many ways
preferable to use the passae (male cult-house, haus tambaran in Tok Pisin) and hamletsite of ones father. Without rigidity in their recruitment, palem often have histories of
many generations. But the history is one of a site that gives its name to those making
a palem there. Newcomers and their children are accommodated as palem konaki (one
palem). Their children are siblings to those of other residents. This gives a form of
coherence, an appearance of a lineage, without reference to biogenetic inheritance of
substance.
One will often find a palem on the borders between lands owned by the members.
Ideally, people who are one door co-operate in everyday tasks and share garden food.
They may garden different land, but bringing its produce back to the one door makes
9 Unhelpfully because I was lulled into believing for some months that these clans were based on
descent from common ancestors.

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them appear as one entity (hamlet), as of one place. The image of being from one
door may be taken further. The offspring of residents of the same palem are siblings
by definition, and thus emerged, as it were, from the same body.

Pr oduction and land

The making of a palem is the responsibility of the man and wife who wish to make a
payment to their affines. Palem construction begins with producing a large garden of
taro. Reite people do not plant taro nothing (as they describe it); they have garden
magic involving the names of taro deities ( pel-patuki), and secret procedures for
ensuring that the taro grows correctly, that it replenishes itself in the garden, tastes
sweet and so on. For a man and his wife who need to produce an affinal payment in
the form of a palem, the first responsibility is to produce abundantly from garden
land. People have few pigs here, and one pig is all that is required for an affinal payment (i.e. it is not the only item given). There ought to be dried marsupials and other
wild meat caught through hunting on a mans land given in these presentations, and
also some leftover to feed his own spirits (kaapu/tambaran) when they are first called
to the hamlet. Hunting successfully involves the knowledge of names of places and
events in the land on which he hunts, and what Lawrence (1964: 17) describes as strict
taboos on food and sexual relations. Growing pigs likewise is accomplished speedily
when a man has knowledge of esoteric names, procedures and specific mythic places
from which substance for the pigs growth is drawn.
When his garden is ready to be harvested, a man enlists the support of the kaap
(tambaran) spirits which reside in pools, formed by springs in the limestone landscape. These kaap spirits are summoned from their different pools on land owned by
his close kin. They are brought to the hamlets mens house, where they are kept out
of the sight of women. Spirits are thought actively to contribute to the preparations
for the palem from there. Their presence is known by their musical but eerie voices
(Leach 1999), and by the presence of the men of the cult who accompany them night
and day on slit-gong (kiramu or garamut in Tok Pisin) and hourglass ( pariwah)
drums. While the kaapu are in residence, the owner of the production must keep them
fed with meat. The group of initiated men who watch over the spirits are known collectively as the tambaran. This entity of men and spirits in combination moves
around during the day, busy with preparations. It is sent to bring back newly dug taro
and yam from the gardens, to cut timber for the palem platform and to erect a coconut
mast that stands beside the construction, imagined as the donor. Surrounding hamlets
hear of all this work. Everywhere the tambaran goes men accompany it, and the spirit
voices call, warning women and children to hide themselves.10 At each completed stage
10 It is strictly forbidden for any women to see the tambaran in all Reite hamlets. They are sent to
gardens to unearth taro, but then scatter at the approach of the tambaran, and hide in the houses
when the tambaran works on the palem. Highly significant to my understanding of the way persons are gendered in Reite, there are classes of female who do not count as women and thus do not
have this restriction. Girls before puberty have the same restrictions as boys before initiation. They
may witness tambaran activity as long as they are not conscious of it is such. Women past the
menopause are free to see the tambaran. It is common in fact for old women to enter the house of
the tambaran to sweep and clean it. When I questioned a group of men about this, Urangari
answered me in Tok Pisin ol man ya (They are people). The penalty for fertile women seeing
the tambaran, it is told, is swift and sure death for the whole hamlet group.

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of the preparation, slit-gong drums are beaten announcing the achievement. When the
coconut mast is raised, for example, the beat for coconut is repeated many times. Thus
affines and receivers are made aware of the progress of the hamlets tambaran and are
reminded of their obligation to come and receive the payment. It is said that it is the
tambaran that pulls the receivers to the exchange.
During the construction and performance, the man in whose name the palem is
made is taught the names ( paru) of patuki who allow the successful completion of each
stage of the production. This is done in the context of the tambaran. From the very
outset in the garden, it is a mans knowledge of local names, myths and animating spirits that allows him to grow the elements that are finally given away.

Places pr oducing kin

In the hamlet of Sarangama a palem presentation was made to two separate groups of
affines on a single day in 1994. Although it was more usual for a single presentation to
be made by a hamlet and a single palem to be constructed at one time, the payments
made on this occasion provide illustrative evidence of the sociology of such exchanges.
Both palem were prepared as payments for/by children to their maternal kin. The two
men staging the payments were co-resident in the hamlet of Sarangama. One of the
men, Palota, originated from a palem group called Kumundung, physically proximate
to Sarangama and recognised to have been closely allied to them in the past.
Kumundung had come under the protection of Sarangama at some time early in this
century when its population had been decimated. They had moved from their own
land to the hamlet occupied by Sarangama. In 1994, there were only two adult brothers, and their two sisters,11 who cited Kumundung as their origin. The elder of these
brothers had recently returned to live on Kumundung land, while the younger of the
brothers was resident in the hamlet of Sarangama. This younger brother (Palota) was
the man making one of the palem that day.
The second palem was constructed by a man named Nangu, the eldest surviving
child of one of the two old men who claimed Sarangama as their origin. He was
making a payment for his third child to a brother of his wife. The relation of Palota
and Nangu was distant. Along one possible route of reckoning, Palota was connected
to Nangu as FMFBSDS; along another cited by Palota, Nangu was his MMFBSS.
They practised name avoidance appropriate to cross-cousins. Yet the preparation for
the palem they were to display was made together, pooling the resources of their lands,
their supporters and their tambaran spirits. Nangus father, brother-in-law (by his
sisters marriage), sister and other members of Sarangama hamlet (his siblings) helped
Palota with food, labour and, in the case of the old Sarangama man, invaluable advice
about the procedure for palem construction. In parallel, Palota and his wife and
brother rendered assistance to Nangu, housing their tambaran in the single passae of
the hamlet and providing labour for him.
Now it was said that there was one tambaran (ie collection of men and spirits)
responsible for the presentation of both palem and for pulling the receivers to the
hamlet. The presentation came from different kin within the hamlet of Sarangama, and
thus from land owned by different people. Subsequently, Nangu and Palota continued
to practise the name avoidance appropriate to cross-cousins. However, their relation11 Married into other hamlets.

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ship from this time forward was as one door, one palem ( palem konaki). To the
receivers of the payments, their destination was the hamlet Sarangama. Sharing the
cult-house ( passae) on this occasion regenerated the kin connection between Nangu
and Palota, joint producers of the palem at Sarangama.
In her description of malangan ceremonies in New Ireland, Suzanne Kchler
makes points relevant to my explanation of Nekgini payments. She describes how the
ritual confederations which arise through sharing land and sharing the memory of a
carved image (malangan) do not depend on clan affiliation. The regulation of
relationships over land, labour and loyalty is virtually independent of clan identity and
marriage. It is articulated rather with participation in the mortuary ceremonies which
climax in the production of sculptures (Kchler 1992: 96). People who share the
memory of a carved image, presented on the death of a person, purchase this right
from the kin of the deceased. This occurs at a ceremony named after the generic term
for the carved images themselves: malangan. Sharing the rights over reproduction of
an image (that purchased at a malangan ceremony) gives rights over the land of the
deceased. The confederation of persons with rights to reproduce this image share the
land of which the image is the skin (tak). Sharing land is the determining criteria for
membership of these federations, as joint work on the land implies joint work for the
dead, and is thus articulated by the joint memory of the image that is produced at this
time. The intimate relation between land and sculptured image is highlighted by the
indigenous term for skin (tak) which applies to both . . . Those who share land on
account of sharing the memory of an image call each other of one skin (namam
retak) (Kchler 1992: 96).
Sharing land in Reite, and sharing the site from which payments (bodies) generated by this land are given away, make persons one door to one another one palem.
There is a perception of a single source for the offspring of a place a single container
from which they emerge as they appear at the same door. Those who share a palem
also share a named place. Palem as social groups are more than ritual confederations,
they are kin confederations in which connections to co-residents and supporters are
generated through sharing in the labour of producing food, children and bodies of
wealth to give away. Separations from other places (affines) are demonstrated through
the removal of a payment from an (apparently) singular source.
In the New Ireland case cited above, death brings about a recognition of the placement of the living in terms of realignments and exchanges focusing on the deceased.
Confederations of those who share land are articulated by their rights to use a single
image on the death of a kinsman. Now in Reite, payments are made during life that
anticipate the placement of the person on their death. Buying bodies and bones
through the construction of a palem makes distinctions between affinal groups visible
while persons themselves are still alive. These distinctions between kin become distinctions between places on the death of the person. Their remains can only be kept in
one place. It is this that is paid for by palem construction. Bones are thought to give
(destructive and defensive) power to a place. And the kin connection that comes
through sharing one place is deferred to the next generation.
One might say that the alignments of kin made in palem construction have future
consequences that are articulated by the placement of bones after death. Adding to a
place through the power of bones makes the source of the offspring of that place all
the more singular. Thus the children of Nangu and Palota became siblings children
of one palem or named place.

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Spirits, placement and connection.

The final throw of a palem construction is the right of the maker of the palem to
follow home the recipients and dance on the ashes of his fire (the fire that cooked the
pig he gave). The hosts then gather up their spirits, designs, instruments and decorations and go to the receivers hamlet to dance. The group of men who go and dance
use other patuki (mythic knowledge) and paru (names of ancestors) to make their
voices and appearances irresistible to those that will observe their dancing performance.12 A lot of effort is put into decorating the dancers. Reite hamlets have the knowledge of how to make torr posts that single men carry on their heads throughout the
performance. These 23m long wooden posts are carved with the images of the kaapu
that they accompany, and with geometric designs dreamed by men and inspired by
this group of kaap spirits. The posts are brightly painted, and carry in relief images of
the animals or birds associated with the sacred pools of the spirits the men take with
them.13 Other men spend days on another task the cooking of perfume, including the
potent scent-glands of marsupials. They gather leaves from their own plantings on the
edges of gardens and feathers from birds in their lands to decorate themselves.
The purpose of all this preparation is to generate emotion in the viewers. Like
Kaluli gisaro (Schieffelin 1976) a performance is judged successful if it causes tears and
wailing among the audience. The anticipation is for people, especially women, to
follow the dancers and their kaapu home, falling in love with the smell, sight and most
of all, the resonant voices of the men and women from the visiting hamlet singing
together with their animating spirits. The songs they sing speak of the land from which
the dancers come, and of the process of life in that land.
Text of Saksakting a kaap owned by Poiyong Salong, Ripia Palem, Saruk hamlet
Saksakting tipor-ee
Saksakting (water) builds up
Saksakting is a spring pool where kaapu spirits reside. Here, calling the name of the spirits and
pool in one, the words give agency to the water itself. Tipor is to build up, as in when a stream is
dammed Saksakting creates and fills its own pool.
Saksakting soleki
Saksakting broke
Like a basin being filled and pouring over the edges, this is about movement now, it is as if it is
the first time Saksakting runs, fills its pool and then pours itself over the top of the dam it has
made.
Saksakting kambusi
Saksakting dirty
Saksakting water is dirty, as in flood a flow that shovels all along with it, swirling and brown.
Saksakting hololai
Saksakting waters meet
Below the spirit pool two other small streams join (holiting) the main stream.
sirisir mambumaambu
two names for a (one) flowering plant that covers the ground alongside the upper reaches of the
stream course.

12 These are powerful forms of love magic.

13 Leach (1999) contains photographs of torr posts, and also recordings of tambaran performances.

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gorumio mukumei
Ficus leaves fall.
In the hot dry season, leaves of the ficus tree turn gold and fall. They lie yellow and bright around
the edges of the water, and floating in it. When these leaves fall it is time to set fire to new-cut gardens, a good time.
tuling yowarieng
Kanda vine pulls
A man pulls at a vine growing by the stream.
tuling karoro [karoreit]
Kanda vine caught.
No more movement. This is the line to finish this tambaran song.

I give the text of just one such song for illustration. These simple words are repeated
many times in each verse of the song, and follow the lead of the voice of the spirit of
this specific place. The evocation of memory, of movement and flow (cf. Weiner 1991)
is that of animation and life. The songs and decorations show peoples knowledge of
the places they live (Feld 1996). Movement in the words of the song, in the voice of
the spirit Saksakting which they accompany, by the dancers themselves, and the
designs they carry on torr posts, do not speak of a place as a static or represented surface (Gow 1995), but rather as a kind of land that is the culmination of, and substance
for, intersecting social relations and forms ( palems and persons).
An interesting aspect of this form of ritual production is the fact that new spirits
and new tambaran personas (linked tunes, names, songs and designs) are coming into
being all the time. That is, people dream of new spirits, and in those dreams the
tune/voice, designs and name of the tambaran is revealed to the dreamer. These spirits are then revealed to others in a performance. Control over the use of these new
spirits, like the old ones, is of great concern to Nekgini speakers. The only circumstance in which others may use the tune and form of a spirit in their own performances
is if they have permission granted as a part of the wealth given in exchange.
The mechanisms of connection are interesting. For despite the individual revelation, one that places the dreamer in a position of some standing in the wider community, there is no sense in which this spirit belongs exclusively to this man, or in
which he would be able to transact its image for reproduction elsewhere, even as part
of a bridewealth exchange, without the consent of his fellow palem members. The revelation is not phrased as an invention or an act of individual creation, but as something
that arises from the particular mans affinity with, and knowledge of, a place in the
landscape, a set of people, a group of spirits. This kind of connection is based on work
and residence in which others are closely implicated. Spirits are always located in
places, and places are made through the ongoing work of palem members. Spirits are
not ascribed to places by their inventors, but discovered in places by people who
constitute those places through their ongoing (combined) work. Those who used a
tambaran tune without permission would be accused of stealing. However, the theft
would be from a place, and those associated with it through their generation there, not
from an individual. There are forms of corporation to be investigated here, and they
appear to include personified aspects of the power of creative endeavour that places
themselves embody (spirits). No one person could encompass this corporation.
Persons in fact are emergent from it, like the things they create (children, substitute
bodies, knowledge).
It is land and places that have the basic role of forging (future directed) and main-

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taining (past oriented) social relations, thus it is land (as places) that underwrite the
social identity of those who claim and use it. As seen in the example given, wealth presented as a palem may be produced in quite different areas and therefore bring
together different ancestors and spirits in the dancing performance. This combination
is itself produced as an entity (a place) in which intellectual resources are known to
inhere, through the success of the endeavour (achieving recognition and even soliciting movement from others). That is, the power of ones connections and labour are
made apparent in the recognition given from other places. Intellectual resources are
terribly important in achieving this effect.

Relations
Women who follow a dancing group home usually marry into the hamlet they arrive
at, and a palem will be constructed by this woman and her husband on his land in payment to her natal hamlet for her body. This is followed by more dancing. New
relations thus flow from moments of completion. The power of growth thought
inherent in the land itself works through this ritual procedure from the outset (in the
form of patuki) in the garden, to its end (as tambaran spirits) in causing emotion on
the part of the audience. Control over this power is control over the substance of
relations.
A palem, then, comes into being during the work to produce a body. It is the
relations that generate bodies that are demonstrated in spirit performances, in knowledge of myths and stories, and secret names. These things evoke a place, in the specific
sense of a known piece of land, the history of which is the history of particular social
relations and productions (kinship). The future of a place in this sense is anticipated in
the production where it is made to appear. What men and women do in constructing
a palem is show their control over the fecundity of the land, over its potential to grow
bodies in the form of taro, pigs and dancers, over its spirits and the designs and songs
these spirits inspire in them. The specific forms that garden ritual takes, the shape of
plantings, and the patuki, kaapu and designs, are all intimately connected to people
who trace their generation to the place defined by these forms. If kinship is about the
production of persons, relations focused on and made possible by the emergence of
places are the basis of kinship.
Spirit voices, designs and the kaapu that animate the construction and performance of a palem ceremony, continue to belong to the donors of the substitute body.
The appearance of these items of intellectual property serve, as Harrison argues, to
make the performers and participants into a single body or social entity. Sharing these
myths, stories and spirits allows the production of the palem and the recognition of its
producers as kin. The audience, the receivers of the body, make a return by their
acknowledgement of the power of the non-partible elements of the performance.
These are exactly the knowledge ( patuki, paru), spirits, designs and songs that make
the presentation possible. As Strathern has elaborated recently, ownership (in this case
of intellectual resources) is a form of social relation that cuts (as well as generates)
connections (Strathern 1996a).
Harrison has argued that restrictions on the dispersal and use of intellectual property are in many cases tied to prestige, or the exercise of political power. Following
Bloch (1986) and others, he points to the lack of innovation in ritual forms (Harrison
1992: 232), even when they are passed onto new owners. In a gift economy, he

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writes, ritual action and belief are in fact experienced in the same way as are objects
in Melanesian economies (1992: 240, emphasis removed). For Nekgini speakers,
[l]ike gift objects they [intellectual property items] are not something that people
own, but something that they are (ibid). Claiming ownership of stories in Reite
is akin to claiming the power of their source.
An important aspect of knowledge of the land in Reite is the ability it gives the
owners to generate new ideational forms spirit voices, designs, patuki which give
weight to the producers claims to be seen as socially significant to others. That is, it is
the potential future in terms of relationships to other people, as Harrison (1992: 235)
notes for Melanesian economies in general, through the power of ideational forms to
generate a productive and attractive appearance, that are the object of ownership there.

Intellectual pr oper ty
Georgina Born illustrates forms of closure or limitation on access that appear in the IT
industry in lieu, as it were, of the ascription of IPR to the work of individuals in that
context. She writes that the guarded closure, or bounded circulation of knowledge by
the technology groups can be seen as different attempts to create or simulate locally
the kinds of structures of protection and restricted access otherwise provided by IP
law which are absent within the research culture . . . (Born 1996: 11314). There is
an interesting parallel here in the restriction on disclosing patuki and paru (stories and
names) that make work effective among Nekgini speakers. But there is also a difference, and this lies in the ways that claims can be made. One of the points in the ethnography above is that power is evinced in the actions others undertake in regard of one;
it is these that show ones power to oneself. The complexity here lies in the specific
linkages that are made between recognition, ownership and placement. Recognition is
coerced from others through non-quotidian technologies (usually glossed as magic in
anthropology). Love magic, perfumes and aesthetic productions literally move people,
emotionally and physically, towards one. This is seen as an aggressive act but, if successful, one that is irresistible. Thus people are angered by emotion that they see as
caused by others. Their equilibrium has been upset, and they find themselves acting
on behalf of, or in response to, persons they would not otherwise have to regard.
The anger associated with feeling forced to recognise, and thus act, because of
another is also anger at the material dimension of this use of power. To recognise a
person is to recognise their connections with others, and ultimately the generative
power of their kin group and land (glossed by place and village names). Legitimacy is
then an issue of power. Coercion has to be an aspect of this, as there is no sanction in
law for ownership. All the elements of coercion, including the ability to produce aesthetic effect and cause another to feel emotion, are drawn into claims over placement,
identity and ultimately (with parallels to heritage and cultural property), ownership of
resources (intellectual and substantial). Interestingly, Born (1996: 104) comes to a similar comparison in highlighting the specificity of her ethnographic case.
I argue in the case study that software has its inception in a sociality reminiscent of gift exchange,
and that software is expected corporately and legally to move towards the goal of commodification or, at least, technical and scientific autonomy and social disembeddedness (Latour 1987;
Barry 1995); but that this is an imperfect movement met with many kinds of resistance, so that
commodification, alienation and autonomy cannot be assured.

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What then might be the effect of introducing IPR into situations like that of contemporary Nekgini speakers? If IPR helps to achieve the commodification of knowledge,
is it right to assert, as Manuela Carneiro da Cunha does (Strathern et al 1998), that is
merely common sense for those who wish to support the autonomy of cultural
minorities or indigenous societies, to agitate for its attribution? She likens the attribution of IPR to the granting of land rights for such societies.
But the material here shows clearly that there is a distinction between rights in
land, which are rights to autonomy and self-sufficiency, to choose livelihood; and
rights in knowledge defined as a commodity. Attributing IPR is not merely bounding
a social space in which people can continue unmolested; it would in fact be entering
directly into the constitution of social relations and therefore into social space at the
local level. One cannot bound ways of making claims. As Radin argues (1996: 202), the
state of the legal system affects the system of cultural meaning in which it exists.14
To provide a regime of ownership sanctioned by external authority will affect the
ways people make claims among themselves with regard to newly defined objects of
transaction and newly defined entities in which rights may be vested. The Reite
material is interesting precisely because it evades our (modernist) distinction between
land as substrate, the basis for human life, and human life as emergent and independent of any particular bit of land. The fact Reite people do not have pressure on their
land15 (PNG is an independent nation state populated by customary landowners)
means that they can, and do, debate and negotiate issues of ownership and exclusion
prompted by cash cropping, school fees and so forth. To impose IPR in the western
legal definition would throw these debates out. It would do so by imposing a powerful legal precedent, over-riding customary law, through which individuals might start
making claims to exclusive ownership and reproduction of myths, songs, designs and
so forth.
The point here is that this would have further implications for the ownership of
land itself. If land is not a material substrate upon which life goes on (see Leach 1997;
Ingold 2000), but rather part of the relationships, agency and creativity that produces
life, then it is owned and claimed precisely through the connections to others, and the
source of oneself as part of those others, which land as places exemplifies. If land manifests its potential or power for creation through persons and the intellectual resources
(knowledge) necessary for those persons to exploit that land, then to privilege one of
those elements (individual persons) over the other (knowledge) by attributing control
to persons (as individuals in law), already sets up a hierarchy of elements in which new
exclusions are an inevitable outcome. If people own knowledge, as opposed to
knowledge and persons emerging from places as elements and aspects of each others
power, then places themselves become owned in a system of hierarchy in which (quite
naturally in a Cartesian world-view) people are the pinnacle towards which rights
aspire. The ownership of stories ( patuki) among Nekgini speakers, then, however
much it may look like intellectual property, needs contextual qualification. I have tried
to provide this here for an alternative perspective on the connection between persons
and intellectual creations.
14 And it is necessary to note that granting land-rights does not always have an empowering effect
when other impositions of legal and social form persist. This may be seen in the current plight of
the Innu of Northern Canada.
15 As yet, although pressure from a growing population is set to change this.

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Indigenous land ownership and use practices may therefore be threatened by IPR
laws. Manuela Carneiro da Cunhas argument for making an equivalent attribution of
rights in knowledge to rights in land as a politically motivated liberating move for
indigenous societies looks less certain to achieve its moral purpose. As Harvey (1996:
124) writes, the extension of ownership will reconfigure the value of what is owned,
before it reconfigures the power to own.
The issues discussed here appear to turn on notions of autonomy and encompassment. This can be made clear in thinking through the ownership of new spirits among
Nekgini speakers. One might ask whether it is the culture that produced such forms
that should be protected (ie ascribed to certain people in law) as the enabling condition, or the spirit itself that should be the focus of ownership claims by individual
authors? It is, of course, the rights of the owner that are at stake, but how would the
connections be made if the owner were not readily identifiable as an individual? Single
persons may be figureheads, distributive agents in the sense of a focus for, and a mechanism by which, wealth and prestige may be transacted and shared. The relationships
to and through such a figurehead are ongoing, not finished by the transaction.
Property, then, is not the focus here either.
For Reite people, a new kaapu comes not from the author, nor from a culture or
tradition, but from an intersection of place, history, kin (other persons) and work
(communal and singular). There is an apparent convergence here with Stratherns
characterisation of university departments as enabling condition (funding and institution) and community of scholars (discipline), neither of which are encompassed by
any individual department, but which only have a life through and of each other in
their nexus at this point (1996b). She uses the term hybrid (ibid 29).
Reite people claim that they bring forth the same creativity in themselves as is evident in the effect kaapu spirits can have on others. The nexus here is place, and ownership therefore is part and parcel of belonging, of claiming and of being claimed by a
group of kin named after the location of their work. Kaapu, then, are not embedded
in persons as their owners (contra Strathern: [o]wnership re-embeds ideas and products in an organism [1996b: 30], emphasis removed). It might be more accurate to say
that persons and spirits are embedded in places, and it is those places that own them.
But places are no better described as hybrids than are persons themselves. If hybridity is the combination of elements of different species, or of incongruous elements
(OED), such a description may only invoke the perspective of a modernist ontology
that distinguishes absolutely between land (substrate), persons (organisms) and belief
(culture). The hierarchy that organises these incongruous elements in such a perspective, as mentioned above, encourages regimes of property ownership based on individuals. Claims to resources, or to the potential future use of images or ideas are made
here through displacing ownership and agency for creation on to modes of collectivity that cannot be encompassed by a single entity, be that hybrid organism or individual author.16
Autonomy of a kind that is dependent on others for its recognition, and thus negotiated through acting because of others, exemplifies the ways in which claims over
resources can be made. People will do things because of the coercive or extractive
demands made by others. In doing so, they claim the resources with which to meet
those demands. These resources are the combined work of kin, in a place, of which
16 Elsewhere (Leach n.d.) I discuss the kinds of hierarchies that are generated from these principles.

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these kin have the knowledge necessary, to achieve productive effect. It is paradoxically
exactly in the demands and claims others have over one ones body, ones labour and
ones produce that one is able to demonstrate ones autonomy. That is to say, one is
not encompassed by those claims and can respond to them because of ones otherness.
Knowledge here does not simply exist embedded in persons, nor in a material
form that embodies creative effort. When Strathern points out that ownership embeds
things in organisms or Born that knowledge is embedded in persons, one would have
to say that this might be true if ownership in a particular sense were imposed upon
Nekgini speakers. At present, the relation between myths and designs and the people
who use them is not well characterised by the notion of embeddedness. The conceptual work of certain Euro-American popular idioms regarding hybrid entities of
nature and human endeavour may be to imagine that such things are best owned by
embedding them in persons, but this does not make all ownership a question amenable
to such metaphors.
Dr James Leach
Department of Social Anthropology
Free School Lane
Cambridge CB2 3RF
Email: jgl20@cam.ac.uk

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