Ecology, Kinship, and Social Structure in Papua New Guinea and the Alps

Introduction: Food, Environment, and the Limits of Prediction

An anthropologist can never entirely separate the delicate relationship that exists between ecology, kinship, and social structure within any given society or community. Family, food, and environment are the key building blocks that produce a culture. The language of food's abundance can create an entire symbolic system of need, dependence, and social uncertainty when deployed within a particular, uncertain system of kinship and social structure — as noted in Miriam Kahn's study of Wamiran attitudes towards sustenance in Papua New Guinea. The mere mile separating two Alpine villages, thousands of leagues from New Guinea, can also prove equally formative, as the relationship of kinship and food demonstrates for the individuals chronicled by John W. Cole and Eric R. Wolf in their classic anthropological text The Hidden Frontier. In these two villages, language proves more important than terrain in creating alternative cultures.

Yet although an anthropologist can make a persuasive case for a clear relationship between environment, sustenance, family relations, social structure, and culture, a comparison of these two studies also reveals that it is difficult — if not impossible — for an anthropologist to predict how different social and ecological factors will become interrelated and play themselves out in real life. The anthropologist can catalogue the dialogue of society and environment, but never predict the outcome.

Wamiran Food Symbolism and Social Structure in Papua New Guinea

The anthropologist Miriam Kahn's experience and analysis of the native residents known as the Wamira highlights how notions of social status conveyed by food impact the social as well as the agricultural relationships of the people of Papua New Guinea. The attitudes of the Wamira towards food define their entire social world. Throughout her book, Kahn argues that the Wamira are preoccupied with food as a marker of social status in a way that transcends what most modern societies construe as hunger. For the Wamira, hunger is entirely conflated with social status and kinship structure, to the point that it transcends the individual body of the consumer.

The fear and the threat of famine are constant in the minds of Wamirans, even when they are well-fed, because through the accumulation of livestock, grains, and a diversity of garden goods, emotions and sexual relations can be managed in a concrete, distanced fashion. The exchange of such goods enables rivalries and friendly alliances to be forged. What is especially striking is that even when there is no true absence of food in any concrete sense, relations between community members are spoken of entirely in the language of the belly, rather than of the heart or the mind.

Kahn deploys what she calls a symbolic ecological orientation. Rather than taking a perceived or reported lack of food as a given simply because the Wamirans claim there is no food, she attempts to understand why these people use food in such symbolic terms. She stresses that one cannot interpret food only in a literal fashion in this society. Instead, she examines how food functions symbolically — how who owns how many pigs, how much taro grows in a particular garden, and who contributes what food at a feast all function as ways for the Wamirans to address emotionally delicate issues between community members that cannot be discussed overtly.

Two Alpine Villages: Language Over Landscape

In The Hidden Frontier, John Cole and Eric Wolf provide a comparable analysis of terrain and language, and how both impact two Alpine communities located in Italy. Their study examines how ethnicity and identity can transcend nation-building. Two Alpine villages — one a German-speaking community called St. Felix and another a Romance-speaking community called Tret — have entirely different cultures, the authors argue, despite their extreme geographic proximity.

A purely ecological or environmental examination of these villages and their natural and human resources might yield the assumption that the two communities would be substantially similar in their development. But although the two communities have faced similar physical obstacles regarding agricultural productivity, farming, and livestock management, they are extremely different — one distinctly Germanic, the other distinctly Italian in character. Even the population pressures of a shrinking young population and concerns about the future have been very similar for both villages. Both communities were relatively recently transferred to Italy as provinces at the end of the Second World War, yet they view their nation-state in entirely different ways.

Conclusion: Ecology, Symbolism, and the Humility of Social Science

Thus, ultimately, when asking how ecology affects kinship and social structure, one might — upon reading Always Hungry, Never Greedy and The Hidden Frontier — be tempted to say: not at all. Clearly, the ways that environment and subsistence strategy shape social relations in these two very different settings cannot easily be predicted. The similar climate and topography found in Cole and Wolf's text did not produce similar ways of structuring and relating to the land. Rather, social and kinship structures, history, and the language of the peoples involved exerted greater influence. In Papua New Guinea, the relationship to the land and its perceived abundance or scarcity served not simply as a response to feast or famine, but as a means of understanding a larger network of social and gender relations.

Taken together, these two texts are humbling to the predictive capacity of social scientists, as well as illustrative of how symbolic understandings of food, kinship, culture, and language transcend the mere need to eke out an existence upon a particular piece of territory. The symbolic dimensions of culture — the myths, the languages, the inherited social structures — shape human life in ways that no ecological map alone could anticipate.

Works Cited

Cole, John, and Eric Wolf. The Hidden Frontier. University of California Press, 1999.

Kahn, Miriam. Always Hungry, Never Greedy. Waveland Press, 1986.