Money Games: Gambling in a Papua New Guinea Town 9781789202229

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Text
Introduction
Chapter 1. Selected Histories
Chapter 2. The Pattern Changes Changes
Chapter 3. The Tyranny of Denomination
Chapter 4. The Fastest Money in Goroka
Chapter 5. The Big-Shots at Old Slots
Chapter 6. The Origin of Pooling
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

MONEY GAMES

ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology General Editor: Rupert Stasch, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

The Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) is an international organization dedicated to studies of Pacific cultures, societies, and histories. This series publishes monographs and thematic collections on topics of global and comparative significance, grounded in anthropological fieldwork in Pacific locations. Volume 10

Money Games: Gambling in a Papua

New Guinea Town

Anthony J. Pickles Volume 9

Dreams Made Small: The Education of West Papuan Highlanders in Indonesia Jenny Munro Volume 8

Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters: Making Likenesses in Time, Trade, and Ritual Reconfigurations Edited by Jeannette Mageo and Elfriede Hermann

Volume 5

The Polynesian Iconoclasm: Religious Revolution and the Seasonality of Power Jeffrey Sissons Volume 4

Creating a Nation with Cloth: Women, Wealth, and Tradition in the Tongan Diaspora Ping-Ann Addo Volume 3

The Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots: Custom and Conflict in East New Britain Keir Martin

Volume 7

Volume 2

Edited by David Lipset and Eric Silverman

Volume 1

Mortuary Dialogues: Death Ritual and the Reproduction of Moral Communities in Pacific Modernities

Volume 6

Engaging with Strangers: Love and Violence in the Rural Solomon Islands

Debra McDougall

Christian Politics in Oceania Edited by Matt Tomlinson and Debra McDougall The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies Edited by Douglas W. Hollan and C. Jason Throop

Money Games Gambling in a Papua New Guinea Town

 Anthony J. Pickles

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2019 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2019 Anthony J. Pickles All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pickles, Anthony J., author. Title: Money games : gambling in a Papua New Guinea town / Anthony J. Pickles. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2019. | Series: ASAO studies in     Pacific anthropology ; volume 10 | Includes bibliographical references and     index.  Identifiers: LCCN 2019007193 (print) | LCCN 2019015674 (ebook) | ISBN     9781789202229 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789202212 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Gambling--Social aspects--Papua New Guinea--Goroka. |     Ethnology--Papua New Guinea--Goroka. | Goroka (Papua New Guinea)--Social     life and customs. Classification: LCC HV6722.P262 (ebook) | LCC HV6722.P262 G67 2019 (print) |     DDC 306.4/82099569--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007193 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78920-221-2 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-222-9 ebook

  For all the world to C.  

Contents  

List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements ix Notes on Text

xi

Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Selected Histories

19

Chapter 2. The Pattern Changes Changes

40

Chapter 3. The Tyranny of Denomination

66

Chapter 4. The Fastest Money in Goroka

94

Chapter 5. The Big-Shots at Old Slots

120

Chapter 6. The Origin of Pooling

148

Conclusion 172 References 181 Index 197

Illustrations  

Figures

2.1  A genealogy of card games.

42

2.2  The Sabarl axe as a pivot and a game of kwin displayed as a circle of pivot relationships.

45

4.1  A betel nut seller displays his takings and the betel nuts on offer.

112

5.1  Past/village distribution patterns according to Alwin.

130

5.2  A big-man’s distribution at pokies according to Alwin.

130

Tables

4.1  Breakdown of marketing practices across the three forms discussed. 114 5.1  Pokie players and their statuses at the Lahanis Pokies Lounge, 8.30pm, 26 November 2009.

132

6.1  A spreadsheet of Pasde’s bridewealth payment.

152

Acknowledgements  

It took a great deal of help to get this book on the shelf. First are the people whose generosity in sharing their experience with me crafted the book’s subject matter, and then there are the people who commented, criticized, edited, loved, nourished, payed, read, proofread, supported, reviewed, re-reviewed and re-re-reviewed. Apologies to the latter. My sincerest gratitude to the people of Goroka and to the country of Papua New Guinea. The National Research Institute, and especially Georgie Kaupu, aided me in gaining a research visa. Rex Matang of the University of Goroka helped with the process, met me at the airport, found me my place to stay and electrified me with his passion for ethnomathematics. He was a tru-ave. In Goroka I had many friends, and an adopted family whom I could never repay. They must remain anonymous here, but they are not forgotten. I employed Loui Ipatu to carry out survey work on my behalf, and he became a comrade. Distinct thanks are due to Idris, Evelyn, Osama, Michael, Peter, Alfons, Simon, Nigel, Charlie, Kripel, Pastor Simon, Jeffrey, Alfred, Anna, Richard, John, Paps Keis, Helen, Blacky, David, Boski, Pamela, Franziska, Johntu, Kenox, Bob, Roni, Julie, Rocky, Christine and Peter Purari. Chris Little was adopted by my own adopted father and became a real friend. Franziska Herbst helped me every way she could. The nature of my fieldwork also meant that new faces gave me an awful lot, often without knowing it. Many of them were just delighted that I wanted to share their world. Thank you. To the gamblers: Yupela stap isi o bom bai bomim yu! Home or abroad, my research and writing was paid for and housed. For work relating to this book I am honoured to have received the support of an Emslie Horniman Prize for Anthropological Fieldwork from the Royal Anthropological Institute. The University of St Andrews Centre for Pacific Studies were always generous with their support. I received an ESRC grant (grant number ES/G012814/1), an Overseas Institutional Visit to the University of California San Diego, an Aarhus University Research Foundation Visiting Graduate Scholar grant, a Title A Fellowship at Trinity College Cambridge and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (grant number pf160081). Secondary source material has come from St Andrews University Library, University of California San Diego’s Geisel Library and particularly its Melanesian Archive, Cambridge University Library and the Haddon Library. For sharing their own expertise

x  Acknowledgements

I thank participants of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania’s email list (ASAONET). I am grateful for the critique, comments and suggestions of attendees at various presentations aired at the Universities of Bergen, Cambridge, Cologne, Durham, Manchester, Milano-Bicocca, St Andrews, Toronto and Virginia, as well as the British Museum, LMU Munich, LSE, UCL and UCSD, and in Brussels, Klitgaarden and Montreal. For their help in tangible and intangible parts of the process, thanks go to Allen Abramson, Tom Boellstorff, Julien Clement, Kathy Creely, Tony Crook, Steffen Dalsgaard, Chris Gregory, Chris Hewlett, Paolo Heywood, Martin Holbraad, Fiona Hukula, Bronwyn Johnston, Simon Kenema, Bill Maurer, Chloe Nahum-Claudel, Patrick O’Hare, Simon Pickles, Alistair Rankin, Adam Reed, Joel Robbins, Michael Scott, Rupert Stasch, Marilyn Strathern, Nicholas Thomas, Christina Toren, and three anonymous reviewers. Rupert Stasch, the editor of this series, made acute suggestions, offered constructive criticism and got this book published. Special thanks are due to Adam Reed, my PhD supervisor at St Andrews and an enduring inspiration, and Joel Robbins, my mentor since arriving at Cambridge. Adam has worked tirelessly to help me, pushing me to publish, to apply, to meet and to discuss at every opportunity. There could be no more superlative supervisor. Joel looked out for me when he needn’t have, and he has played no small part in what successes I have had. My family brought a whole new generation into being during the writing process, and I have transitioned from a subject of support to part of the supportive infrastructure. I thank them first for their care and then for the role change. The latter development allowed me to know my own forebears from another viewpoint and brought new perspective to this work. In particular, my twins Simon and Alfred prised my centre of gravity outside of my body, forcing me forward. Finally, my life partner Chloe made much of it possible and all of it worthwhile. Remaining shortcomings are mine.

Notes on Text  

Tok Pisin is the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea, and it was the language of my fieldwork. In this book Tok Pisin words are italicized upon first use in a chapter, but italics are dropped if the word appears frequently thereafter. Spelling is phonetic, following convention and The Jacaranda Dictionary and Grammar of Melanesian Pidgin (Mihalic 1971). Translations are given in single inverted commas. For the purposes of this book one should know the following: i is pronounced as in ‘kit’; e as in ‘met’; u as in ‘put’; a as in ‘fat’; o as in ‘tot’. There is no letter ‘c’ in Tok Pisin; it is replaced by k, which is pronounced like the ‘c’ in ‘cat’.

 Introduction

Gambling is at the vanguard of innovative ways to mobilize money. Industry researchers look first to gambling to help them anticipate new forms of currency and new technologies. This book takes readers to a fresh gambling frontier, where the nature of wagering and the properties of currency are hotly contested on the floor each day. Not the hyper-controlled casino floors of metropolitan Macau or Las Vegas, where customers are daily served with new bells and whistles, innovations hatched in gaming labs, but on a tarp laid on the floor in Goroka, a not-so-sleepy town in the globally peripheral Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG). There, adaptability is everybody’s business, and transaction skills are front and centre. What unites today’s gambling meccas, online betting platforms and Caribbean cruise ships with lotteries in Revolutionary France, Chicago under Prohibition and Goroka in the late 2000s is a frontier approach to space, time and rules that creates excitingly structured contexts. For all their variation and complexity, all gambling games centre on the quick transmission of wealth, disturbing ordinary assumptions about what wealth is worth. Most of us think about £10 as in a stable relationship with £1 and £1,000. But when you gamble, you try to use your £10 as best you can to transform it into, say, £400. The workaday relationship between what you have and what you want are destabilized, decoupling money’s value from hypothetical equations between labour and value, or investment and return. Gambling is the world’s most accessible form of capital manipulation. The betting event itself is filled with an array of highly specific means of comprehension, like risk management, luck, fate, consumption, brinkmanship, psychic connectivity, or powers of attraction. These perceptions are played into games, and they affect the results. The forms of comprehension brought into gambling alter people’s relationships to the currency they are putting into action, and because their ideas make a difference, then the nature of the money they use is likewise altered. It is reimagined. This is a property of all gambling, but the effects are not even in all gambling contexts. With casino slot machines in the US, customers are bit-part players in an industry that actively attempts to channel players’ perceptions towards gambling as escape so that losses inflicted by the ‘house edge’ lose

2  Money Games

their bite (Schüll 2012). The house edge is the statistical advantage that casinos have over players and the way they make the bulk of their profits. In PNG the main games are illegal card games, invented locally and adapted constantly by anybody who cares to do so. The reimagining of money is democratized by competitors who have no intrinsic edge built into their games. Gorokan gamblers are particularly inventive for other reasons too. For one, the town residents’ parents or grandparents had once never seen cash and never heard of gambling. In Papua New Guinea, gambling was part of a repertoire of imports that included Christianity, money, wage labour, the state and a swathe of new technologies and commodities. Far from being a peculiarity of this corner of the world, in truth huge tracts of the planet just did not gamble. No cards, no dice, not even a coin flip; in some areas it is just fifty years since gambling arrived. A hundred and fifty years ago betting on contests was absent from the indigenous peoples of most of South America, almost all of Australia, most of the Pacific Islands including the vast islands comprising New Guinea and New Zealand, most Inuit and Siberian peoples and a great many peoples of southern Africa (Binde 2005). What makes Highland Papua New Guinea exceptional in this regard is that gambling was introduced in the 1950s (Pickles 2014a) – putting it within living memory. Melanesianist studies have provided unique on the ground descriptions of the experience of adopting gambling. So why didn’t these people gamble? We know that they were not isolated: there have been huge polities spanning the Amazon (Heckenberger 2005) and trade networks that bridged the Pacific well before Captain Cook (Weisler and Kirch 1996). How easy it would have been to pick up a pair of dice or make them when you got home. Neither were these people just isolated from Europeans and North Americans. In fact, contact with the ‘West’ and the presence of gambling shows no correlation (Pryor 1977). It does not seem to have anything to do with risk either; many of the peoples who did not gamble at all had a far riskier time of things than peoples who do (ibid). If it was not isolation and it was not lack of risk, or lack of imagination, why have many peoples gambled so much while many others who did not at all have now taken it up so quickly? The simple answer given either implicitly or explicitly, and with more or less subtlety, is that gambling societies have money and marked stratification with a lot of economic inequality and non-gambling societies did not, but when they do, they start gambling.1 But once we scratch the surface of what is meant by ‘money’ and ‘economic inequality’ in somewhere like Goroka, we find we are dealing in tangibles and concepts that imply both a measure of continuity and an enormous rupture. In a location that was once stateless but in which the state, money and gambling all appeared within the same decade, we must reckon with a turbulent transformation in the very ideas that legitimated wealth as wealth. The

Introduction 3

simple answer that money and inequality beget gambling leads to deeper questions about the way valuables are conceived during times of unfathomable schism. Inspired by such questions, in 2014 I edited a special issue of Oceania on gambling, which built upon a special issue of the same journal from 1987. The more recent special issue can be read as exploring how gambling might occupy a privileged position in contemporary debates over social change in Melanesia.2 In particular, our concern with gambling as ‘analytic’ moved attention from the redistributional effects of gambling as people came to terms with money and economic inequality to the implications of the actual rules, microdynamics and practices at the heart of gambling itself and their relationship to thinking about, moralizing and managing relationships in Melanesia. In the 2014 issue, Mosko reconceptualized villagers’ engagements with Western commodities through the ritual-magical ideas that have extended to include them, in an island village context with a highly localized cosmological frame. On Kiriwina in the Trobriand Islands, a commoner class had become the central players in the island’s engagement with capitalism; this was reflected in commoners’ proficiency at gambling, which added to their repertoires in an already richly textured Trobriand magico-ritual geography. Other articles took the urban-rural relation as their starting point to bring novel scales into view. Zimmer-Tamakoshi (the editor of the 1987 special issue) presented a history of the transformation of ‘exchange’ relationships and their negotiation through gambling within a Papua New Guinea mainland village and its urban outmigrants, who suffered dramatic reversals in their respective economic circumstances (2014). In her Gende context, gambling was at the frontier between subsistence and economic migration, but it then struggled to accommodate the latest extreme fluctuation in inequality. Horse race betting was analysed by Presterudstuen (2014) as an arena that manifested ethnic differences in Fiji by facilitating the self-estrangement of a whole cohort of young men, who gambled to express a different relation to the global on the one hand and the village on the other. Cox’s article shifted scales by following indigenous comparisons between gambling as a whole, on the one hand, and the get-rich-quick schemes that occupied the urban middle classes at a national and even regional level, on the other, and compared these themes to a global fashion for perceiving late modernity as an era of ‘casino capitalism’ (2014). My own contribution was about the way contrasting games modelled the purported mental capacities of different age groups. That material appears in this book in revised and elaborated form. Cassidy’s (2014) afterword demonstrated the importance of the Melanesian material for the study of gambling as a worldwide industry. The special issue demonstrated two more reasons why gambling can be so inventive in and

4  Money Games

around Papua New Guinea: because gambling is a huge part of contemporary Pacific life and because the diversity of the region means gambling has been stretched and folded to fill a great breadth of roles. This monograph aims to supplement and extend earlier analysis with a uniquely in-depth exploration of the local conceptual relevance of Pacific gambling, not as a proxy for something else but as a central trope of contemporary life; as a way that Papua New Guineans play the world and its economic orders. It will take a monograph to fully explicate, for the first time, the range of ideas bound up in gambling, the uses to which it is put and the effects that it has in a Pacific location where it once did not exist. Goroka Is Gambling

Today Goroka is Papua New Guinea’s self-confessed gambling capital: in 2010 73 per cent of over sixteens gambled; 45 per cent played cards in their local residential area, with 25 per cent going further afield; 11 per cent played in the vibrant but volatile betel nut markets; 5 per cent played when they were in residential areas other than their own; 3 per cent preferred local markets to the central betel nut markets, and 1 per cent admitted to playing secretly at work; 4 per cent confessed to regularly playing at the five high stakes slot machine joints that were dotted around the centre of town; 4 per cent frequented the horse racing bookies.3 Popular numbers games called hi-lo popped up time and time again, only to be shut down again by police. Goroka also has many visitors and a lot of through traffic, and while I had no way to quantify it, I know that many of these wayfarers gambled as part of the Goroka experience. There are a further four large-scale betting events per year that both ignite the imagination of residents and draw people from the rural surrounds: the three-game State of Origin rugby league series and the Melbourne Cup horse race; all happen in Australia but excite huge interest in Papua New Guinea. In 2010 about half the townsfolk had a bet on at least one of these occasions, and luxury cars and even wives were rumoured to have changed hands. To study this vibrant gambling scene, from April 2009 to June 2010 I lived at the town’s National Sports Institute, on land alienated from Kama people, interrupted by two months renting a room in Kaunsil Kem (lit. ‘Council Camp’) settlement (on Faniufa land) when my work there became more intense. I set out daily and/or nightly and got involved with all aspects of life but paid fullest attention to gambling and related activities. I returned in 2013, 2015 and 2017–18. Gambling is an emotive issue, and so I have chosen not to give my personal opinions on the moral status of gambling in its various forms and to

Introduction 5

report only how Gorokans thought about it. Wagering is illegal in Papua New Guinea outside of betting shops and slot machine joints, so I will keep to the rule of only relaying publicly available information on sites and people involved in gambling. I spent most time in Banana Blok (lit. ‘Banana Block’) settlement, a subdivision of Kaunsil Kem, but also attended four regular card gambling sites outside or underneath houses in the formal residential areas, three in West Goroka and one high stakes card site in a more central location. I spent an extended period of time following one body of colleagues who played cards in secret at their workplace. It is an open secret that gambling is rife in the two betel nut markets: Kakaruk (lit. ‘Chicken’, because it used to sell them) and Chuave (named after a district in Simbu Province whose inhabitants dominate sales). I was there often. A small amount of time was spent at or around the bookies, but the proprietors were hostile to my research so I respect their wishes and do not report on them directly. Other people were almost always happy to talk to me and found my topic readily understandable and interesting, treating my own gambling education as an imperative that would benefit them in the future. I gambled often and usually lost, but I played with intent to win (and a secret commitment to redistribute any winnings among those who lost). This form of pure participant observation gave me a thorough understanding of gameplay. I consumed many hours in night and daytime trips to various slot machine joints known locally as ‘pokies’, especially with my adopted father Tom Liam,4 a prominent leader and a personality associated with pokies. I covered one full three-game series of State of Origin gambling events in various locations around Goroka and a further two games of the following series. The Melbourne Cup horse race fell only once during my time. As a counterpoint I spent three months attending a Pentecostal church in West Goroka known as Sunrise Four-Square and conducted forty-eight in-depth interviews with a range of people around broad themes. Gambling led me to explore different geographical areas and people of diverse linguistic origins. I felt it propitious therefore to relinquish the classic concern in Melanesian anthropology with the way people bound groups. Instead I embraced the elasticity of a practice that makes units of people all the time but never pretends they are final.5 Gambling as a contrived point of confluence is certainly newer than, say, the universal valuation of pigs, but it is telling precisely because it is current, recognized as recent and yet expected to endure. Just as important as the gathering of people in gambling was the meeting of monies. At these times, more was at stake than the stake; the value of money itself was up for grabs. Essentially, whenever anything was handed over, its value was contested. All transactions, whether categorized by anthropologists as a gift, commodity, financial arrangement, or as gambling, were

6  Money Games

in fact expressions of PNG pragmatics of value manipulation in which the goal was as much about transacting appropriately and innovatively as it was about accumulating capital. Gambling was a repetitive and above all playful forum that made these strategies starkly apparent. I will argue that in the light of these strategies, economics becomes an artefact of intersubjective value destabilization; an ‘objective’ economist’s picture of the ‘economy as a whole’ becomes meaningless because the value of money can never be represented faithfully outside of each context. I offer a more effective way to understand this ludic economy by using indigenous calculative pragmatics to systematize these value transformations. This is consequently a book that problematizes orthodox understandings of economics, but it is not a book that sits comfortably in the literature on Melanesian ‘exchanges’ (this for that, or this for the same, or this for that at some later point). It cannot, because gambling is not an exchange. Technically, gambling is an example of a one-way transfer of wealth because nothing of comparable value is given in exchange for a win. If everyone walked away with something of comparable value, it would not be gambling. I intend to get out ahead of this issue by defining the terms I have chosen to adopt straight away. Terms

In my terminology, ‘transaction’ is used as the collective term for the totality of overlapping ways that ‘valuables’ are circulated within an economy. ‘Valuables’ include both tangibles and intangibles such as knowledge, but they must involve ‘enumeration’– i.e. they must become units through valuation (see Ascher 1991, 2002). Anything might conceivably fall into this category at one time or another, or cease to be transactable, so the division I make is contingent on specific practices. Valuables in this book have to pass a simple test: could Gorokan people envisage gambling with them? My characterization of ‘economy’ is human-centred and distinct from its dominant usage as the aggregate of goods and services bought and sold within a territory. I trace localized entanglements rather than attempt totalizations (cf. Appadurai 1986). The dominant definition of economy, institutionalized markets and the market value of a particular item play a significant part in the entanglement of a given valuable in a given context, but they are treated as factors in specific valuations rather than as an investigative goal. The aim is to underline the influence of agents embedded within an economic context whose continual projects of growth, renewal and sustenance are to be understood as pragmatics that enliven and develop the economy surrounding them. Efforts to affect the value of the valuables that move

Introduction 7

between agents are appraised in terms of the long-term effects they have on valuations within the ‘economy’ as centripetally defined. This requires an appreciation of intersubjective forms of reckoning that play out in space and time as a set of ‘frontiers’ representing conflicts and concordances in valuation. ‘Value’ is therefore emergent, a form of boundary-making constrained by the influence of the agents involved and the inertia of the medium’s prevailing value. The ‘economy’ consists of a set of evolving dialectical frontiers that can be conceptualized at scales ranging from an individual transaction to an international treaty. I conceptualize marginality as the result of an ongoing lived frontier defined by unequal control over the parameters of transactions (Li 1999; Tsing 2005: 33). Those who have less control are, progressively, marginal. In some areas, control is more diffuse; in others more centralized, and movement between these areas can itself be profitable and is an arena for yet more transaction. The meeting points of competing framings for how transactions may be conducted are their ‘frontiers’. Instead of proceeding from the level of transactions and economy into potentially messy subcategories such as gift exchange and commodity exchange,6 I envisage a term that operates at an intra-transactional level, which I call a ‘transfer’ (Pickles in press), building off the largely overlooked work of Pryor (1977) and later Hunt (2002, cf. Sneath 2006, 2012). Hunt provides a handy definition: [A transfer is] the shift of a valued (X) from one social unit (A) to another social unit (B). The valued can be tangible, a service, or knowledge. The shift can refer to changes in possession, as well as to shifts in ownership … The X being transferred has economic content. It contains the efforts of production (work, skill, and experience). (2002: 108) The movement of a valuable from one person to another is a ‘transfer’; it may be balanced with a return, in which case it becomes an ‘exchange’ of two (or more) transfers. If the return happens later, this would be a ‘delayed exchange’ of two transfers. A ‘transfer’ that is not accompanied by a return and has no prospect of generating one in the future is a ‘one-way transfer’. The valuables in motion during a ‘one-way transfer’ do not have a counter-valuable against which their value can be directly compared, whereas an ‘exchange of transfers’ offers an opportunity for direct comparison.7 ‘Gambling’ is the committing of value (a ‘stake’) to a circumscribed and definitive event (or series of events packaged together) that no one party is supposed to fully control; the objective state of the event(s) at certain junctures determines whether a return may be claimed for one’s initial transfer. By staking money (i.e. by committing it to being part of a consolidated transfer),

8  Money Games

gamblers attempt to gain valuables that have been divorced from reciprocal obligation and so cause a one-way transfer in their own direction. In so doing, the value of the stakes are compared as they are consolidated, rather than when they are exchanged. Gambling everywhere involves attempts to induce a one-way transfer that includes this form of valuation. That valuation is underdetermined when compared to an exchange of transfers because winning allows the victor to take home both the value of their stake as well as some (or all) of the other valuables staked by others. Gambling therefore privileges subjective assessments of the value of one’s stakes as opposed to the market value of items that are exchanged.8 Subjective valuation is heightened by the repeated rounds of play, in which participants may choose to anchor their success against highpoints, low points, or the starting point of their bank. In staking their subjective assessments of value, gamblers explore and potentially master the flow of transfers that are the building blocks of economic life without reference to their market value. I will go on to argue that the fluidity of value in Goroka necessitates a model of economy that generalizes subjective valuation rather than subsuming it under a market model. I will follow my informants in avoiding strict distinctions between exchanges and other kinds of transactions by focusing on a total pragmatic of transmission conceptualized through the term transfers, with each transactive form becoming a variation on the way transfers are formalized (cf. Graeber 2001: 217). In many respects, gambling resembled long-standing patterns of what has come to be known in the anthropological literature as ‘exchange’, differing mainly in the way gambling explicitly circumvents the obligation to return, opening up the possibility that active reciprocity need not be a foundational motivation in economic practice. Finally, I use the term ‘pragmatic’ to refer to the points of conjunction between ideas and those actions that are transformed in relation to them. One only knows a concept or idea through the nature of the modifications it makes to its interactants, and those modifications are its definition for all intents and purposes. As such, the concept or idea is, to the extent we can know it at all, a pragmatic. This philosophy was developed by C.S. Peirce (1923), but I am using it in a very specific, historical sense (cf. Pedersen 2008). The pragmatics to do with transactions that I document have some history in Melanesia but have entered into interaction with novel activities like slot machines and money, and in that interaction, the concepts invoked by them were modified and continue to change. By documenting how pragmatics look today, and how they are seen to transform in activities like gambling, we can get a grip on the way people manipulate their worlds and the extent to which manipulation is possible.

Introduction 9

The analysis of Gorokan gambling suggests five lessons. 1) The under determinism of the unregulated aspects of economy allows locally determined ways of reckoning to influence not just the movements of money but also the properties and capacities of currency. 2) Economics as we know it scripts people’s activities; individuals who are acting aberrantly are prescribed a dose of abstract economic analysis. But locally informed ways of doing currency are not necessarily mistakes that ‘distort’ the way people should interact with the formal economy; they can instead enable original and profitable possibilities. Social reality at the capitalist periphery recycles currency and the economy as a continual frontier, necessitating locally inflected theorization. 3) What is required to understand economies at large is a framework that reckons the larger economy through local pragmatics conceived at the micro-level. 4) Gaining meaningful access to the ideas and therefore the economics in play where international capital meets local concepts requires a focus on obviously frontier activities such as gambling. 5) All transactions, everywhere, would be illuminated by reconceptualizing them as frontiers of various kinds and recasting people’s efforts in terms of locally inflected pragmatics that centre on economic transfers. Pragmatics by their nature lack universal applicability; they are local conceptual regularities for only as long as they remain regular. Universal systematization is not possible within this method of modelling. The approach is heuristic. It is nevertheless possible to make comparisons of abstracted-out pragmatics and their relationship. There are analogies among Japanese securities traders and Salvadorian migrant workers, Chicago commodity traders and exotic mushroom pickers, West African slave traders and alternative currency enthusiasts (Guyer 2004; Maurer 2005; Miyazaki 2003; Pedersen 2008; Tsing 2009; Zaloom 2006). I will be attempting quite a few analogies in this book, in part because I think comparison illuminates the material and in part because I think anthropology should always aspire to comparison.9 I have kept to economic terms in this outline because my main aim will be situating gambling among other economic practices. What sets gambling apart from more prosaic transactions is its relationship with play. The very playfulness of play opens the toy chest (or the Pandora’s box) of what it means to be human, throwing out loose ends and possible connections that cross all sorts of domains of experience. We all know already that an attitude of levity can lighten the load, and gambling takes that stance towards money. As I suggest in this book’s title, to gamble is to play with money, rendering the game and its economics disorderly. For that reason, I probe important insights from the literature on play in general before continuing. The book is then structured so that the nature of play in Gorokan gambling comes to light before its economics, providing the backdrop for the play of values in gambling.

10  Money Games

Gameplay

The significance of play underwrites all the claims in this book: every assertion about such and such game playing out local concepts, each argument about the effects of particular games upon the value of currencies, as well as all the comparisons with other places and times. Underneath all of these is the notion that play is a particularly meaningful activity within human existence. I must therefore persuade the reader that play is no trivial matter. In this section I argue that play is a primal frame for comprehending the wider human world and acting upon it. Play refines messy concepts, and it allows people to imagine alternate versions of the real. Gambling in particular demonstrates a willingness to change one’s world, to play with not just your wealth and status but cosmopolitics itself. What is called ‘play’ in English and ‘pilai’ in Tok Pisin has been a subject of study across a range of disciplines spanning from evolutionary biology to classics. This means that fertile insights often emerged sui generis. The subject boasts a sizeable literature but no canon. In lieu of one, I describe one very late nineteenth-century forebear and four twentieth-century pillars in the study of play. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen theorized an evolutionary development of leisure and excess (2007 [1899]). Leisure, he claimed, is a product of two interconnected processes. The first is people’s strivings to elite status through the exploitation of others and, most importantly, advertising their freedom from toil by conspicuous consumption, including every sort of play (the more wasteful the better). The second process is emulation, keeping up with the Jones’s by spending an increasing proportion of your resources on leisure activities (i.e. the symbols of exploitation). Waste’s utility therefore actually becomes a function of its disutility. Together these processes propel leisure in ever more attenuated and recursive directions, from pigeon fancying to Iron Man competitions. Veblen does not have anything to say about the forms of play or games in themselves except as manifestations of waste. That dressage is identified as play and a classical education as worthy but not playful is immaterial to the overall thesis. The wastefulness of play is a theme that runs through almost all of the literature that follows, but Veblen’s work on play as leisure makes it obvious that what makes play playful cannot be found solely in its disutility. Johan Huizinga’s elegant theory in Homo Ludens (1970 [1949]) is the starting point for the contemporary study of play. Play is the antithesis of rationality. It occurs when mind ‘breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos’ (ibid.: 22). Because play is so profoundly disturbing to order, it must be bounded so as not to endanger our survival. Games create an ordered arena that is replicable across space and time. The heightened order required

Introduction 11

to contain play has the seemingly paradoxical effect of capturing order from the confusion of a life that rarely seems as straightforward as a game. At the same time, bounding play in a game intensifies uncertainty within it, creating tension (ibid.: 29). For Huizinga, play is not required to survive; it is voluntary and superfluous by definition. It is in that sense waste. Play is nevertheless enjoyed and consequently desired. Play must be free and indeed play is freedom for Huizinga. It is not the opposite of seriousness; instead playfulness breaks the boundaries of the antimony. It makes a game of usefulness and uselessness. Between Veblen and Huizinga there is a dialectical development: work leads to its opposite play, which then encompasses the opposition. And yet play’s exceptionality is in some way a requirement. Not a requirement for existence but necessary for a meaningful human life, play generates a kind of recursive amplification of existence that creates meaning (ibid.: 27). Huizinga derives from Plato that the more we participate in exalting play, the better we are as people (ibid.: 45) and the more cultured our society becomes (ibid.: 19; see also Hamayon 2016). For Huizinga, the epitome of play is regulated competition between two parties. In all cases of play, the aim is to raise the victor to a higher power, progressing culture as a result. The form of the contest is unimportant, only the winning (Huizinga 1970 [1949]: 77).10 Our existing culture is also at its best when it is played. Huizinga’s position becomes unstuck, in my opinion, because he wants to advocate for the ‘right’ kind of play, and thus promotes it conceptually into the only kind of play worth its name. Gambling and cards, for instance, are seen as culturally sterile because they are not played in the true spirit of play – that is, amateur competition, which is clearly irrelevant to their playfulness. His notion that play breaks down the boundaries of rationality in a way that generates meaning remains insightful but only if we disregard the outmoded notion that culture is additive. Huizinga and Roger Caillois belong together because Caillois was writing largely in response to Huizinga (Caillois 1961: 3–5). Caillois’ analysis is subtler; it took human diversity and divergent cultural history as the starting point for the development of a global typology of games. Like Huizinga, there is a unity of play and a diversity of games, but for Caillois all human play begins with ‘spontaneous manifestations of the play instinct’ and the ‘elementary need for disturbance and tumult’ (ibid.: 28), which is denoted by the Greek paidia. Paidia is, however, disciplined to various extents by a concept from Latin: ludus, the ‘pleasure experienced in solving a problem arbitrarily designed’ (ibid.: 29). The resultant game takes a form that lies within a matrix of four tropes: directed contest, chance, mimesis and disorientation, thereby incorporating many more kinds of game than Huizinga. Because the diversity

12  Money Games

of game types is spread unevenly across social contexts, the various ‘civilizations’ can be characterized by the games their peoples enjoy. Caillois was also at pains to point out that ludus is not the only conceivable metamorphosis of paidia, and he takes the closest Chinese language equivalent to paidia, wan, as his example. Wan is ‘oriented not toward process, calculation, or triumph over difficulties [as ludus is] but toward calm, patience and idle speculation’ (ibid.: 33). For Caillois, this was evidence of how China wisely worked out a contrasting philosophical destiny for itself and that cultures’ destinies could be read from their games.11 The third pillar is unique even among these free thinkers. In 1978, Bernard Suits made his argument under the guise of a retelling of Aesop’s fable about the ant and the grasshopper. The grasshopper had refused to toil through the summer months despite observing an industrious ant’s example and tolerating its tedious warnings, and the grasshopper died in that year’s first cold snap. Suits’ conceit is that hidden under the false pretence of a bland morality tale about prudence and industry a revolutionary grasshopper and advocate of play sacrificed himself for our ludic salvation. Suits reimagines the grasshopper as a sage. The prophet for play was willing to endure an early death for the utopian idea that we should never toil. Part fabled grasshopper, part Jesus Christ and part Socrates, Suits’ book follows the grasshopper and its devotees’ dialogue about the nature of playing games, beginning on the grasshopper’s deathbed and ending after a temporary resurrection. In the face of looming annihilation, the grasshopper defiantly indulged in riddles with his insect followers Skepticus and Prudence. This original (not to mention brilliant and genuinely funny) conceit enables Suits both to convincingly define what it means to play a game and to follow that form in his writing. The book is a direct response to Wittgenstein’s assertion that there is no common thread that links games together; that they are indefinable. Not so, the grasshopper says: To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity. (ibid.: 34) Games operate by blocking off the most efficient means of achieving a goal. One of Suits’ illustrative examples is a chess player checkmating, as opposed to holding a pistol to their opponent’s head and declaring victory. Clearly only the former is observing the rules, or playing. Suits allows for both goal-oriented and ‘closed’ games, such as chess, and games that have no ending, or ‘open’ games such as dressing up. The definition can accommodate ‘open’ games if the specific state of affairs that is to be achieved is the game’s continuation (e.g. a game of ‘Tigers’ with a three

Introduction 13

year old may hinge solely on remembering not to stop being a tiger). This turns play scripts into the more efficient means that are prohibited. With this all-containing definition, Suits dissolves Huizinga’s main problem, which was discerning which kind of play is the platonic ideal. Suits’ definition, Caillois’ openness to the different psychological readings of games, and Huizinga’s original insight into the collapse of utility and disutility together reveal games’ substantial analytical force. Games can require internal autotelism (being done for their own sake), and they can also be put to external instrumental ends (being played as a means to something else). Gambling then instrumentalizes the game by tying a change in one’s wealth to the result, but it also makes a mockery of wealth by staking it on a ‘trivial’ event. The choice of motivation for gambling is between disregarding money on the one hand or playing for it on the other, and these reflect the autotelic and the instrumental structure of gambling games, the former locating the consciousness inside the game, the latter outside. Gamblers and professional game-players may prioritize the incentive of a win over the incentive of maintaining the integrity of the game. Gregory Bateson, the one-time Melanesianist anthropologist, is the fourth mid twentieth-century pillar of play upon which this study rests (1973 [1955]). Bateson cuts to the heart of the conceptual mechanics that both Caillois and Huizinga rely upon but cannot account for. From observing monkeys playing, he derives that play is denoted by ‘metacommunicative’ signals. Metacommunication as a term covers signals that have as their subject the relationship between the communicating parties. The play signal is ‘metacommunicative’ in that it tells the recipient that ‘[t]hese actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote’ (1973: 152, emphasis in original). For example, I would take you kicking a football directly at me as an affront unless we were both surrounded by people wearing the same jersey and shorts. The uniforms are metacommunicative play signals. Play occurs in animals as well as humans, and therefore metacommunicative signals are evolutionarily prior to denotative language (i.e. saying ‘we are playing’), and may in fact have been an important step towards language. We can therefore derive that play is fundamental to cognitive development. Metacommunicative signals offer the opportunity to bound off certain signals and thereby convey novel meanings for those signals. That play is a primal example of metacommunication upon which complex communication can be scaffolded explains the universality of play and allows the possibility of its expression in myriad variations. It also rightly elevates the status of games from being simply the opposite of serious activity (against which they must always seem trivial) to instances of condensed reality in the sense that reality consists of embodied constructions of the real

14  Money Games

and the unreal. Condensing reality into a game heightens the fictive element. Games offer us a glimpse into the aesthetics of the construction of reality through the interplay of fiction and consequence. Like picture frames for art, games are the reified form of the psychological demarcation of those practices or actions that are to be considered play. Though Bateson does not say as much, the demarcation of a game space means the play within it can be bet upon, which is an act of impudent cosmopolitics where the real and the fictive are encompassed by the willingness of the bettor to stake upon it. Games are not simply reflections of the world that created them, but as both Bateson and Huizinga explore in their own ways, the open-ended contingency of games generates altered models for contingency in the unbounded world of not play (see also Hacking 1990; Reith 1999). Bateson and Suits also come to complementary conclusions. Bateson explains the evolutionary processes that fold play into human existence and which give play its transcendent quality, while Suits reveals the structural mechanisms by which the logic of games enacts metacommunicative signalling and the philosophical potency that is invoked in the process. Play literally imagines a field upon which stakes can then be made, and thus gambling depends upon play. It depends upon play’s metacommunicative ability to create curtailed domains in space and time that may be judged to have definitive win or lose outcomes. One must always consider, therefore, that defining gambling is a political move and that the forms of play that become the subject of gambling are themselves both subject to cosmopolitics and empowered to enact cosmopolitics (for a review of the anthropology of gambling, see Pickles 2016). In this spirit I will interrogate the nature of Gorokan games and gambling with maximum seriousness in the chapters that follow. Chapter Outlines

Many claims are made in this introduction, and I am well aware that I bought the big picture on hire purchase. I found this necessary to explicate the scope of the study. Subsequent chapters are instalments to repay the debt of suspended disbelief and to generate interest for the patient reader via various calculations and accounts. Chapter one is historical. Taking a snapshot from my ethnographic fieldwork as its point of departure, it traces some lines of temporality that met in Goroka in 2009. These include the history of the town itself, the history of gambling in Papua New Guinea and its relationship to a regional literature obsessed instead with gifts, and the historical development of Papua New Guinea gambling into a transactional space in which men and women

Introduction 15

participated together. I then return to the ethnographic moment with which I began, revealing how gambling connects all these histories in a self-consciously bounded set of rules and materials. Chapter two takes the reader straight into the heart of the most prevalent forms of gambling in contemporary Goroka, working through the rules and social settings of the two card games that dominate the scene. Looking at the idioms of gameplay and how to win, I aim to dissolve the division between game and life and to postulate a model of thought about situations of effective action that do not rely on the dichotomy of chance and skill, replaced instead by the indigenous categories ‘thought’ and ‘speed’. Notions associated with effective play like to control their ‘corner’, and having effective ‘ideas’ is brought into dialogue with two other famous Melanesian arenas for tactics: kula and moka. I bring out a common model for causality, and for change, with implications for Melanesianist anthropology. I begin chapter three by looking at one way the existing literature on gambling in anthropology falls short. By over-relying on probability, anthropologists who look at gambling in the Pacific have helped to set up a false paradox between gambling and gifting when in fact shades of cooperation and overt acquisition can be seen within what would otherwise be understood as competitive gameplay without obligation. By way of contrast, I then explore how betting practices in Goroka support a complex language made through money by utilizing the conceptual divisibility and material indivisibility inherent in denominations (see Pickles 2017). This leads into a discussion of theories of money and the contradiction that emerges from my material between money as a mode of immanent calculation and the assumption that money is by default abstract in character. By unpacking the giving of free games during low-stakes gambling, I argue that while calculations with money are everywhere in Goroka this does not make all transactions impersonal but quite the opposite. I suggest that the proper idiom to explore the use of money in Gorokan gambling is the contingent way that Gorokan people manipulate valyu (‘value’) (cf. Gregory 1997; Munn 1986). From this base understanding of efficacy and gaming, chapter four explores the relationship between street selling (maketim) and gambling, by looking at the more exceptional, archetypical antagonistic fast game known as Chalinj (lit. ‘challenge’). As the apotheosis of fast games, located in the place of fastest and most impersonal bargains, the market, Chalinj is understood as a reproduction of Goroka’s most extreme market pragmatics. The subtext to the chapter is the attribute of speed given to money across Goroka and how this impacts upon the value of money. More overtly, the chapter explores the minutiae of three different types of exchange in the marketing sphere in order to counter the ‘barter model of value’ that results from economistic models (M. Strathern 1992), instead investigating the structural relations between

16  Money Games

the three types through ethnographic accounts. Comparative material from Nigerian market traders and market gamblers allows for a broader correlation between transactional forms that incorporate negotiation into the way units are defined and the existence of aggressive and speedy forms of gambling. The chapter engages with Gorokan conceptions of what constitutes work and what does not, which is based upon an opposition between production (in Gorokan terms ‘work’) and finance (which covers many other types of transaction). That in turn sets the foundations for the discussion of leadership in the following chapter. Having concentrated up to this point on card gambling (which is the most widespread and reproducible form of gambling), I open the analysis up to high stakes machine gaming in chapter five, which has a starkly dissimilar character. The discussion centres on the actions of local ‘big-men’, who display vast sums compared to that available to card gamblers or the followers who help them travel through the precarious and drunken town centre at night. Contrasting to the fields of efficacy at play during card games, the lack of control players have over slot machines is a crucial factor in their popularity and contributes to the marked destruction of the value of money in these places. The chapter is concerned with the multiple sources of money available to big-men who play pokies, their mutual gifting and the smaller donations they make to followers. I argue that while ‘finance’ and ‘production’ may have been limiting factors in the control that big-men exerted across the Highlands (A. Strathern 1969), today all over the Highlands big-men have access to novel forms of finance that allow them to transcend their local particularities and play the part of ‘Highlands-wide big-man’. Finance is therefore another example of a pragmatic that has taken new forms, and I expand this analysis by comparison to the computerization of financial trading in Chicago and London, where the technology of on-screen tactical manoeuvring has likewise displaced face-to-face encounters, with alarmingly similar effects. I begin chapter six with a current manifestation of a classic topic in the anthropology of Melanesia—bridewealth payments, focusing narrowly on how pooling wealth is organized prior to payment. I spend the rest of the chapter inflecting this material through the collective bets that happened during the annual State of Origin series of rugby league games. The festival atmosphere of State of Origin gives people the opportunity to collect together and oppose one another on spurious grounds (supporting Blues or Maroons), crossing kin and affinal relations. The aim is to reveal the common aesthetic of large agglomerations of money, reimagining exchanges from the perspective of pooling rather than the necessities of reciprocity. I argue that the value of money is higher when it contains the efforts of many people to bring it together, exposing the simple joy of collective exchanges and the value they

Introduction 17

generated. Through comparison with Native American Pawnee collective betting practices before 1890, I show that the way bets are consolidated reflect socially privileged ways of conceptualizing how wealth is attained. In the Pawnee case, this means collective gambling looks like individual exploits and individual spoils gained through warfare, and in the Goroka case, collective bets take the image of women-as-wealth (created through their juxtaposition to valuables during bridewealth payments). I conclude by summing up how money and value are manipulated through Gorokan gambling and how this informs our understanding of change. I reflect back on material from the foregoing chapters and examine how other forms of gambling can be seen as variations on the theme of pooling. Finally, I argue that the inventiveness of Gorokan transaction skills is contained within the narrow rails of a global economic hegemony that sequesters transactional creativity and the dividends of it to its elite classes. Notes  1. While there is nothing innate about gambling that simply must bubble to the surface, this does not mean gambling addiction is not real or serious either. Many regions where people once did not gamble now have a very high level of problem gambling (Papineau 2010). It is one thing to say gambling is not in our genes and quite another to say that some people are not predisposed to develop a dependency on gambling when it is around them.  2. Together with two intervening articles, Mimica (2006) and Mosko (2012).  3. All statistics here are from a survey of households and employees. Given gambling’s morally ambiguous status, these figures likely underplay the reality.  4. Tom Liam is a pseudonym, as are all names in the book that could lead to a person’s identification. Except my friend and later field assistant Loui, who was excited to be named.  5. In this I take my cue from Roy Wagner’s (1974) ethnographically informed foregrounding of groups as a contingent product of relations.  6. Davis, for example, makes a partial repertoire of British exchanges, listing forty-two possible kinds of exchange (1992: 29).  7. The value of the valuable can still be compared to other valuables in the abstract, but the lack of a direct comparison loosens its hold.  8. It is only when a player loses money at a proprietary gambling establishment that they could be said to have exchanged money for pleasure, so this is largely a post-hoc justification.  9. Certainly the inclination to draw systematicity out of these innovative goings on was governed by the kinds of transactional formalization I am familiar with from my home country, and this will also affect how analogous what I produce must seem. 10. Huizinga thinks gambling in particular is unproductive towards the development of culture, arguing that while the desire to win is strong in the bettors (which is

18  Money Games

culturally productive), that interest is lost to the audience, who lack investment in the game, so the cultural gain is lost. Card games, to the extent that they rely on chance, fall more or less under the category of gambling and are therefore culturally sterile (ibid.: 225). 11. Caillois took Huizinga to task for excluding gambling from proper play by virtue of the fact it has stakes, rather than theorizing the close relationship between games and economic interest, which Caillois notes is a relationship based on ‘pure waste’ in which nothing of value is created, making it futile but of potential analytical insight (1961: 5–6).



 1 Selected Histories

We ambled south-westwards, leaving the slot machine joints and the town centre. I was in no hurry; neither was my friend Loui (later my field assistant). Our bachelor-style string bags were slung over our shoulders. We wore combat shorts and fading T-shirts; for Loui dark green flip-flops, and for me workman’s boots. My feet are soft. It was mid 2009, around 4.30pm – the sun was in our eyes. Wide roads separated double and triple story buildings: trade stores, the electricity company, food bars, pharmacies, banks, a bookie and a bowling club. Sun-bleached paint split to reveal the older buildings’ earlier identities. Many have remained structurally unchanged since before Papua New Guinea achieved Independence. That was 1975 – two generations ago. New building projects were sprouting in between and on the margins, funded by various outside interests. We made the short stroll from the administrative and commercial centre, rounding the airport and through a grid of permanent residences. Houses instead of offices, street vendors instead of shops; three stories became two, two became one. Australian-built Public Housing accounts for the monotony of town houses in residential Goroka with their galvanized stilts and corrugated roofs, but by my time they were almost all privately owned. Beyond lay the semi-legal settlement where Loui struggled to live. From the centre outward, the ground transitioned from sealed tarmac to potholed loose shingle to dusty brown or viscous dirt. Increasingly, composite roadways intermingled with refuse that swiftly composted, leaving rich soil but little archaeology. Steeper slopes within the town boundary were home to illegal and legal, planned and unplanned settlements, while customary and parcelled freehold land just outside supported an assortment of local landowners, rented plots and properties as well as individual plots bought freehold. In practice, it was hard to spot differences between these areas and the town’s official settlements. In any case, at least half of all residents lived outside of Public Housing but within the immediate vicinity of Goroka Town. Even before I learnt that Gorokans thought of their town as a gambling capital, I had come to Goroka because Highlanders are known nationwide for

20  Money Games

their propensity to gamble. Outsiders from other regions cite their lust for money, rich resources and love of ‘giving’ (paradoxically, it seemed to me at the time) as the main reasons for this attitude; this usually came along with a suggestion that Highlanders are ‘backward’ – i.e. lacking experience with Europeans. The Highlands as a whole came under colonial influence several decades after the coasts and islands, and its experience was in some ways unique and unifying, but it is also the case that people of other regions often band Highlanders together as relatively ‘uncivilized’ peoples more closely associated than themselves to a life without colonial law. To put this ethnographic moment in context, I present three short historical accounts that converge upon it: a history of Goroka Town and two histories of gambling in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. The latter centre respectively on two prominent tropes in Papua New Guinea anthropology: gifts and gender. The aim will be to provide background to the in-depth studies of particular contemporary gambling phenomena that follow. I then return to the ethnographic present, rounding out the account with an unusual unifying detail that justifies my choosing a whole town and a practice as my field site rather than a particular people bound by kinship. Goroka

In 2009, Goroka was the seventh largest of twenty provincial capitals in Papua New Guinea. Built around an airstrip from 1941 as the first town in the Highlands, Goroka was designated regional capital in 1945, a title quickly lost; during my fieldwork it was more of a stopping point in the national imagination between industrial Lae on the coast and the present regional capital Mount Hagen further up the Highway, or a point of departure for the forty-five minute flight to the capital Port Moresby. Colonial intervention and the establishment of a town had to contend with and alienate land from a diverse population: localized factions at high density who were constantly at war with certain neighbours (see Read 1965). The fortified, palisaded and nucleated villages that predate Goroka Town were home to highly corporate assemblages of (principally but not exclusively) agnatically connected men, their wives, children and men who for one reason or another decided to live uxorilocally, as well as displaced peoples who had been temporarily or permanently incorporated. Fluid notions of corporation in the region at large led to a long debate in Melanesian anthropology (see Wagner 1974) and the rise of the term ‘cognatic’ as a mode of description. I use ‘assemblages’ as a shorthand that expresses the fluid way that people self-identify with and distinguish between others at various scales (see Wagner 1991).

Selected Histories 21

The peoples of the Goroka Valley gave and returned pigs to each other, but these were not bombastic incremental transfers unfolding over years (the ones made famous in the Ongka’s Big Moka film (1976)); that happened further up the Highway. Their leaders attempted to shame their rivals by giving more than they thought they could return. In this part of the Goroka Valley, people usually killed pigs before handing them over and set more store on initiation and warfare than their westerly counterparts (see Langness 1977; Newman 1962; Read 1954, 1965). The constant wars contributed further to their fracturing identities. Local people whose labour helped to make Goroka a reality, and who had for the most part previously lived on ridges surrounding the valley floor, abandoned warfare and moved closer, making their claims for ancestral ownership of the tall grasslands below; these were suddenly in demand by the colonisers. The extraordinarily dense yet fragmented – almost already metropolitan – population standards of the Highlands meant that even in this relatively small town diversity was intense. Goroka is the image of a frontier town, built on a faltered gold frontier. After disappointing finds of gold, it was outmigration in the form of indentured labour rather than an influx of foreigners that characterized its early years. This backwards frontier spread from east to west. Indigenous young men were turned into exportable resources, seriously disrupting their home communities. After transformative experiences at the coast or building towns and airstrips, these young men (if they returned) were sent back home with immeasurably altered expectations. There they and their relatives called for the real frontier to arrive and transform their world, and they were ready to transact with its emissaries. One of the Highlands’ first ethnographers, Kenneth Read, said he was greeted as if the Guhuku-Gama had finally been given their own white man and was plagued (as anthropologists of the area often are) by feelings of failing to deliver the goods (Read 1965). Having seen the disparities that existed across what had become their country, Highlands people and their representatives in the emerging democracy of the 1960s and early 1970s became concerned that Independence was being set in motion too quickly, without giving them the opportunity to catch up to their countrymen (Waiko 1993: 138). There were legitimate fears that the result would be the institution of permanent inequality. These opinions are commonly voiced even today. The primary source of money has been coffee ever since the indigenously led planting boom of the 1950s and 1960s, when Gorokans stunned their Australian colonizers with their ready grasp of the value of money, industry and ‘materialism’.1 Goroka sits at 1,573m above sea level, with year round maximum temperatures of 26–29°C during the day and minimums of 12–14°C at night, and while variation in rainfall may go from a high of 282mm (in

22  Money Games

March) to a low of 83mm (in July), it will still rain at least twenty-one days of each month (Papua New Guinea Climate Guide 2014). This climate is ideal for growing premium coffee, and so are the soil profiles. Overlaying yellowish-brown clay are deep organic topsoils with excellent physical properties, which means that subsistence crops also thrive (Haantjens 1970). Fifty years or so on from the coffee planting boom, Gorokans were disappointed. Sources describe an inexhaustible demand for new agricultural products and later a listlessness under the realization that cash crops would never prompt the desired transformation. Coffee trees produced drudgingly, flourishing once a year sometime between March and July (at the start of the dry season), depending on the altitude. It did not help that many coffee trees were neglected once they began to disappoint, and untended or elderly coffee trees did little to change their dreary reputations. The frontier settled into stagnant inequality and development stopped short like a gift unrequited. Many (but by no means all) coveted the promise and pain of large-scale resource extraction and the accompanying explosion of capital investment seen elsewhere, but the Goroka Valley that cups the town has not yielded serious mineral wealth. The 2000 census recorded urban unemployment in Eastern Highlands Province at 17 per cent.2 In Goroka, the most frequent occupations were agricultural, animal and fisheries workers (19 per cent) and elementary occupations (23 per cent).3 According to a survey I conducted, mean income was K41 a week (approximately £11 at the time),4 with an average of one wage earner per household of six. Seventy per cent of households marketed goods to supplement wages. Without the advantage of mineral wealth, it is little wonder Gorokans thought that people further up the Okuk Highway – with their mines and forestry – could gamble for bigger money, a (morally questionable) index of carefree success.5 With such a fertile base, it is perhaps unsurprising that Goroka Town (as opposed to Goroka Valley [a geographical feature] or Goroka District [a larger political unit]) makes up a measly 23,000 (4 per cent) of the 580,000 people in Eastern Highlands Province.6 The rural Highlands remained for a long time a paradox of overcrowding for small-scale societies with so-called stone-age technology (see Sahlins 1972), yet net urban migration to Highlands towns has been modest given the latent ‘population pressure.’ Papua New Guinea is the second most rural country in the world behind Burundi; the percentage of people living rurally remains in the high eighties (Rural Population Tables 1981–2015). Nevertheless, good local road and aviation infrastructure by Papua New Guinean standards meant Goroka was always awash with rural visitors from the surrounding districts and its immediate westerly neighbour Simbu Province.

Selected Histories 23

Eastern Highlands urban areas are dominated by migrants (70 per cent of all males, 67 per cent of females),7 58 per cent of whom come from outside the province (Papua New Guinea National Statistics Office 2002). In my survey, I asked where respondents’ households were from (allowing two locations if they identified them): 62 per cent said Eastern Highlands (14 per cent of whom claimed to be local land owners), 20 per cent held they were from neighbouring Simbu Province, and other provinces together totalled 17 per cent. Towns present a problem for some anthropologists because of their scale and the origin of their occupants (see Amin and Thrift 2002; Goddard 2005), and Goroka is a good example of urban diversity. Looking at gambling, however, as an activity that actively creates relations among participants from various locations (e.g. settlement visitors, mobile betel nut traders, coffee and fresh produce sellers) bypasses some of these problems, as I will demonstrate. With activities like gambling spurring them on, new patterns of assemblage flourished in Goroka Town. A great many migrants assumed local landowning and proprietorship rights as they became related to one another, while alienated state land was recolonized by illegal or planned settlements creating complex webs of relatedness and more or less new social forms. Newfound mobility on the back of roads, aeroplanes, pacification and wage labour meant that residents of Goroka came from far and wide but particularly from Simbu. I myself was adopted by a prominent local leader, who, like many, referred to himself as Simbu blo Goroka (lit. ‘Simbu belonging to Goroka’). That people could be both from Simbu and recognize the deep obligations of belonging to Goroka testifies to the novel social forms developing in the Highlands. My Papua New Guinea father was a big-time gambler, and the history of gambling is an account of transactions that bridge diverse origins and forge new articulations between economic spheres. Gambling and a ‘Gift Economy’

Archaeology gives no evidence that there was gambling prior to late nineteenth-century European colonialism in either of the territories that would later become Papua New Guinea. Because ‘neither card-playing nor drinking were native customs’, the Commonwealth administration of Papua (the southern half of the modern state) became stridently against gambling and alcohol consumption by locals (Murray 1925: 71). Penalties were sometimes severe, with fines of up to six months and five New Guinea pound fines for repeat offenders (Section 78 of the Native Regulations, Papuan Villager 2. March 1930. ‘Gambling’, 2–3). Lieutenant Governor and Chief Judicial Officer of Papua Sir Hubert Murray’s attitude to meting out punishments was that those who were

24  Money Games

accustomed to European ways were more inculcated than those whose crimes were consistent with customary beliefs (Dinnen 2001: 21). For the British and later Australians, who enforced this policy before and after Murray, the absence of gambling denoted a natural, pure state that should be maintained. In his personal life, Sir Hubert Murray was a fan of bridge parties, and gambling was a staple (and unsanctioned) activity among Europeans. While framed in terms of protecting fragile natives, the urgency with which gambling was condemned suggests deeper motives bound up with the much broader tendency for new or insecure governments to take aim at gambling for those at the bottom because it threatens the predictability of their goals and the flow of their wealth. The policy in Papua was particularly odious because it punished the people facing the most radical changes, people who were in large part cooperating in attempts at ‘civilization’. The Administration could in reality do little about gambling in distant villages, so expediency may also have been a motive for the policy. At the same time that gambling was punished around colonial centres in Papua New Guinea, the meeting points facilitated by colonial plantations, police barracks, prisons and wage work were acting like incubators, and gambling returned with labourers, policemen and ex-convicts to farflung communities.8 Convictions in Papua reached 104 in 1911–12.9 Australia wrested control of New Guinea (the northern half of what is now Papua New Guinea, including the unexplored area that would become Goroka) from Germany at the outset of the Great War. According to the Annual Reports to the United Nations, in 1929–30 two people were convicted for gambling; ten years later the figure was 846. After dipping during WWII, the numbers rose quite steadily until they peaked in 1965–66 at 2,216.10 Considering the very low probability of being caught, the total movement of wealth through gambling must have been large indeed. The Highlands region was opened up as a labour frontier by the Australians following World War II, and the young men sent to coastal plantations found themselves in gambling hotbeds. The initial spread of gambling into the Highlands that is represented in these conviction figures was predominantly through cards (along with dice) and particularly one staple plantation game called either laki (lit. ‘lucky’) or tri-lip (lit. ‘three leaves’, a reference to the number of cards each player received). Goroka has some of the most complete records for the transmission of gambling, partly thanks to pioneering anthropologists Kenneth Read and Richard Salisbury, both of whom worked nearby Goroka at the time of cards’ appearance. Kenneth Read’s fieldwork among the Gahuku-Gama began in 1950–52. They own parts of what is now Goroka, including some of what can only be described as notorious gambling dens. The Gahuku-Gama’s proximity to the emerging town meant ready access to cards. Read recalled his exasperation in 1952 with his ‘boys’ (those young men employed to take care of

Selected Histories 25

his domestic duties) playing ‘interminable games of cards’ whenever he went out (Read 1965: 21). Richard Salisbury’s fieldwork on social and economic change was among Siane people of the Upper Asaro area (just a few miles north of Goroka) in 1952–53. He encountered the return of only the second crop of Siane indentured labourers from the coast. Salisbury reported that these young men had watched ‘more sophisticated natives playing guitars and harmonicas, gambling with cards at laki’ (1962: 127) but makes no mention of these adventurers bringing the cards back home with them. Salisbury therefore likely captured the historical moment of transmission of new knowledge by migrant workers, who nevertheless still lacked the materials (card, ink and sufficient money) to replicate gaming in their home communities. New Guineans were barred from possessing playing cards, and cards were banned outright in 1965. Colonial officers and tourists then had to smuggle decks of cards in their socks to avoid detection (Wilkinson pers. comm.; Stannard pers. comm.). Very few decks were likely to have leaked out to locals outside of the town itself – at least at first, but old decks belonging to Europeans were known to go missing. Scholarly consideration of gambling games began in the late 1960s when Donald Laycock and Ernest Brandewie traded thoughts on the six card games they encountered during various fieldworks and especially ‘Lucky’, which showed some variance (Brandewie 1967; Laycock 1966, 1967); both speculated on the games’ European origins and modes of transmission, with special attention to the way variations might account for both societal differences and levels of acculturation (see also Burton-Bradley 1968: 29–33; M. Strathern 1975: 216–22). During my time in Goroka older people described how, some years after gambling became popular, they found cardboard boxes, cut them into squares and drew playing card symbols on them if they could not get their hands on manufactured cards, a practice that seems to have been commonplace (Ekins 1969; Tamakoshi pers. comm.). Homemade cards are inevitably more susceptible to manipulation, so they were a last resort, but these are the lengths players went to for a game. On top of lacking the necessary materials, it seems gambling was further hampered by newly introduced money, which had triggered an initial rampage of saving. The Trust Territory’s Treasury Department is reported to have regularly asked: ‘Where does all the money go in the Eastern Highlands?’11 Such was the hoarding of cash. Patrol reports from the Goroka sub-district for the following four years moan about locals sitting on their money, refusing to spend it, while petitioning for better marketing opportunities with which to obtain more (see also Howlett 1962). After four years of familiarization and accumulation, money surfaced when gambling was first officially documented in the Goroka sub-district in February 1958. Patrol Officer Allan Cottle convicted nine Korfena people for

26  Money Games

playing, each getting two months with hard labour (Cottle 1958). Korfena is the named group who possessed the northwest portion of land that was alienated to build Goroka Town. One subset, the Asariufa (who were among Kenneth Read’s informants) own and run the three largest gambling dens in Goroka today. When Phillip Newman conducted his doctoral research a few miles northwest of Korfena among the Gururumba in 1959, he was impressed by the ‘young sophisticates who have learned a card game called “Lucky” while away at work’ (1962: 238; see also Howlett 1962). Newman chronicles the zeal of young players, some of whom had become ‘full-time gamblers. They travel from one place to another devoting their full time to this occupation’ (1962: 239). Newman observed the seed of gambling’s rapid spread through the Eastern Highlands and with it new transactive possibilities. Young Korfena and Gururumba men were both among the first and keenest to work on the coast, where they enjoyed novel transactions as they were paid in money for the first time and had their first flutter. By the early 1960s patrol officers in the region were convicting people for gambling practically every patrol, and among indigenous peoples, playing cards seemed unproblematic except when they got caught.12 Convictions for gambling spread up through the Highlands in a westerly direction from the late 1950s through the early 1960s along the labour frontier. Around each government post and growing town (where indentured labourers were recruited in greater numbers), gambling appeared and then radiated swiftly. Patrol officers commonly thought that their Native Constables and interpreters played cards whenever they rested, and some even trained their European patrol officers (Wilkinson, pers. comm.), providing a good model for the ‘full-time gamblers’ to emulate (see Maclean 1984: 46). The adoption of gambling is an extraordinary saga that was documented in particular detail, a taste of which is given here. Card gaming crossed deep historical divides in a short period of time, coming fast on the heels of money and spreading in the face of condemnation by colonial officials. Gambling also engulfed the Highlands at the same time as the ‘efflorescence’ of so-called gift exchange (A. Strathern 1979a: 532) that (through films like Ongka’s Big Moka (1976)) helped make Melanesia a prominent region anthropologically. What did the term gift exchange mean for anthropological understandings of the gambling they saw? Anthropological orthodoxy has it that a Maussian gift (named after the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss) is an item conferred by a donor upon a recipient under the auspice that the recipient need not or cannot reciprocate with an appropriate return. While this auspice is deemed critical, it is nevertheless thought delusory. Parties know that a return is obligatory, but more importantly, they each know that the other party knows that they know that

Selected Histories 27

it is obligatory (Mauss 1954). Everyone knows they are participating in a contrived game of free will. The timing of a return upon a Maussian gift is potentially open-ended, but in every case there is an expectation among at least one party to the transaction that a return transfer will eventually take effect. This may end the exchange or instigate yet other transfers in an ongoing web known as an exchange system (see Pickles in press). Godelier (1999: 10) points out it was Mauss’ genius to reconnect the point of departure of original gifts to the point of arrival of their return. Lack of reciprocation is basically excluded from consideration by Mauss by virtue of Mauss’ interest in gifts insofar as they were precursors to contractual law, in the Durkheimian evolutionary tradition (Parry 1986: 457). Posing Maussian gift exchange as the structural opposite of capitalism is a straw man regularly unmasked in lecture theatres and seminar rooms. To achieve this unveiling, most oversimplify C.A. Gregory’s (1982) Gifts and Commodities to say that in gift economies (as opposed to capitalist economies) the important result is always and only the relationship that the contributions represent or bring into being, rather than the gift itself, that participants really desire. Meanwhile, in capitalist economies things characteristically take the form of commodities divorced from their producers, and because that is how their subjects are accustomed to thinking of objects, people tend to desire the thing that is given and not the abstract labour relationships that created it. From that polemical starting point, it is a short step to revealing that societies that organize their economy through delayed reciprocity (famous examples being the kula ring in Papua New Guinea, and potlatch along the northwest coast of North America) intensely desire the things themselves for themselves after all. Ipso facto one can then reveal that the relationship represented by a gift in a commodity economy is often in fact far more important than the object. It is by now well established that the gift can be seen in the market transaction and object fetishism in the gift (e.g. Appadurai 1986; Carrier 1990; Gell 1992). The romantic association between altruistic giving and simple economies who practice gift exchange is then revealed as a commodity-induced projection because the very possibility of separation of interest from gift is shown to be an artefact that is if not peculiar to a capitalist economy then at least correlated with it (Carrier 1990). Nowadays the current consensus on the importance of Maussian gifts versus pure gifts follows Parry’s common sense wisdom that empirically ‘it is not a question of either an ideology of reciprocity or of its repudiation, but rather of a significant difference in the extent to which these possibilities are elaborated’ (Parry 1986: 466). The first explorers, colonial officers, missionaries and anthropologists in the Highlands found its peoples had developed what looked like gift exchange into their most exulted cultural forms, a to and fro that played out over and beyond the life cycle of its individual members and involved the most valued

28  Money Games

items: usually pigs, shells, feathers and axes. The newcomers fed this grand competition by paying those who assisted them with shells, steel and later money. Fortunes rose and fell when shifts in access to Europeans’ valuables created new inequalities, and savvy aspirants moved quickly to consolidate an advantageous position. Different classes of valuables lost their worth, and communities were aghast to find that an event that might have set you back two gold-lip pearl shells a couple of years earlier now required ten. Most of these valuables, with the partial exception of pigs, were eventually superseded by money. Marcel Mauss’ concept of ‘gift exchange’ was nourished by research in Melanesia; later on, the ‘gift exchange’ concept was taken to Melanesia by anthropologists, and soon enough the gift became Melanesia’s dominant explanatory device. It became part of Melanesian anthropological orthodoxy that the gift was at one point the organizing principle for Melanesian sociality and that the situation has since been muddied by European encroachment. By contrast, gambling enforces certain rules that purport to make it stand out from everyday rounds of give and take as a one-way transfer. The stake is tied to the unforeseeable result of an event that when resolved strictly determines an outcome. This in theory precludes people from feeling axiomatically responsible to a loser who backed the incorrect outcome. Gambling, therefore, has among its defining characteristics the negation of a mutual assumption that one should be obliged to reciprocate the flow of goods that occurs during the course of a game. (If one was obliged to give a loser an amount equivalent to what one won, this would not be gambling.) Therefore if reciprocity is felt necessary, it usually comes in the form of a free game, a token return, or the axiom that a winner must keep playing until a loser gives up. Gambling is in this respect a vehicle for increasing choice about whether to donate, and who to donate to, negating specific relationships. Ethnographers keen on emphasizing the gift-centeredness of Highland people and their resistance to ‘commodification’ also saw people simultaneously taking up gambling, which can look a lot like a symptom of commodification. The famously ‘gift-centred’ Melpa (A. Strathern 1984), Mae Enga (Meggitt 1979) and Siane (Salisbury 1962) were experiencing extreme inflation of their ‘gift-economies’ during the period I have described, and they simultaneously allowed and often encouraged gambling. It is clear from the many short references littering the ethnographic record that anthropologists generally assumed that gambling was a small-scale symptom of creeping commodification, usually overshadowed in their ethnographies by largescale gifting, for example: Coffee planting has been enthusiastically adopted, and the trees are now beginning to bear. This brings in a partial money economy.

Selected Histories 29

The money is used for purchases from other natives and from trade stores, for gambling, occasionally to hire labour for a month or two, and, most importantly, in exchanges. (Brown and Brookfield 1959: 3; see also Howlett 1962: 268; Nilles 1953: 12) Since its inception, research into gambling in PNG has remained tethered to questions about the interaction of once distinct economic ‘systems’: capitalism and the so-called ‘gift economy’. In the mid to late 1980s the Melanesianist anthropologist Laura Zimmer published two journal articles, wrote a PhD thesis (1985, 1986, 1987), organized two conference sessions and edited the 1987 special issue of Oceania on the topic of gambling. Card games as an indication of nascent capitalism were roundly critiqued in that issue. Gambling instead sat alongside efflorescing gift economies, providing a crucial point of conjunction between those who worked for money and those who did not (cf. Riches 1975). Contributors to that conference session were at pains to point out the complementarity or disruption of gambling within a mixed gift and commodity economy. In some cases, the redistributive effects of gambling reduced relative differences in wealth (Zimmer 1986, 1987), while in others it had the effect of creating desirable imbalances in the face of a frustratingly levelling exchange system (Mitchell 1988: 645). Guiding concerns were the role of gambling in integrating new practices, especially as modes of redistribution, and the association of gambling with young men who were rebelling against patriarchal control. At the same time, gambling was depicted as a localized practice (albeit an imported one), and wider links were stressed less than the internal meanings of gambling games to local communities. The issue was a corrective to the commonly held idea that gambling undermined ‘traditional’ economic practices. My informants cited their love of giving as a reason for profuse gambling, and the historical record likewise shows no evidence of qualms from Highlanders when incorporating gambling into their worldly repertoires. The paradox of gift and gambling therefore only exists at the level of anthropological description. It is a ‘descriptive paradox’, for instance, that widespread gambling commanded so little attention when it happened under the noses of outstanding ethnographers, their gift-centred manuscripts capturing the imagination of wider anthropology. By sheer volume of transfers, gambling is often among the most consequential of activities in Papua New Guinea economies, but its place in economic anthropology and in analysis at large is minor at best, and this must be at least partially attributed to assumptions about its lack of seriousness and partially to its apparent incongruence to a prior gift economy.13 In order to tease out a more nuanced appreciation of Goroka’s contemporary economy, I need to ask: what calculations and ideas cross these

30  Money Games

landscapes exactly? Does gambling remain a monolithic act when it is taken up or is it transformed and if so how? What does that mean for the transactions that preceded gambling? What does this tell us about how we can appreciate all the back and forth that makes up life, rather than separating out things like gifts and gambling losses? It is these questions that led me finally to conduct my analysis at the level of transfers, to track the segregation of certain constellations of transaction as appropriate to particular kinds of people. One way that the ability to participate in certain transactions is entangled is with gender distinctions. I now turn to the sustenance of gender categories through (non)participation in gambling and show that gambling has been at the forefront of a major shift in the gendering of economic relations brought about by the adoption of money and an urban lifestyle. Gambling and Gender

It would seem trivial that men and women sit down together for a game of cards, as trivial as the presence of gambling itself. And yet, informal gender intermingling in this part of the Highlands runs counter to many long-held ideas about the proper activities of men and women. Historical evidence shows that women were prevented from gambling with and against men for some years after gambling arrived, but in the ethnographic present, everyone vehemently insisted that of course men and women can gamble together and that there is no contradiction in it. Ardent opposition has become eager indifference. The contemporary gambling scenes that readers are set to encounter were presaged by this historical gender peculiarity.14 Before Europeans arrived in the Goroka Valley, misogyny and the expropriation of women’s products was pronounced; Feil called this part of the Eastern Highlands ‘the locus classicus of sexual antagonism’ (1987: 199). Initiated men slept together in communal men’s houses while women slept in individual houses with children and sometimes pigs (Read 1965). Men’s houses were the centre of political decision-making, and women were only rarely if ever admitted. Inside, adult men affirmed their domination, while as a rule women moved between clans through marriage, living virilocally. Hidden in the men’s house were ritual accoutrements including sacred flutes, pregnant with phallic symbolism, over which men retained jealous control. Women were thought to have originally possessed these magical flutes and they were nominally forbidden to see them for fear that they would attempt to retrieve them once more, upending their subjugation. Gender antagonism was given periodic ritual release during male initiations in which women pelted the men and their young initiant charges with stones, axes and arrows as they charged by. The practice of sleeping separately, male initiation and

Selected Histories 31

the sacred flutes were in most cases quickly abandoned upon missionization, men choosing to sleep in the ‘women’s houses’ with their wives (Read 1965, 1988). In cases where men had multiple wives, they usually lived in separate houses, and men attempted to strike a balance between domiciles. In rural areas it was and still is women who rear pigs and plant and tend most of the crops, including the staple sweet potatoes. It was the job of men to clear neat rectangular plots and in some places fence them, and particularly in the Eastern Highlands men devoted a great deal of their time to warfare and security. Once the acquisition of steel tools made male clearing and fencing tasks less arduous, and pacification made security superfluous, men (who already had a lighter workload with respect to production (Read 1952: 13)) spent more of their time in visiting and engineering various transactions of pigs or durable valuables. The horticultural work done by women was not significantly reduced by steel tools (see Sillitoe 2010). While women tended pigs and retained a minimal stake in their disposal (far less than their westerly neighbours (Feil 1987: 200)), their ultimate destination lay firmly under the command of their husbands, who often used them to obtain durable valuables like shells while on their many visits. Married women opened up transfer routes and strategic alliances between clans and tribes by virtue of the debts their marriages created (and, as one moves west, women’s ongoing connections to their natal relatives also became important linkages), but it was men who conducted the transactions and the warfare while remaining rooted to their patrilineal clan land. Analytically and ideologically, rural women are by virtue of marriage ultimately mobile, while the daily reality of subjugation by horticulture means rural women are tied to the land through the need to produce, and it is instead men who (having a productive base made possible by women’s work) spend their time demonstrating their mobility through constant visiting. Women tended not to deride a political system from which they were largely excluded and usually accepted their role as producers; their complaints tended to be particularistic, aimed at men who had failed to acknowledge their role, heed their desires or sufficiently recognize their kin (see M. Strathern 1972: 142–49). Against this background of a sharp division in the roles men and women played in livelihood strategies, in prestige transactions and in encountering new transactive forms, the move to gender neutral gambling (to equal participation in an arena of transfers) has a ring of significance. It took time for gender to cease to be a barrier to gambling. The gradual drift in attitudes is connected to the interplay of urban and money-centred livelihood strategies and subsistence farming/cash cropping in rural locales. The initial discovery of gambling by Highlanders tended to be in all-male contexts such as police training and labour compounds. My research has not uncovered any female arrests for gambling in the first years after gambling

32  Money Games

arrived in the Highlands. The earliest reports cited in the previous section (if gender was specified) say men did the gambling. Given the sporadic secondary evidence available, I will use a particular case that draws from subsequent fieldwork in a rural area two hours by road west of Goroka, which I take to be indicative of what occurred in the eastern half of the Highlands (what was once called the Central Highlands). The account is peppered with supporting (but less complete) examples from contemporaneous Papua New Guinean contexts. Before cards arrived in the Tabare-Klai area of Simbu Province, the first returnees from migrant labour brought back golf. Women were instructed to sweep and weed a dirt floor on a ridgetop each day, where an empty can of tuna was sunk into the ground as a hole. They possessed only a few balls brought back by a migrant labourer who was employed as a golf caddy in the capital Port Moresby. Men fashioned golf clubs from the branches of trees. Each man placed an equal stake in the can and each took a turn in a putting competition, having slept with their stake and impregnated it by rubbing magical herbs on it the night before. First to sink their ball gained the pot and a cut went to the owner of the ball. (A very similar golf game was also reported in Makiroka, a village on the outskirts of Goroka (Howlett 1962: 189)).The organization was male, and the particular putting ‘green’ was exclusive to members of a single men’s house. When cards arrived, golf was abandoned. Card gambling, especially for large stakes, was an exclusively male preserve (see also Howlett et al. 1976: 348). In Tabare-Klai each clan identified a winman (lit. ‘win man’), whose win rate exceeded his male peers. The winman attended all-night card games at different men’s houses. Women who were married to the men’s house in question prepared and cooked pigs and sometimes marketed on the margins but were otherwise spectators. Perhaps ten to twelve players from different men’s houses assembled, along with accompanying ‘bodyguards’, who covered the players’ bets when he ran out of money. Win men bought portions of pork for themselves and their ‘bodyguards’. As the night drew on, losers exhausted their bank, players dwindled and the pot increased. Winnings were heaped in front of crossed legs. The overall winner, who won the majority if not all the money, bought the backbone of the pig, lavishly fed those accompanying him and gave money to the organizer. Winners often brought their money home and laid it out in a public place, distributing it to men from their men’s house. I already mentioned the inflation of ceremonial events during the period when first shells and then money began flooding the economy. It was at this time that concerns about the reduced impact of traditional valuables were at their peak. Whole types of valuables were dropping out of circulation as their value collapsed. Initially, wider access to valuables fuelled an economy in which a broader stratum of men saw potential to gain personal fame through

Selected Histories 33

a combination of old and new transaction types. Men’s acquisitive desire for traditional valuables as well as participation in commodity consumption eventually slackened the male monopoly on money. In Hagen, for instance, women were allowed more easily into gambling than into the ceremonial transfer system called moka because Hagen bigmen derided gambling as rubbish, household-level transactions by comparison to their grandiose displays, thereby leaving gambling to low stakes, low status personages (A. Strathern 1984: 102). Rather than identifying money as the primary valuable, the continued primacy of pigs and shells (and the increased access to both through money) precipitated low stakes gambling among women. As money took dominance in most Highlands locales, gambling was initially either explicitly banned from women, or more often money, the medium used for gambling, was kept out of the hands of women. Cash derived from male labouring (either indentured or not) remained the province of men. A significant change occurred during the coffee boom of the 1960s. One of the major bones of contention became whether a woman was entitled to a share in the proceeds of the coffee harvest, of which she did the lion’s share of the work on smallholder plots owned by her affines. As demand for household durables and consumption items like rice and tinned meat/fish increased (Koczberski 2002), cash, often in small denominations, found its way into the hands of women in their role as homekeepers (see also Burkins 1984: 204, 207). Gambling opened up to women when it was relegated to small stakes. The move to everyday, low stakes betting open to all coincided with a diversification in the types of card games available to potential punters. The original game laki (which has a high turnaround involving new stakes every minute or so) remained popular, but it was joined by slower games. At that point, women and young men participated equally, but men were more frequent players of the very fastest and most expensive games. Once the entire economy was permeated in this way by a single valuable (cash), then it became possible for men and women to compete directly for it. At first, mixed gambling occurred for small sums between women and young men; the latter had enjoyed the privilege of gambling for some time, having little responsibility and some access to cash (Hatanaka 1972: 110; Whiteman 1973: 20, 35). Then the apical transfer events, pig festivals, collapsed in Simbu as attention turned fully towards money activities such as purchasing trucks and investing in business; at the same time the profligacy of men led women to use their meagre earnings to form collectives that pooled wealth (Sexton 1982). Gambling was on its way to becoming gender neutral. The town was another major engine in the cessation of gender barriers to gambling. The earliest descriptions of women and men gambling together come from urban locations (e.g. Belshaw 1957: 217; Oram 1968a: 30; M.

34  Money Games

Strathern 1975: 222), and urban women were more likely to gamble (Reay 1966: 175). The sources also indicate that high stakes gambling and group matches in towns were still dominated by men (Oram 1968a: 30) and that women used winnings to solve household financial difficulties rather than fuel personal consumption (Levine and Levine 1979: 54–57; Oeser 1969: 62).15 In town, everybody has to use money to some extent. Already in the 1960s, women in Mount Hagen were much more prone to becoming heavy gamblers than their rural counterparts (Brandewie 1967: 47; A. Strathern 1984: 102). More so than in the village, in town husbands who work had to allocate money to their wives for household expenses because wives were not able to support their family exclusively through the land. Additionally, without gardens to tend or work to attend, wives were long on time (Rowley 1965: 210). The new generation of businessmen frequently left daily cashflow management to wives and daughters, providing further experience with money. While women were participating in the same money economy, they had greater responsibilities, generally being charged with all household provisioning, often through an allowance from their husband that could be irregular (in part because of the husband’s gambling). Wives took to turning up at their husband’s workplaces on paydays in an attempt to receive the portion of their husband’s pay they needed for domestic upkeep (Brandewie 1967: 48). Others tried to convince their employers to pay them instead of their husbands, and some were successful (see also Wardlow 2006: 41). Further domestic conflict followed, but at least children were fed that fortnight. Men countered that wives should not gamble lest they lose the food budget (Whiteman 1973: 62). Wives’ success in getting money varied and continues to vary, but we can take away that women began to expect money from wage-earning husbands. Unfailingly, when I enquired about mixed-gender gambling during my own fieldworks I was told that anyone can play because everyone uses money. Money was the leveller in local eyes. In fact, I was initially perturbed from exploring the gender differences in gambling due to the fervency of these statements. I had to piece together the transformative role of money through historical inquiry. The overall picture may be one of de-gendering participation in gambling, but familiar gender divisions surface within gambling, including significant differences in the kinds of gambling that men and women participate in, something I will discuss further towards the end of chapter six. Women, for instance, play a much larger role in gambling for low stakes in their local areas than in high stakes gambling and gambling far from their homestead, which is consistent with their reduced access to cash funds. Women who gamble in public, higher stakes areas tend to be either wage earners, single, marketers in the local area, or responsible for collecting rents from those using their land, their husband’s or their brother’s.

Selected Histories 35

There remains significant tension surrounding the use of money by men and women. The sale of coffee (often tended by women but sold by men) is the template for such conflicts. Many men still assume that they should have control over the sphere of transaction that results from domestic production. However, women are able to access money from domestic production if they market it directly (see also Koczberski 2002). The complexity of incomes and outgoings in an urban cash economy makes for more intricate points of contest around the proper use of different sources of money. The kinds of bets that are made across genders are therefore theoretically open but limited by income as well as the perceived masculinity of associated sporting events and night-time travel. All this is to say that while the current gender distribution of gambling activity in Papua New Guinea resembles the international status quo in which men make up a majority of recreational gamblers, it is in fact the outcome of a very particular historical process that has not necessarily settled into a new equilibrium (Phillips and Wilson 2009). It is equally important that the perception of those who choose to gamble, and who gamble more or less than their peers, is also gender inflected. While gambling is ideologically open to all, men are thought more prone, and male status meant greater freedom to exercise dominion over one’s spending. As has been noted by other observers as well as myself (e.g. Burton-Bradley 1968: 31), domestic violence was clearly linked to card gambling, and women bore the brunt of the violence (but see Wardlow 2006: 82). Stated causes of conflict were women using monies that are destined for household provisioning to gamble and women purportedly exchanging sexual favours for money to prevent their husbands from finding out they had lost their own money (see Wardlow 2006; Zimmer 1986: 246). Many women use low stakes gambling to fill the hours at home, leaving them open to such suspicions. Gambling became a ready medium for expanding new transactive spheres once the collective focus had shifted to a common valuable, facilitating both new possibilities and the echoes of old anxieties. Once both men and women had come to rely on money, gender disparities came to be expressed through gambling activity rather than participation/nonparticipation. One aspect that is missing from this potted history is the exhilaration women must have felt playing for the first time. In fact, the thrill of the game is always a hard part of gambling history to capture, even though it is one of the most important aspects of the phenomenon and crucial to the understanding of a game and its effects. Unfortunately, contingency and open-endedness in hindsight become foregone conclusions (see Malaby 2012).16 Gambling is projective and prospective, and observing its changing role over time requires a full understanding of the vistas of opportunity as they appear and capturing them on paper before certitude is restored by the result (Pickles 2014c). The materials I reviewed in order to write this historical account carried none

36  Money Games

of the ecstasy of the act of playing and how this was experienced differently by different genders. Evidence for it can only be found once we get a sense of how to read it. I return now to the walk that began this chapter, which I hope will show how the contingent thrill of gambling was given a specifically Gorokan form. Conclusion

Walking Goroka that afternoon in 2009, I was aware of a correspondence: as I took this route I saw more and more playing cards strewn over the ground, mixed into the matter. First the odd card sat in a gutter, battered, deformed, half buried with last week’s mud or washed down and caught on the lips of a drainage duct. At a few houses or in some of the markets, there were pockets of card abundance. These were major sites for my enquiries. Further out, large card deposits could be spotted under stilted houses, spanning street corners or gathered around street sellers’ stalls: fifteen, thirty, smeared with dried betel nut spittle and parched mud from the last few days; more research. In the settlements, camel humps of earth acted as stepping stones above the more liquid sludge that was the result of low-lying land, poor drainage, improvised roads and teeming activity. There, cards added a continual pictorial or patterned tinge, lying with betel nut husks, plastic bottles and the occasional lonely sole in a half-hearted mosaic. Some of the cards were ripped in half, acting as a relic of some past frustration; others fragmented further, shredded to cover bingo numbers and left holding the secret of their user’s fortunes. There was one consistent trait in the confetti of cards: the colour of their flip sides. They were lightly waxed paper cards; standard symbols at the front and patterned blue backs centred by a silhouetted mermaid. The alien symbols on the packets revealed an origin in China, but for all intents and purposes, they could have been any cards. Bought in sets of ten for around three Papua New Guinea Kina and ninety Toea (about £1 in 2009) either in the markets or shops, they were sold on the street for upwards of K2 a pack. Yet a look in large shops revealed that they were not just any cards: it was possible to buy many kinds of cards – different colours, textures, materials, boxes and distinguishing features – all at similar prices, but no other cards made it onto the street. The roads only wore one brand. The brand name translates from Chinese as ‘Mermaid High Quality’, it was one of the cheapest available in bulk, but speculation persisted over why the brand had come to dominate. Apparently, there used to be many types of card, but consensus was reached that these ones were the best as well as the cheapest. Many people professed that ‘Mermaid High Quality’ cards were the best because wins go to everyone equally (win save stap lo olgeta man,

Selected Histories 37

lit. ‘wins habitually stop at every man’), whereas with other cards wins go to only one player. Many cited the inferior material properties of other cards: some were not as glossy and thus perishable and easily marked; others were too thick. Substandard printing on the backs and fronts of yet other cards gave the cunning an advantage. The stated upshot for each of these properties is that people could devise tricks using them. Even worse, locally produced cards undermined people’s confidence because local manufacture implied they were susceptible to control by local magic. Cards with failings like these used to be the only ones available and could be influenced by a person who possessed a piece of magical bark or another such potent object and who could win everyone else’s money. Today, the purportedly substandard traits of competing brands of cards made a virtue of the existing monopoly:17 one person said that with the favoured cards, ‘if two people like each other, these new cards will increase this as both will win, not just one.’ So the ground shimmered exclusively with tiny mermaids. Tricks, magic, low quality and localness were all considered together; they fell under the idea of influence-ability. For the cards to be uniformly made by a distant hand gave confidence to the gamblers that their own efficacies would play out unhindered and that the materials mediating between them were equally resistant to every player. An illustrative reversal happened when I, a waitman (lit. ‘white man’), wanted a game. There was sometimes trepidation – despite my evident lack of skill early on – that if I played I would take all their money because the cards were foreign too and might therefore ‘like’ me.18 When a new set of cards passed through local hands, it became progressively susceptible to local agencies. It should therefore be no surprise there were so many cards strewn on the streets of Goroka, for fresh decks were constantly replacing those only slightly blemished in an effort to quash the possibility of interference. At blackjack tables in Las Vegas casinos, the decks are changed once or twice a day. In Goroka, a new deck was introduced at least every couple of hours. And little wonder they were all the same brand, for if they were different then you could not know the cards were equally trustworthy. Variable brands of cards would betray a dangerous lack of trust and mutual cooperation in a town already packed with suspicions because of the fine lines that divided kin, semi-kin, non-kin, language mates, workmates and even complete strangers you saw around you. A uniform outsider brand suppressed the assumed differences in people’s potencies and levelled suspicions of an uneven field, therefore encouraging relations between otherwise untrustworthy others (cf. Stasch 2009; A. Strathern 1984: 102–3). The thrill of the game is partly the thrill of an even playing field. In effect, gambling has become one mode by which we can understand PNG across social divides because it was a live concern in people’s thoughts,

38  Money Games

forcing particular types of uniformity while creating an arena for the competitive display of those differences that properly belonged in-game. Ideas of efficacy and fecundity influenced gaming and had a profound effect on who played, when and to what end and even enforced a town-wide consensus on the appropriate material culture to maintain the thrill of gaming. Set among great diversity, gambling united Gorokans by facilitating a Melanesian propensity to find or make relations with even the most distant stranger. Over time, the games have come to model life’s reality, its fictions and its contradictions. To flesh out the thrill of play, the next chapter will therefore dive down into the kinds of games I encountered in Goroka and the meanings ascribed to them, why they were fun, as well as how wider understandings of efficacy are instantiated within them over time. Notes  1. E.R Johnson (1958); Cleland (1956); see also Finney (1973).  2. The labour force was defined as those over ten years of age, with employment including subsistence activities (Papua New Guinea National Statistics Office 2002).  3. Defined as simple and routine tasks that mainly require the use of handheld tools and often some physical effort (International Labour Organisation 2012).  4. All statistics were collated from a series of surveys of different socio-economic groups based on residential location or employment, totalling 563 households, by me and the aforementioned Loui Ipatu in 2009–2010.  5. This single lane and at points single-track road is the one neglected lifeline that connects the Highlands to the coast by land. It is often known as the Highlands Highway.  6. Papua New Guinea National Statistics Office (2011). The actual town population will be considerably higher, but not enough to undercut the point.  7. Comprised of Goroka and Eastern Highlands’ second town Kainantu.  8. See Hides (1936: 3); Hogbin (1947: 18); Kituai (1998: 252–53).  9. Commonwealth of Australia Annual Report of the Territory of Papua, 1911–12. 10. From 1968, gambling convictions were subsumed into a broader category that makes it difficult to assess their prevalence. Commonwealth of Australia Report to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of the Territory of New Guinea, 1929–30; ibid. 1939–40; Commonwealth of Australia Report to the General Assembly of the United Nations on the Administration of the Territory of New Guinea, 1965–66; 1968–69. 11. Cleland (1955: 3); see also Howlett (1962). 12. E.g. Dwyer (1961); Lynch (1960). 13. This is true all over the world, for instance gambling has been recognized as ‘the unexamined exchange system of Africa’, despite frequently being behind only bridewealth as a nonmarket mechanism for transferring goods (Reefe 1987: 64–65). 14. As I have outlined already, Goroka is home to many people of disparate origins, but the majority are from the Eastern Highlands and Simbu. My characterization is therefore heuristic and not every particular will apply to everyone. I found it challenging

Selected Histories 39

15. 16.

17.

18.

to get unmarried women to speak to me, so the voices of young female Gorokans are missing from this book. I therefore focused attention on older, married women and ultimately interviewed almost as many women as men. See also Baxter (1973: 99). Malaby says: ‘[g]ames are distinctive in their achievement of a generative balance between the open-endedness of contingencies and the reproducibility of conditions for action’ (2007: 106; see also Malaby 2009). He stresses the generative nature of play and games, their ability both to adapt to and to shape the reality they parody, as well as new practices and new interpretations recursively leading to new rules. Instead of therefore diagnosing what is or is not a game by their static attributes, we should look instead for universal features of games as processes. We might then ask why games appear static. The point is well made, but formal rules remain central to both analysis and gameplay. Process is powerful in that it is a process of iterative formalization. Making, changing, reinterpreting and adapting are all about interacting processually only inasmuch as they reference formal structure, here perhaps more than anywhere in human life. I have attempted an analysis of formalization as an ongoing mash up of rule and process. The only comparable example I could find was offered in the caption to a photograph found in Roger Keesing’s field notes from one of his fieldwork spells in Kwaio (Solomon Islands) in the early 1960s, where he notes a deliberate indigenization of dice in order to prevent them from being susceptible to tricks like shaving the die. See also A. Strathern (1984: 103).



 2 The Pattern Changes Changes

Moka is like a card game. Now it comes to us and we win. Later it passes to someone else; and so it goes round. —Kont of Hagen, epigraph to The Rope of Moka This chapter is about causality. I describe the two main card games played in Goroka and how to win them. In the process, I develop a running analogy with Massim kula and Highlands moka. Kula is an inter-island network of competitive transfers in which elaborate arm shells move in one direction, necklaces in the other and where prestige is won by collecting, hoarding, and eventually releasing the most famous of the valuables.1 Moka is a name given to chains of incremental transfer and counter-transfer, primarily in live pigs, that occurred every few years and was centred in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea (west of Goroka). Moka reached its zenith in the twenty years after Europeans began trading with the peoples of this region but is no longer practised.2 I use the idiom of transfers to highlight commonalities across transactive contexts – ceremonial transactions and gambling – whose separateness we might otherwise too readily assume. The analogies help me to specify the kind of theory of causality, abstraction and historical change that we need in order to understand Goroka’s most ubiquitous gambling games. I am not claiming gambling is equivalent to either kula or moka. Unlike kula and moka, gambling is not a celebrated activity, nor is it an icon of regional identities; however, it is a lot more pervasive. Daily dealings with others are often mediated by cards. That mediation takes the form of miniaturized transfers; that is, the movement of cards between people, culminating in a one-way transfer of money to the winner. These everyday manoeuvrings mirror in an interesting way the larger scale political work of shaping up for a big transfer in kula and moka activities. Cards, like kula or moka, encourage people to think analytically and reflectively about their past and future efforts in terms of patterns and tactics.3 Analogizing is one way that kula and moka have helped us to think about Melanesia as a whole and competitive ‘exchange’ more broadly. I therefore ask the broader question of how much of life in Papua New Guinea was game-like

The Pattern Changes Changes 41

according to Papua New Guinean characterizations of games. The strategy has its origins in vanguard Melanesianist anthropology from the 1970s, 80s and 90s, which attempted to render indigenous categories analytic in the broadest possible sense.4 I specifically chose kula and moka as analogies not just because they look similar to Gorokan gambling in certain respects but also because various anthropologists have extended the game analogy onto them.5 In reversing the analogy by demonstrating how cards are like kula, I show how understanding games in Papua New Guinean terms can help us rethink the dynamics of larger competitions. This is important because, as I set out in the Introduction, games model life. If we are to model important parts of people’s lives as being game-like, we had better know how games work for those people because an anthropological account is distinctive and potent when its subjects’ models for their actions are included in its model of subjects’ actions. Describing how games and causality intertwined uncovers a sophisticated local take on change. Change had a tempo that was game-like, a pattern that was always changing. Reimagining the diachronic along these lines led me to re-evaluate the explanatory purchase of the twin paradigms of encroaching individualism and enduring communistic cultures.6 Origins and Commonalities

Most early documentation of gambling refers to a ‘fast’ card game called laki (‘lucky’, also known as tri-lip, ‘three leaves’).7 Diverse versions of laki/ tri-lip are still played today (e.g. Mosko 2012, 2014), but early reports give the impression that the game was largely homogenous.8 It was and is played extremely quickly in those locations where it is still played, with wins or losses mounting up rapidly. The original form of laki had all but disappeared from Goroka during my fieldwork, but it was still remembered and usually referred to as the first ‘fast game’. In 2009–10 Goroka was dominated instead by kwin (‘queen’) and bom (‘bomb’). Opinion among local card gambling experts was that both kwin and bom traced their origins back to laki,9 as part of a continuous, and at times rapid, innovation of new games. In total I traced seventeen different games back to laki. The development of games has been towards speciation rather than homogenization. Unlike games like chess, backgammon and checkers that have evolved standardized rules acknowledged across the world, card games in Papua New Guinea have evolved more in the model of mancala, the globe’s most widely distributed board game.10 Mancala boards offer a very broad range of possibilities from which to develop locally meaningful games.

Figure 2.1 A genealogy of card games. Figure created by the author. Source: Bosu, a middle-aged man resident in Goroka.

42  Money Games

The Pattern Changes Changes 43

Like Mancala, card games like kwin and bom are both recognizable translocally and yet self-consciously particular in different places, with endless rule variations that spring up from one community to the next and culminate in occasional new games. Basic mechanics like moving counters from one indentation to the next made mancala mancala, and likewise all the card games played on Goroka’s streets share five commonalities that endure over and above their myriad, and constantly reinvented, particulars. 1) Laki and all subsequent games were played for stakes that are strictly equal for all participants.11 2) As opposed to Goroka’s bookie and its five slot-machine joints, run-of-the-mill card games never had a ‘house’, the dealer rotated and no party had a statistical edge (see Pickles 2014a). 3) None involved an element of bluff; in fact, I repeatedly experimented with demonstrating the bluffing game poker, and it was always roundly dismissed for fomenting anger and suspicion. Instead, card games revolved around controlling or anticipating the flow of cards between players. 4) Games sat on a continuum based on their speed of play. 5) Cards were understood as vehicles for configuration, as a set of symbols with internal associations that were ready to come into winning combination if the cards ‘liked’ the player.12 Within these parameters, there is nevertheless scope for considerable variation, and the variation between the games is the most interesting thing about them. For the purpose of exploring this variation, I focus on the two most popular games in Goroka simultaneously. Kwin, one of laki’s many descendants, is believed to have emerged in the 1970s out of a fusion of two popular games called blok (where one matched cards by value) and kala (where runs of the same suit were sought). More recently (sometime after the millennium), bom came about through a transformation from a game called las kat (‘last card’, where players had to shout out when they were down to their last card), or a derivative of las kat called seven lip (‘seven leaves’, so named because each player held seven cards), in both of which the aim was to get rid of your cards before other players got rid of theirs.13 Kwin

In a game of kwin, each of the five players holds seven cards in their hand, and the aim is to match one’s cards in either a run (for instance 6♥, 7♥, 8♥, 9♥) or a set (say 2♣, 2♦, 2♥, 2♠). To start the game, after each player has been dealt seven cards, one card from the remaining deck is placed face-up in the middle. When their turn comes around players pick an extra card from the deck so that they now hold eight cards and then choose one of the cards to throw away, face-up on the pile. This is called ‘marketing’ the card. The

44  Money Games

winner is the person who uses all seven of their cards to make one set of three cards, and another set of four cards (say 6♥, 7♥, 8♥, 9♥ along with 2♣, 2♦, 2♥), and so play revolves around achieving sets and runs through the acquiring and giving away of cards. Players sifted through the discarded cards with their hands to help them decide which of the cards in their hand had a potential match in the deck after a reshuffle and which card combinations were being held or sought by other players. In this way, players speculated on the paten (lit. ‘pattern’) of play. If the player before you markets a card that completes a set or run together with cards in your hand, you can pick it up instead of taking from the deck (say it was a 6♥ to add to a 7♥ and 8♥). In that case, players brought the card towards them and placed the two corresponding cards on top for all the players to see. Putting down a set or run like this was known as making a kik (‘kick’). A major emphasis in the game is on not giving away a card that might cause the player who followed you to kik. The following player was ever poised to pounce, often forcefully saying kikim (lit. ‘kick it’, an analogy to football and rugby) to induce a favourable card. These were moments of great anticipation for players, as they thought hard about the card they wanted to see put down. When a player kicked a set of three cards, putting them on the table in front of them for all to see, those cards became open to other players, who could then add another compatible card to it. That way, a player could win the game with only two sets/runs of three cards as long as they could place their remaining card with another player’s kik (e.g. a run of J♠, Q♠, K♠, a set of 2♣, 2♦, 2♥, and a 9♥ that joins someone else’s kik of 6♥, 7♥, 8♥). That seventh card was particularly cherished by players and known as a brek kat (‘break card’), or brek for short. There were therefore both pitfalls and benefits to a kik, namely that in order to take the card from the pile you have to make your set public but doing so may help others to win the game. This is therefore a game in which people pause and think before they play and each game took up to twenty minutes. Kwin was described by all as slow – because it involved careful consideration, fostered that way of thinking, was preferred by older players and because it had been a long-standing fixture in Gorokan life. As in all gambling in Goroka, a person’s gameplay was guided by their ability to use their openness to come up with aidia (‘ideas’, tactics), and particularly in kwin, having good aidia meant being a kona man (‘corner man’). Each player in kwin was conceived as a kona (‘corner’), i.e. a kind of pivot because they were both constrained by their own circumstances and the card offered by the previous player. When they did act, they had a corresponding effect upon the player that followed them. So each player always had to bear in mind two others: one that caused their action, the other who was affected by it. Hence the imagistic term ‘corner’. A kona man skilfully turned that fact

The Pattern Changes Changes 45

to their advantage by provoking an action that they could use to hinder others and help themselves. A corner who was waiting to receive a card (and hoping that the card would be favourable) said the imperative transitive form of the verb kik, kikim!, meaning ‘kick!’, even though the resulting kik (the set or run of three cards) would belong to themselves, rather than saying something like kik i kam!, meaning ‘kick it come’. Instead, cause was attributed to the player before them; they unleashed a card combination that literally caused a kik for the receiving corner. In fact, pivot relationships like corners are a standard way of conceptualizing agency in Melanesia (M. Strathern 1988: 270). Take for example axes from Sabarl Island, near the kula ring. According to Battaglia (1983: 296–97), the Sabarl axe was the island’s paradigmatic metaphor for flows of wealth. The past relationship between two people (A and B) is symbolized by the handle of the axe and the new relationship between B and C by the head of the axe. B sits at the joint, where handle and head are lashed together. Just as an axe is useless without a handle, B attributes their relationship with C to A, even though she/he may seem uninvolved.

Figure 2.2 The Sabarl axe as a pivot and a game of kwin displayed as a circle of pivot relationships. Figure created by the author.

46  Money Games

Similarly, when playing kwin, each player understood their actions in reference to another player who coerced them into those acts. At the same time, corner and coercer could only do what they did because of the other three players who positioned the two as opponents. After all, the player at the end of a pivot was also the centre point of the next pivot in the game, and so on. In kwin, a winner configured that circuit of causative relationships so they could transcend them and win. So, if the Sabarl axe was a single pivot, kwin was formed by five of them overlapping, a miniaturized and self-contained circuit of causal links. The world in playful miniature. Players were agents in the game inasmuch as they understood their own position within a set of relationships and turned the standardized transfers of cards into an enhancing rather than meaningless circulation, just as those who choose to participate in kula enter into a system of rule-bound transfers (i.e. arm shells one way, necklaces the other) that may or may not come off well. To make the transfers complementary, players had to focus on the pile of discarded cards. Players abstracted out a pattern from the discarded cards as a whole. In kwin as in kula ‘good players must carry in their heads reckoning of all their debts and obligations and also the past histories of former paths and debts while conceptualising all the future moves that they plan to make, much like the complex knowledge necessary for a chess champion’ (Weiner 1992: 141; see also MacCarthy 2015) The analogy Weiner made works equally well in reverse; it was the pattern of all the kona relationships as deduced from the pile that allowed people to see their particular kona effectively. Nonetheless, a key difference lies in the respective temporality of kula and kwin; card players held the paths and transfers of cards as well as the past patterns of previous games with others in their heads temporarily, focusing on the short-term memory of cards in the game, rather than the deep history of kula valuables’ paths and owners. Damon’s informants on Muyuw Island had a clear vision of the wider world of kula trade, which they characterized as an up and down movement that turns on its axis at each end (Damon 2002: 122).14 Both kula participants and card gamblers acted by looking for patterns within a totalized system. When I was learning to play kwin, at first I did not realize why I was always being chided for looking at my own hand or at the faces of other players. My instructors told me my opponents’ bodies did not give off reliable knowledge. Instead, they said to look at the pile because that was where the patterns lay; that was where you won or lost. In other words, the specific corner relationship did not determine people’s thinking, which was ideally that of an outward-looking pattern-finder. In kwin, the progress of players is hidden in their hands until someone wins out. At the end of a game, players compared their cards to see who had been the best kona man. Each publicly revealed what they were holding in

The Pattern Changes Changes 47

their hand, and they lent to their left and right and had a minute’s (usually) good-natured discussion of the alternative paths the game might have taken; of who had blocked that path by holding a card back and what had led them to think that holding that card would be important. In an inversion of the anticipation of a kik, this was a moment of reflection and revelation for players, who were unfailingly absorbed in learning about one another’s strategic capacities. When I presented an early version of this chapter as a seminar, it was this detail that sparked a conversation with Frederick Damon about similarities with kula. Once a necklace or arm shell has made its way, people reflect on one another’s strategies and their ability to hoard and direct these valuables in long-remembered histories of those items’ transfers.15 Though inconsequential by comparison, memories of tactical manoeuvres during games of kwin were surprisingly rich and specific, much like the winning goal in a memorable football match. These retrospective evaluations also had effects on relationships beyond the game. Winners compensated the person who caused their win and became angry with those who consistently foiled their plans, accusing steady winners of playing kompani (lit. ‘company’, colluding). In fact, it is not easy to collude in kwin and most people consider the game peaceful and socially positive. I have presented the ways that playing kwin implies tactical engagement with idealized models of sociality. Among at least some players, playing kwin was said to be representative of what Gorokans, following the Sepik politician and philosopher Bernard Narokobi, called the ‘Melanesian way’ (1983). Local ideas of causality therefore feature prominently in understandings of gambling. This is to be expected. If it should be anywhere, causality should be visible in an activity like gambling, if only because gambling is always a theatre for effects (wins and losses) whose causes are deliberately contingent on others. To be successful implies an understanding of the nature of that contingency, and so local ideas of causality are played out in real time. Understanding Causality, Becoming a Winner

To win at most card games is to configure the cards better than your opponent(s). For Goroka’s residents, in order to configure cards and win games, players themselves had to be configured, their ‘brains had to be right’. This meant securing harmonious relationships with fellow competitors, as well as in one’s relationships outside of the game. In short, card gambling required a mastery of social graces – or giving off the bodily indications of social graces through magic – over and above what one would normally delimit as the game. This is not a new observation. Mimica and Mosko are both anthropologists of Melanesia who have argued for a more complex understanding of

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gambling in their respective Papua New Guinea contexts. In spite of otherwise very different approaches, both factor in people’s sense of their own cosmological potency and challenge luck and odds as an explanatory framework (Mimica 2006; Mosko 2012, 2014).16 In fact, most articles on Melanesian gambling hint at alternative emic models of causality. The material presented here confirms and adds further detail to the contours of Melanesian causality found in these articles. It also differs somewhat in that it pays attention to the form of the contest and the relationship this has to the cosmology of causality. For both Mimica and Mosko, by contrast, the structure of gaming was important only inasmuch as it was open to indigenous cosmology. One could have substituted the card games people played with chess, or Blackjack, or pool, and it would not change their ethnographies. But as will become increasingly clear, games are more than black boxes in which different causalities enabled different ways of looking at the same result – Papua New Guinean conceptions of likelihood were enacted in the form games took and adapted as games changed (Pickles 2014c). In gambling, Gorokans describe themselves as muddled (feeling fifti-fifti (lit. ‘50:50’) or tu bel (lit. ‘two stomachs’)) until they resolve upon an action. Such a muddle can be caused by another person, because inaccessible thoughts are wont to travel, and they can infiltrate the mind of the subject, as I shall explain. When people do act, they assume that action to have resulted from collapsing the multiple thoughts (their own and others) into a single course of action (cf. Reed 2011). A serious gambler is someone who is skilled at encompassing the competing thoughts in a game and turning them into a single course, their win. The creation of a single action from the multiple starting points was, for M. Strathern, ‘the single most important metaphysical basis for the understanding of Melanesian relations’ (1988: 274, emphasis added). In Gender of the Gift Marilyn Strathern makes much of a related observation: in Melanesia, people tend not to understand themselves as the cause of their own actions. According to her model, each person can only know his/her actions in reference to another person who coerced them into these acts. At the same time, the relation between them and the other that they are acting in reference to is of a given kind (say husband and wife) because of other relations that position the two as such (affines in this case). In M. Strathern’s example, the wife who grows food for the man because she is married to him does so by virtue of her relations to her natal kin, which made her a marriageable woman for her husband. This, she argues, is the assumed basis for all social action. Participants are only able to make themselves apparent through the web of relations that define them, and are therefore ‘relational’. ‘The agent’s position is thus a multiple one, constituted in the different directions in which he or she is faced, but his or her consequent acts are singular. Each act is “one” act’ (M. Strathern 1988: 274).

The Pattern Changes Changes 49

Imagine an occurrence as perceived by a participant in which they have acted. They have assumed that another or others have caused them to act, and the effect has occurred whether they resolved it or they were coerced without their conscious knowledge. For M. Strathern this is the fundamental or ontological state of being for a person, and the source of wonder for Melanesians is to discover which single course of action occurred and who made it happen. This is also the point at which the actor can exercise agency. Their agency lies in how they chose to make a single event occur in reference to particular others when multiple relations could have acted as the starting point. Meanwhile the person/people who emerged as the starting point are attributed with the initiating agency because they won out over other potential starting points. Acting in general is about configuring multiplicities so as to encompass them by making particular courses of action come about. I think this is a great starting point for understanding how Gorokans win at kwin. Causality in kwin is an orthodox version of M. Strathern’s pan-Melanesian view of causality as split into two. Within this metaphysical framework, if people were unhappy with you for being miserly or uncaring, their unpleasant thoughts could infiltrate your mind, and the game, causing you to lose (cf. Reed 1999). This could be countered through generosity, and gambling itself was used to display generosity, and, in fact, the perception that someone cared too much about winning did sometimes spur animosity. Jelas pasin (lit. ‘jealous passion’) could be very serious. Witchcraft was the most concrete manifestation of jelas pasin, but negative thoughts did not actually require a conscious curse; just thinking badly of another was enough to have a negative effect. As O’Hanlon deftly described, to be afflicted with others’ deleterious thoughts causes ashen, ugly skin and dirty blood (1989). The thoughts of others affected the cards as well as the players. Negative thoughts embedded in the players mind dirtied their blood. Dirty blood circulated around the body, polluting the skin, which was in turn felt by the cards. Cards were sensitive to pollution as they were touched, and they refused to configure themselves properly in a polluted player’s hands (Pickles 2014b). The magic used for card games in Goroka was consequently directed at the cards themselves, rather than at opponents. Many people admitted to me in private that they had secret objects for influencing cards, but they would deny this in public.17 Charms included the bark of a particular tree, a seed, a stone and even ash from an active volcano. In my interviews (one of which is detailed in chapter four), people spoke of magic charms acting medicinally upon a player by drawing dirty blood away from their fingers and face, pulling clean blood into these areas, thus purifying the blood and thereby the skin that came into contact with cards. Instead of charming other players, magic charms tricked the cards into ‘liking’ the player.18 In this way, cards

50  Money Games

became attracted towards you regardless of others’ attempts to disrupt you in the game. Gamblers volunteered that clean or new blood was also associated with pregnant women, young children who play, or those who have cleaned their blood by ritual purging and bathing or using oils, and these people also held an advantage (Hogbin 1970; cf. Gell 1979; O’Hanlon 1989; Read 1965). With the right magic in hand, players say kas bai laikim yu (lit. ‘cards will like you’), which, just like people settling upon a course of action, was an act of configuration that went from a starting point of muddled multiplicity into a set of winning cards. Gorokans used their remedies and capacities to influence a medium that was closed to them before the deck was unwrapped, so they spent a lot of time second-guessing the way cards tended to configure and how that could be piggy-backed. A quick comparison will help to draw out the peculiarity of this approach to potency. In the early twentieth century, farmer-trappers in the dense forests of southwestern Cameroon were heavily into gambling. Their game of choice was called abbia, a pitch-and-toss game that used decoratively carved nuts that have since found their way into metropolitan museums as examples of miniaturized African carving. Thomas Reefe’s historical study of African gambling, which I paraphrase here (Reefe 1987: 62–63), explains that the physical properties of plants and animals were transferable to both the player and their gambling chips. The biologically congested rainforest thereby had its powers tapped. At the game, each player placed disks carved from a specific gourd, indicating what they expected to be the winning combination of chips in an abbia toss. The night before, the gambler had consumed a special meal, one prepared in part from the seeds of their gourd. The other part of the meal was composed of medicines of the forest. He was heated and strengthened by the products of up to eight different spicy or flammable plants. Finally, burrs were mingled with the stakes to snare a win. Chips themselves even became part of a player’s battery. Each chip was a power unit, a charm so potent it was worn for protection by nongamblers. The potency derived from the force of the carving and its representation on the face of the chip, but the efficacy of that power was not easily transferred. The power warped and shifted in contact with the personality and force of the owner and their preparations, as well as the seasons, the rains and the hour of the day. To cope with such a daunting power, such a malevolent ‘jumble of conflicting forces’ (Reefe 1987: 63), abbia chips were kept in a bag that was then suspended from a tree hidden deep in the forest far from the people of the village. Perhaps the most revealing indicator of the medium’s importance is that, if losing heavily, a gambler staked their chips last of all. Experienced gamblers had hundreds of chips and an expert’s grasp of which of those chips were best used against opposing chip patterns.

The Pattern Changes Changes 51

In Goroka, the playing cards were nothing like abbia chips; they had no personalized qualities. As I discussed at the end of the last chapter, cards were deliberately uniform, opening other possibilities. Uniformity is not the same thing as neutrality, and cards did not lack agency. Like gamblers, cards were spoken of as having powers of attraction and action. The qualities of the card 7♦, for instance, might draw out (cause) the 6♦ and 8♦ or the 7♥ and 7♣ from another player’s hand. Each player was allowed to hold back a card from the deck between one game and the next, which they called a laki kat (lit. ‘lucky card’, a card for which cards come together). Suited-ness and seriality appeared to have their own agencies; they preferred a particular configuration. My advisors oftentimes vehemently insisted I reorder the cards fanned out in my hand into combinations between turns, which I now understand as an attempt to suggest configurations to the cards. Other players avoided ordering their cards into sets or series; they said they preferred not to second-guess their cards’ preferences (laik blo kas, lit. ‘like belong cards’) as such cards were oriented to their own relatives and could not be possessed like abbia chips. Cards exogenous origin adds a further complexity. Local sources of magic affect local artefacts more intensely because of their denser association. Ipso facto, many times the magical substances thought to help in gambling were things associated with ‘white people’, such as perfumes, since people held that because cards were themselves foreign, foreign magic would affect them more potently.19 Andrew Strathern and Mark Mosko are among the many anthropologists asked to bring their informants perfumes for use at cards.20 In addition to hearing of ‘Lucky magic’ sold in clear bottles in Port Moresby, Ernest Brandewie also noted that his own decks of cards, though identical to the ones sold at the local trade store, were sought after by his informants (1967: 47). Policing the kind of foreign cards that could be used to just one brand was an important way to even up the playing field as far as possible. Cards’ relations existed out there, between each other, and were knowable from the point of view of a person who was open and ready to comprehend them as an abstracted set of relationships that could be brought into alignment if one could understand how foreign relations worked. Cards expressed their preferences by coming into proper alignment as sets of cards in your hand under your persuasive powers. As we have seen with the effort to neutralize the cards by standardizing the brand, cards are not supposed to have preferences for people, and yet in their relations to each other they are spoken of in terms of preference, attraction and emergent configuration. Kula items, like cards, explicitly lacked sacred powers (Weiner 1992: 133), yet both had the capacity to configure related objects. High-rank arm shells could only be used against particular necklaces and so they tended towards each other (1992). Weiner went so far as to compare some shells to ‘wild cards in poker, enabling a player to multiply the possibilities for success by

52  Money Games

negotiating simultaneously with several partners on different paths over the same sought-after shell’ (ibid.: 135). In fact, although people do seek perfumes and treat their opponents with generosity in the ways I have outlined, a player’s most prized asset was not magic but mental openness; their ability to recognize the total flow of cards laid down, the positions and motivations of other players and their openness to signs that might otherwise be thought to have nothing to do with gambling. Likewise in the north of the kula ring, Campbell found that a prerequisite for initiates’ attempts to own magical knowledge was clearing their mind, which predisposed them towards successful use of the magic they were taught (2002: 55). The same applied to gamblers in Goroka, and this asset sat above clean blood, efficacious objects and trickery in importance, as it represented the possibility of detecting and directing all these things through the recognition of patterns. Master carvers in the kula ring had clear minds, and their magic consequently transformed canoes into beautiful, light and swift agents of kula acquisition. These men felt compelled to carve, ‘allowing the designs, patterning and form to “flow” from his mind through his hand and eye’, and this seems exactly the kind of thought that gamblers in Goroka strove for: clearing and opening, removing obstruction and obscurity (ibid.: 132). We can therefore understand the employment of magic as an effort to create potentiality and only secondarily to effect an outcome. Anthropological convention heaps significance on the specificities of their magical material while citing gambling as one of a number of fields where these actions are efficacious (see Mimica 2006; Pflanz 1977: 175). Yet in Goroka majik (‘magic’) was an additional possibility, not a necessary means to victory. This is in keeping with kula, for in the Trobriand Islands Malinowski notes that ‘the effects of magic are something superadded to all the other effects produced by human effort and by natural qualities’ (1961 [1922]: 421; see also Campbell 2002: 54–56). A player often found it necessary to focus their consciousness in some way in order to open their mind. Some options included concentrating on a recent dream portending victory or how much one desired to win, or which cards one aimed to win by, or even employing reverse psychology by trying to forget one’s desire to win or renounce attachment to how one was doing.21 The particulars of each game in turn directed how one might synchronize with it and the style of openness required, either thinking deeply or quickly. I have already presented kwin and the slow, deep and mature thought that is propitious in that game. I have argued that kwin resembles kula insofar as it is invested in relational work and invites systematic thinking and retrospective evaluation on the part of its participants about their success at navigating a relational circuit. This analogy rests, I have argued, on the model of causality that is basic to both kwin and kula and that centres on making singular

The Pattern Changes Changes 53

courses of action emerge from a multiplicity of interconnected dyadic relations. Having identified what amounts to an ‘orthodox’ Melanesian model of causality in one game, I now want to disturb the narrative of Melanesian relationality by introducing a very different game called bom. Bom

According to Goroka’s inhabitants, bom was invented by a famous doctor from Simbu Province called Isaac Baikuru. The story goes that Dr Baikuru was watching the film Titanic (1997) and a scene in which people played cards. In that scene, Jack (played by actor Leonardo DiCaprio) won by revealing the 7♥ in a game Baikuru did not recognize. The doctor, or so it is said, had an idea at that very moment: to make the 7♥ the decisive card in the existing game las kat. Small rule changes are very common, and they have their own topography across the Highlands, but this one was remarkable. The new variation became extremely popular and was said to warrant a new name that paid homage to Baikuru. It was called dokta bom (‘doctor bomb’), later shortened in most locations to bom and in a few places to dokta. Why bom? The Titanic crashed and sank of course, and the initial blast was like a bomb going off; the 7♥ had a similar impact on las kat. Bom involves progressively shedding your seven cards one, two or three at a time. In Goroka, at the time of my fieldwork, bom was played with five players, like kwin, and was initiated when a face-up card was placed in the middle. However, unlike in kwin, in bom this is the lead card and each player in turn must put down a card from their hand of the same kala (lit. ‘colour’, in this context used to mean ‘suit’)22 as the previous player (say 6♦ to follow a 3♦). Alternatively, a player puts down a card with the equivalent number belonging to a different suit (a 6♠ to follow the 6♦). This changes the suit for the next player (from ♦ to ♠). The stream of cards is therefore a chain of transformations that all players observe at the same time, rather than the primarily hidden transformations that occurred in the hands of kwin players. Certain cards have special properties, like allowing a player to put down multiple cards at once, or forcing another player to pick up cards, or changing the direction of play. In addition to the dictates of several special cards, a penalty (picking up a card) is incurred for not having the required card, and a harsh two-card penalty is imposed for mistakes. These sanctions reflect the importance of speed and fluency. This was the reason I found it stressful to play bom at first. You had to know all the special cards so that they became second nature and you could react on an instant with the correct response, without stopping to evaluate. To compound the situation, people get annoyed with the loss of fluency caused by a novice.

54  Money Games

7♥ is the bom kat (‘bomb card’): it is the most important of the special cards, lending its name to the game as a whole. Once played, the bom kat ended the game, adding a whole new layer of complexity. Players then totalled their cards’ point values, and the player with the lowest total won the pot. Special cards usually had high point values (e.g. the Jack was forty-five), so some players tried to shed them as fast as possible in case the game was ended suddenly. Games could be finished in seconds and rarely lasted more than five minutes. Bom was the game of choice for passing time during the day (lit. pasim taim, ‘tying/closing the time’).23 But even so, bom was far from a peaceful game; the pace was frenetic, and despite a strong deterministic element in gameplay, you had to be switched on. While stakes for kwin started around K1 and ranged up to K50 (£13 in 2009) in a few places, bom could be played for as little as fifty Toea and rarely reached as high as K10. These same K50kwin places banned bom outright for fear it would disturb the ambience of serious gaming establishments. Bom was fast, new, fostered quick thinking and was associated with young people. During my 2009–10 fieldwork, there was no talk of corners when it came to bom. Strategizing was a matter of noticing the amount of any particular suit or symbol that had been played by one and all players, and thus the likelihood that others had cards to respond to the ones you played (and vice versa). In bom, there were many possible cards that could be played in response to any given suit, and what was important was how often these changed the direction of the game. Correspondingly, people said that bom had many more chances to win than kwin. These included opportunities to rid yourself of cards, but there were also opportunities to lay a combination of cards or to change the suit to favour your hand or hamper another’s. Players’ progress could be seen in the number of cards remaining in their hand, and players sometimes tried to hide how many cards they had. This was my own favourite tactic. Most of the time players simply played the highest value card they could, which made much of the play automatic and very speedy indeed; like laki, but quite unlike the ruminations sparked by kwin. The many rounds, one after another, and the speed with which decisions were made and turns taken made it the most exciting and popular ‘fast game’. Because play went faster in bom, the pattern unfolded faster.24 The pattern also changed constantly, as players took opportunities to switch suit or symbol. In kwin the pattern remained locked in people’s hands and the often obscure relationships between cards on the ground, whereas the pattern in bom was visible, immediate and variable. In bom, one interacted with the ‘pattern’ directly, rather than observing it and affecting it from within corner relationships. When a player changed the pattern from ♦s into ♣s, they were

The Pattern Changes Changes 55

controlling the pattern, and so pattern in bom visibly altered all the time as the result of people’s actions. The pattern and its transformation became a place where people calibrated themselves in the knowledge that the game moved too fast to be controlled by another for long. With bom, the single serial ordering of cards as they were laid down meant that a player could clearly see which types of cards would have what impact on the game and which cards were the most valuable to keep. This makes sense of Gorokan statements that the paten of bom was stronger, more unfolding, more subject to change than the more intuition-based understanding that dominated kwin. The result was that in bom even though cause was even more strongly associated with the front end of a player’s pivot (the lead card) the change of pattern was thought to lie in the cards, not in people. The young, particularly, were attracted to bom, specifically because the paten constantly changed. A good example of this came from Albert, a bodybuilder who worked on security at the National Sports Institute alongside Daniel and was particularly partial to bom. As he patrolled the playing field and passed outside my room, he would stop and we would chat, and one time our conversation turned to the merits of his favourite game bom. For him, the major attraction was that the paten senis senis (lit. ‘the pattern changes changes’, the pattern changes all the time). The change in patterns drove the speed of bom. He thought that opportunities opened and closed more quickly, and you had to be aware and keep your mind open to new patterns or you would not be able to win. Allowing one’s thoughts to speed up with the focus on the cards carried its own risk; bom was so fast that it caused great excitement, and this could quickly turn into anger. Older people complained that bom, despite its low stakes, involved only a lust for money rather than sitting down well with people. Many times I was told that the lower stakes used in bom were a response to the fact that people won and lost very quickly, and the game was banned from certain gambling dens completely because of the threat of violence that came with a fast game and high stakes. Bom was also regarded as more money-oriented because the focus on changing patterns meant players were not engaged with other people, like they are within a kona when playing kwin. People said that kwin was part of the ‘Melanesian Way’, a generally positive statement, while bom was not, because the pattern of bom was oriented towards fast money rather than sharing and thinking well with others and because the pattern appeared between cards without sufficient reference to people. This was precisely the same criticism that older people in Goroka levelled at the young when they routinely accused them of acting like pigs and dogs (animals that are held to be selfish, gluttonous and short-sighted). In contrast to the kona man, a successful but

56  Money Games

socially responsible (relational) being, the changing pattern of bom may be understood as being directed to a more abstracted set of relations between cards and a corresponding lack of regard for other people. The foregrounding of ordinal versus cardinal relations was one way of mapping the distinctions people made between good and bad activities, and this shines some light on Gorokan perceptions of the money-centrism of bom. In spheres such as kula and moka, certain valuables should only be transferred in exchange for valuables of the same type (Liep 1983). Different kinds of objects were therefore ordinally related (cf. Bohannan 1955). Money has related all objects cardinally, under a single scale in which anything could potentially be exchanged for money (see Gregory 1997: 23). Bom also related all cards cardinally during the counting up phase in a way that was not present in kwin, and this is also what made bom distinctive enough from las kat as to warrant a new name. Gorokans also saw the similarity, and bom was thought to be more money-like. So it made sense that the desire to think in terms of money was equated with liking the game bom even though the stakes in bom were consistently lower than they were in kwin. Relative to how long the two games take, more money could be lost quicker playing speedy, successive rounds of t50 bom than K2 kwin. The Spectrum of Possibilities

Bom as the major fast game and kwin as the chief slow one represent points on either side of a speed-of-thought dialectic that applied to all games and other forms of transaction besides. In the general absence of an explanatory framework based upon a balance between skill and chance (the implications of which I will return to in Chapter three), Gorokans used the speed of games’ paten as the chief vehicle for working out tactics.25 The paten referred to the flow of cards within a game and the ways that flow changed, whether as a result of happenstance or human intervention. The overall paten was either too fast to allow a person to discern or direct the game, or if slower, then one’s tactics impacted the game. What readers might recognize as games of skill, such as kwin, were thought to be slow, allowing the aidia (‘ideas’) of competing players to do battle. Those games that to those same readers’ eyes involve a large element of chance or luck (like the original game laki and the contemporary game bom) were typically mechanical in their gameplay, and thus speedier, and one’s manoeuvers were less impactful on other players. Speediness was identified with games that were beyond one’s control, rather than lingering on the ‘chanciness’ of moments within a game. There were a series of moments at which a person might act within a game and whose turnaround was objectified into a game that was either speedy, with

The Pattern Changes Changes 57

many moments requiring immediate and therefore less well thought through action, or slower, with more considered choices. People’s preferences were couched in terms of one game being too fast or slow for them, and these penchants correlated with people’s life stages in a strikingly similar way to kula participation. Damon found that on Muyuw low rank kula items moved without reason, as did the young, who were accused of running around without reason, their acts creating only impermanent relationships that did not lead to fame. Both the young and low ranked kula valuables thus had no ‘names’. High rank and thus high value kula arm shells and necklaces were said to only move when the path is well laid out, as do the elderly there (Damon 2002: 126). In Goroka, the young (youthfulness extended approximately up to age thirty for a man, twenty-five for a woman, usually ending at marriage) were considered metabolically speedy and thus attracted inexorably towards faster forms of gaming. Older people were supposed to be slower and more considered, and therefore keener on kwin and other tingting gem (‘thinking games’). Between these poles, married but not yet elderly people in Goroka expressed different preferences at different times but showed a tendency towards kwin as they aged. Middle rank kula valuables moved fast but with intentionality, corresponding to those who were married but still very active (ibid.). From a Gorokan perspective, the different types of game acted to cultivate their particular speed of thought as well: fast games ‘heated’ people up, getting their thoughts going and testing them out, while thinking games cleared people’s heads and allowed them to focus (cf. Mosko 1999). Thus thought and speed were cultivable attributes of people that were nourished by the speed of the game, helping people alter their mental states toward either speediness or thoughtfulness. On Muyuw, temporality was literally measured by kula participation; the marks of time on the body evidenced the effort put into kula (Damon 2002: 116). At the same time, people aspired to handle high rank valuables to ‘be like them’ (ibid.: 127). I found this kind of transmission literalized in Goroka when people played games that instilled them with the speed of thought they desired, marking and cultivating the speed that defined them. Furthermore, players were more likely to succeed in a game with a pace similar to their own thoughts. Young people were therefore already at an advantage in bom and older people in kwin.26 Those who would graduate to kwin learned to hone their pattern-discerning skills at bom, but the thoughts that worked for bom were importantly not sufficiently kona-like to be considered unequivocally positive. Gorokans therefore saw the growing popularity of bom and its association with easy and fast money as evidence of a moral decline and the waning of the ‘Melanesian way’. Bom was accused of contributing to the supposedly increased selfishness of the young, who were skipping past people for

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material success. Figure 2.1 suggests that the two games must nevertheless be understood together, as foils for each other’s characterizations. Notice in that diagram the many fast games underlined and how many more there have been and also how quickly they were replaced by other fast games. In contrast, on the left hand side, one slow game gave rise to other slow games, slowly. Fast begets fast quickly, and slow changes little gradually. Furthermore, games’ popularity corresponded to the life cycle of a person, for it was assumed that young minds slowed as they aged and their tastes changed correspondingly. Thus in 2009–10, bom was understood as a craze, generating huge interest but fully expected to be superseded by yet another manifestation of speed, one that, like bom, would come along quickly and spread like wildfire. Another way of looking at this is that kwin produced thought designed to last in the long term, while bom would never try to. Those who think fast invent new things, and playing bom encourages inventiveness. Slower thoughts promoted by kwin acted like the high rank kula valuables that are the measure of proper activity on Muyuw and that preoccupy the thoughts of eminent men. The low rank, fast valuables and games are forgotten and are replaced easily by others, while more valuable, slower games or valuables are less subject to change and retain their worth. Perhaps it is best, then, that we understand fast games as having gained popularity rapidly and propagated a speed of thought that in turn led to boredom and the desire to invent new variations. Notice how long kwin has been around and we see that the genealogies of the games over time have come to model the life cycles of people’s thoughts in Goroka as well as the persistence, within different circles, of the youthful value of speed and the considered thought of age. A Graduated Analogy

I am yet to explore the relationship between card gambling and moka, the chains of incremental exchange in the Highlands that at their height in the 1960s involved thousands of people and even more pigs. I left it this late because it is the relationship between two kinds of transaction that is the analogy here, particularly the relationship between gambling and moka. To make the analogy work, I first needed to show how kwin and bom acted together as a pair. A. Strathern perceived that among Melpa speakers fast card games were a kind of ‘speeded-up’ moka (1984: 103). His informants were keen to stress that they gave ‘moka so that relations between groups would remain friendly and card games would be safe to play’, implying firstly that cards and moka were analogous activities and secondly that larger, slower, more thoughtful

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competition rendered chaotic, speedy, small-scale competition benign (1984: 103; cf. Hart 1986). The possibility of incremental return also motivated local analogies between gambling, cult activities and moka (A. Strathern 1979b: 98). In A. Strathern and Stewart (2000), a big-man called Ru’s account of his dealings with an associate named Engk illustrates the reciprocal relationship between small-scale speedy gambling and large-scale slower moka. After losing a substantial amount at the fast game ‘lucky’, Ru approached Engk for cash to re-challenge his competitors. Engk obliged, Ru won it all back and more and called triumphantly for Engk to come to his house. After relaying the news, Ru declared that ‘money is something which goes around and around, whereas pigs are things which a few of us men are strong enough to look after, so now I am going to give you a pig’ (2000: 101). Delighted, Engk promised to make a return, saying that ‘[w]e two were not moka partners before, but you gave me a pig first and now we are partners.’ Three weeks later, Ru collected ten large pigs from Engk, and the two became firm moka partners. In other words, foreign-derived money, with its speedy, casual nature embodied clearly in the gambling game, can nevertheless graduate into more properly ‘Melanesian’ relationship-stressing transfers like moka payments. It is striking also that at this time in the Hagen area gambling was associated with the young and with women – those who were marginal to the moka system (A. Strathern 1984: 102; see chapter one). As Strathern himself argues, cards and moka, with their different modes of agency, were complimentary. The card games were fast and chaotic and largely accepted because they were balanced by the more thoughtful and serious alternative forms of competition. Gambling games are: continuous omen-takings at which one’s luck, or supernatural support, is proved or disproved; as such they represent a speeded-up version of moka itself. Outcomes occur or are reversed over periods of minutes, hours, and days rather than weeks, months, and years as in the actual moka, and one wrests money automatically from an opponent rather than receiving it as a gift. At a certain period in Hagen, playing cards was also undoubtedly a young men’s game, engaged in as a statement of difference from the older generation. (A. Strathern 1984: 103) This could almost be one of Annette Weiner’s analogies. In Hagen, the older generation saw the young playing cards and decided to invest in their games as a means of sounding out their potential for moka – this is what Ru and Engk were up to. In Damon’s account, low value kula objects were a sounding board for the high prestige transfers that novices aspired to. More contemporary men of kula sponsor games of cards in the Trobriands for commoners who do not participate in kula (Mosko 2014).

60  Money Games

The Pattern Changes Again

I fully expected bom to be replaced in a few short years, but upon my first return trip in 2013, I was surprised to learn that in the intervening three years bom had all but wiped kwin from the gaming map. Kwin was by then only played by the elderly, who, often by their own admission, could not keep track of the speed of bom. It is interesting analytically that bom was perceived to have flourished not as a mere symptom of the young’s growing disinterest in the ways of their elders or in the explosion in the young population, though these were certainly factors. Instead, bom thrived because it fostered speedy and fast money-oriented thought in a sociological sense. Bom out-thought kwin, or rather ‘bom bombed kwin’ as one player joked. Going on what I learnt previously about the association between bom and the lust for money, I thought that this must have been evidence of an ominous societal shift. In my efforts to learn about the history of games’ rise and fall, I had often heard people draw analogies between episodes in the history of cards and epochs in Papua New Guinea’s development. Laki had been a game for the era when people were new to money and wanted it quickly, and kwin had taken hold when people realized that hard work was required to attain money. The rise of bom apparently signalled the maturation of a new young generation who were used to money but had disregarded the ways of their forbears and refused to do the ‘hard work’, desiring handouts and fast games, which were often conflated. There were also discussions in which players debated whether bom had had corners all along, like kwin, and whether they had just overlooked the corners at first because bom was new. If corners were a feature of bom, then players thought they would have to be less aggressive in their play so as not to offend the following corner. It seemed that the ‘Melanesian Way’ analytic that was fostered by kwin had to be a part of gaming, even if this meant cropping up in its previous antithesis. It was the density of the relationships recognized in gambling and the ability of those relationships to play out within constrained circumstances that gave gambling such a powerful reflective capacity. This is a capacity more commonly associated with ritual (see Stasch 2011), and particularly in Melanesia, with large-scale transfer-centric events like kula and moka. In kula, for instance, there is a virtuous circle of signification; densely significant relationships became coagulated into the kula objects associated with them, and in turn the material form of the objects comes to embody the qualities of those constituent relationships, hence the dramatic appearance and unusable size of kula valuables shows just how important the valuables are to people (Munn 1986). Likewise in gambling, there was such conventionality that rules became reflectively highlighted as definitive of broader social reality.

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Without activities like gambling, it would be difficult to gauge intentions and efficacies, just as people along the kula ring and across chains of moka used their transactions to gauge their fame. It was only by attempting to attract things to yourself by engaging in activities like playing cards, kula or moka that you could measure the efficacy of your tactics and the present state of your relationships. While people had other ways to test their own efficacy, such as sport, health or their transactions with others, nothing appraised people’s current efficacy as precisely and as readily as gambling did. Conclusion

The dynamics of Gorokan gambling are neatly summed up in Albert’s Tok Pisin phrase paten senis senis (lit. ‘the pattern changes changes’, i.e. the pattern changes all the time). Verb reduplication is a common linguistic form in Tok Pisin, and to my ear it usually means that the verb turns in on itself, so it would be more accurate but less concise to translate senis senis as change that is subject to change, just as luk, ‘to look’, is duplicated in lukluk, which translates as both ‘looking at’ – i.e. picking out from one’s field of vision – and a subject’s ‘appearance’.27 The pattern changes itself in response to the actions of others in ways that are then recognizable and subject to interception. Speed led the change in patterns and ultimately the turnover of games. That people recognized that the paten senis senis is indicative of Gorokan sensitivity to the consequences of their own and others’ actions. Paten, like any other pragmatic, should therefore be understood as a diachronic unfolding that requires human agency to retain or redirect its course. Knowledge was aspirational; one’s theorizing of patterns was literally ideas of what was happening, unverifiable until the end of the game. A winning player had to control the flow of cards in the game, take control of their relationships within and without the game, attempt to tame and counteract the flows, attractions and agencies inherent in other objects like charms, cards and money, and at the same time abstract themselves from relations between people so that they could search for patterns, strengths and weaknesses that determined their course of action at every level. There were various vantage points for comprehending the situation while you occupied a kona, from which a player could observe an overall paten, leading to some aidia that could be used to mastermind the game so that one would be known as an outstanding kona man and hopefully become a winner. This was what it meant to have an open mind, which we can understand as a model for social life at large. In the games, players showed their talent for abstraction, for taking a version of the big picture and turning it to their advantage.

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Gorokans simultaneously modelled the steadiness that relationships are supposed to embody and how other kinds of relationships depart from, skirt or bypass that ideal. These pragmatics, once set in motion through transfers within and beyond gambling games, became an engine for reproducing these same ideas or coming up with new versions of them. Through the games that they played, Gorokans therefore offer us a glimpse of a model for, and a concrete engagement with, change in general. This is an interactive and shifting model for change in which players’ probe for success within each game, between contrasting games, and in adapting games over time. In so doing, agency was invested, cooperatively, in the materials and conventions of rules that were then able to act as a field of transfers in which Papua New Guineans could compete with each other (Munn 1986). The revelatory nature of knowledge, by which I mean the deliberate play on expectations in order to exceed the bounds of them and create a new reality, is a well-documented phenomenon in Melanesian anthropology, and it often proves an endpoint for analysis. Roy Wagner is notable for taking revelation further by developing Melanesian revelation, or obviation, into a model for continual cultural invention. How one wins or loses a game of cards by manipulating the ‘pattern’ seems to me to be another example of this kind of thinking. But I have also shown that the perceived rate of innovation, fast and slow, can together be used as a model to create a different vantage point, one where revelatory action is not the endpoint of the ethnography. From the vantage point of interacting forms of invention, one can move toward describing indigenous models that make ethnographic sense of the endless proliferation of innovatory revelations into the future and the folding in of exogenous possibilities. This takes the findings in a complementary but distinct direction because the tipping point into anthropological analysis lies not with the acts of revelation but with the perceived systematization of them. I mention Wagner’s model for continual invention within what he calls ‘tribal’ societies because Melanesian anthropology has become divided into proponents of a strict ethnographic continuity of M. Strathern’s (e.g. 1988, 1999) theories (usually paired with Roy Wagner’s (e.g. 1978, 1981, 1986) theories) on the one hand and those who see themselves as recognizing the reality of European encroachment and the irrevocable transformation that Melanesians have experienced where others deny it on the other (see Foster 1995b; Josephides 1991). The discourse around kwin and bom suggests instead the potential to generate endless new forms of action that, as they come along, change the necessarily incomplete models of action that preceded them. This is an outward-facing cosmological knot that depends upon transformation and renewal at the fast end of the spectrum. The velocity is subject to what

The Pattern Changes Changes 63

we might call the life-energy of people as they slow down through time and the surrounding world that can instil people with its characteristics, itself partially implanted with its speed by interactions with humans. This is not a uniform speed across the social world as a totality. Different speeds are variously inventive, leading to altered manifestations of phenomena and people, and incorporate introduced formalizations like new card games. The entropic end of this spectrum is chaotic, fast and creative in a simple kind of way. The concerted end is collaborative, slow and the instrument that sustains and reproduces Melanesian high-cultural forums. The entropic end of the scale includes the perceived potentiality for radical and episodic breaks from the past as are to be found in the subsection of Melanesianist anthropology for which Millenarian movements, Christian conversion and capitalist encroachment are the dominant exemplars. The continuity of a ‘Melanesian Way’ was a preoccupation of the slow and thoughtful end of the scale I presented, and it echoes the arguments of some of those whose reading of Strathern and Wagner lead them to view Melanesians as retaining an essentially timeless dividuality (see Mosko 2010). Gambling was a motif for relating, but those ideas and realities are changing, and as they do so, more patterns will appear fleetingly, offering a record of ideas in motion; each record changes the ideas once again. And so the pattern changes changes. How those ideas are systematized and modelled reveals the lived experience of transformation as a phenomenon that occurs simultaneously alongside individuals’ lives, full of striving and learning and achievement and failure. In the following two chapters, I will investigate the nature of the medium used to strive in gambling, which is cash money. It is not simply the case that perceptions of agency play out within games that model a more consequential reality outside of the games, I intend to show that the economic value that is risked can also have its nature harnessed within the game, adapting our shared material reality. Notes   1. Kula has changed since Malinowski observed it in the 1910s, but the particular aspects of kula exchange that I will be discussing remain operative (according to recent accounts).   2. But see Ketan (2004) on contemporary elections, where the spirit of moka lives on.   3. See Campbell (2002); Damon (2002); Munn (1986); Weiner (1992); A. Strathern (1971).   4. Important works included Mimica (1988); Munn (1986); M. Strathern (1988, 1992); Wagner (1974, 1991). For a review, see Josephides (1991).   5. In kula, see MacCarthy (2014); Weiner (1992); in moka, see A. Strathern (1984).

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  6. For a discussion of the utility of indigenously derived theories see Gegeo and WatsonGegeo (2001).   7. Either that or the ‘fast’ dice game satu (no translation), see for example Mitchell (1978).   8. For instance in Brandewie (1967); Burkins (1984); and Laycock (1966, 1967).   9. The games kwin and bom were new variations upon card games documented by Donald Laycock in 1966, and by the 1987 Oceania special issue Gambling with Cards in Melanesia and Australia. 10. Mancala, a game known by many names and thousands of variants, is played across Asia, in the Middle East and across Africa (Reefe 1987: 54). Like Papua New Guinea card games, mancala is united by a common material culture, which is the use of a board with two sides consisting of rows of indentations in which counters are placed. The greatest variety of mancala games occurs on the African continent, where it is believed to have originated well over a thousand years ago (ibid.: 55). 11. Side bets occurred, and these were likewise bets of equal size between those who chose to participate in them; they did not affect the central pot. 12. This attitude was particularly striking when applied to games that appear at first sight not to operate like this. For instance, cards did not circulate between players during rounds of laki, but the game was still conceived in terms of a flow of cards that may or may not configure in the hands of individual players (e.g. Davidson (1979); Mimica (2006)). 13. See Rubinstein (1987); Zimmer (1987). 14. Curiously, Malinowski never talked about kula paths (Weiner 1992: 140) 15. E.g. Damon (2002: 130); (Weiner 1992); see also Reed (1999). 16. See also Pickles (2014a); Trompf (1994: 387–88). 17. See also Pflanz (1977: 175). 18. I never heard this directly, but I suspect any magic directed at others’ thoughts was tantamount to witchcraft and would not be admitted to in a place where witch killings are a major issue. 19. This seems a widespread conception in connection to cards in particular, see Brandewie (1967); Burton-Bradley (1973); Mosko (2012, 2014); Pflanz (1977); Stent (1977). 20. See Mosko (2012: 29); A. Strathern (1984). 21. See also Mimica (2006); Reed (2011). 22. In other parts of the Highlands, colour terms have shown themselves to range more broadly than our own, often taking into account glossiness and brightness (see O’Hanlon 1989). In this case, it seems the Tok Pisin word kala has likewise been extended to include the suit it was denoting. 23. See Reed (2003: 88–91); Pickles (2014c). 24. See also Küchler and Were (2005); Pickles (2009). 25. I suspect this is a general trait given the many times across Papua New Guinea and in indigenous Northern Australia when games are commented upon according to their speed. In Papua New Guinea, see Burton-Bradley (1973: 157); Gustafsson (1992: 192); Hogbin (1951: 190); Maclean (1984: 46–47); A. Strathern (1984: 102–3); Zimmer (1986: 248); Zuckerman (1984: 215). In Australia, see Goodale (1987: 14). 26. The very old were partial to an old and slow game called faiv lip (lit. ‘Five Leaves’), a mixture of the first game laki (also known as tri-lip (‘three leaves’)) and kwin.

The Pattern Changes Changes 65

27. For a list of reduplication of verbs in Tok Pisin see Mihalic (1971: 22–23); for a general discussion of the use of reduplication in creole languages see Kouwenberg (2003). Damon sees reduplication in the Muyuw (Milne Bay) language expressing the idea of continuous, intensified action, such that a duplicated form of the verb ‘see’ means ‘knowing’ or ‘seeing’ (2002: 121).



 3 The Tyranny of Denomination

Daniel was a security guard in his mid thirties, working at the National Sports Institute where I lived from 2009 to 2010. He was paid every other Friday evening, at the end of his shift. With an envelope full of notes, Daniel walked for ten minutes back home to Blakaut Siti (lit. ‘Blackout City’) a subsection of Kaunsil Kem (lit. ‘Council Camp’) settlement. That day, his pay packet of K180 (which was about average for a security guard) came in two K50 notes and four K20s. The money would generally run out after a week, so paydays were exciting. A long-time settlement dweller, out of touch with his village in Simbu Province, Daniel was known by his family as a waster but also a kind man with a soft heart. Above all his other attributes he was desperate to be married, but he could not find the support to gather a bridewealth payment. At this stage in his life he even struggled to find candidates because he was so old for an unmarried man, and because he was very diminutive. As a bachelor, Daniel supported the relatives he lived with. But he also liked to gamble, and in the gathering dusk on his way home Daniel passed numerous card games. This was more than he could resist, and he was not alone; with alternate pay fortnights for state and private employees, every Friday saw payees getting embroiled in card gambling in the settlements, and this pushed the size of bets from t20, t50 and K1 up to K2, K5 or sometimes K10 a round. This was a lot of money for most people, translating to up to two bottles of beer or three packets of rice every few minutes. Or to put it another way, Daniel could lose all his pay in the span of a few hours if he joined a high stakes game. Daniel might have played kwin (‘queen’) or bom (‘bomb’); the way wagers were placed within either were identical, but the size of the stakes varied. With an agreed stake of K2 you would normally have a central pot of K10 (we will see why this was only normally the case later on).1 This was an appropriate game for Daniel to join and he sat down at an empty corner of the game. But Daniel’s pay packet did not have the right change. His K20 could not be substituted for chips or matches; players invariably played with the real thing, saying that they wished to filim fos/pawa blo mani (lit. ‘feel the force/power of money’).

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The calculations that followed from this moment required an appreciation of the material properties of money because they emphasize money’s conceptual divisibility and material indivisibility as elements in conscious redistributive strategies. In this chapter, I isolate two ‘scenarios’ for dealing with large notes during low stakes games, both of which have implications for players’ likelihood of success and form part of conscious efforts to mitigate or accentuate large notes’ redistributive capacities. I then describe how you can use denominations to get extra free games, stretching the money further than it would otherwise go. The result is an extension of Highlands transaction skills to a novel form of wealth and an objectively impressive generalized ability to play with the commensurability of money. Before I get to that point, however, I need to say something about how chances of success are usually calculated when anthropologists refer to gambling and why what people in Goroka do subverts those ways of calculating. Rational Choices

Daniel was poised to join the game by laying his stakes. It is at this moment that the logic of the game is supposed to take over and with it the cold mathematics of objective probability. In the last chapter, I examined how efficacies affect gameplay and outcome; here I argue that these efficacies extend their effects equally to the betting and through betting to the probability of success. This is unusual. The combination of stakes and game is usually theorized in terms of ‘chances’, ‘luck’, ‘probability’ and the ‘rational choice’. These sit at least one level of abstraction removed from gameplay (e.g. Gray 2004), reproducing a Levi-Straussian overemphasis on the power of mathematics to explain the true nature of social reality to the point where the people no longer seem to be needed (Mimica 1988: 155–61). By contrast, I argue that Daniel’s choices massage the mathematics along with the attributes of age and openness. Social scientific approaches to gambling rely on probability to understand a game’s internal dynamics. The pertinence of this strain of mathematics to understanding how games operate has its own history that is intimately tied to ideas of progress. The usual historiography of mathematics is one of increasing complexity and refinement over time, the ultimate corollary to the myth of civilization. Mathematics and particularly probability have had an interdependent relationship with gambling over their historical development, which holds a mirror up to the idea of evolutionary progression (Hacking 1990). Scholarly investigation of likelihood can be traced back to ancient Greece, China and India, among other places and perhaps extends beyond recorded history. It is in Europe, however, that probability budded into a separate scholarly discipline from its various applications and contexts.2

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The essential tenet of probability as a theory is that at one level of mathematical abstraction, the likelihood of particular events can be calculated based upon a mathematical model (usually the law of averages if dealing with a replicable event like gambling) and therefore actions based on obtaining maximum returns or averting risk can be extracted from these likelihoods, becoming the more ‘rational’ outcomes. In spirit, it is not a model of causality but a model for action based upon rules taken in lieu of a total understanding of an event’s causation. For instance, it assumes a random distribution of cards because of the near impossibility of adjudging how one particular shuffle by one particular pair of hands will order the deck and advises action based upon this assumption – given a random deal, which card should I play? Probability Theory,3 first conceived to address tactical questions relating to gambling for the wealthy patrons of leading mathematicians like Cardano, Galileo and Pascal, has grown beyond its disciplinary boundaries and come to significantly influence the day-to-day lives of people all over the world. Gambling games gave us the Laws of Probability, now applied to spheres as diverse as stock trading (see Maurer 2005) and artificial insemination (see M. Strathern 1996). Once formulated, these laws fed back again into gambling, providing the mathematical surety of a ‘house edge’ – i.e. the host of a gambling game is guaranteed a better likelihood of winning than the punter. This is necessary for the sound financial underpinning of modern casinos,4 and it provides the basis for risk management in the banking system. Probability also made its way into our comprehension of what gambling actually is and is taken as a model for how people apprehend the world in a risk society (M. Douglas 1992). Some histories of gambling, like their mathematical counterparts, unreflectively concentrate on the growth and progressive sophistication of gambling against a background of ‘innate’ human risk-taking in a dangerous ‘winners and losers’ world (see Schwartz 2006). They seem oblivious to the fact that these histories are analytically premised on the pre-existence of the very probabilistic ideas they are documenting the emergence of. The foundation of such historical approaches, linked to the rationalist mathematical analyses that are the current vogue in gambling analysis, are that opportunity-cost decisions are taken rationally by actors in accordance with a game theory model, unless pathological gambling takes hold and distorts this rationality. Rizzo reminds us that however separated, important, institutionalized and powerful Probability Theory has become in our daily lives, these models are rationalized and enumerated versions of reality that ascribe game-like characteristics to life (Rizzo 2004). In the present, it need hardly be stated that rationality, the result of Western scholasticism, is a poor guide even to the societies from which it was spawned. Indeed, case studies of gambling activities have shown that they can hold vastly different meanings for different

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actors5 and in different societies.6 One need look no further than the previous chapter for an entirely different model of causality. Statistical rationality may or may not correspond to even a part of individuals’ subjective consciousness, and there is no reason to suppose they will do so in locations with their own, autonomous numerical traditions. Without interrogating the calculations that people make at the edge of the game in order to affect the likelihoods within, the mathematics of probability becomes a black box that sits in place of players’ ideas, in turn affecting the types of analyses that anthropologists of gambling produce. This leads many anthropologists down a functionalist path. I hope to unpick this residual functionalism, discard it and move on. Actual punters and interested parties often think about their numerical chances in an entirely different way to a mathematical model of the game in question, using a hybrid conception of rationality and luck during play and experiencing a rollercoaster of emotions that belie ‘rational’ decision-making (see Oldman 1974). When players are confronted with social scientific analyses, they see abstracted interpretations of their behaviour and rationalized strategies for success but, under the rubric of free choice, are otherwise left to understand their likelihood of success in whatever way they see fit (cf. Shaffer, Stanton and Nelson 2006). Gamblers are in turn divided into ‘fish’ and ‘pros’ along the lines of their comprehension of abstract and mathematical knowledge about the games they play. If we can know gambling through the objective mathematics of play, how much should we credit gamblers’ own understandings of their likelihood of winning in our analyses, and how do we class that knowledge? Based on research in the United States, the sociologist Erving Goffman generalizes about gamblers everywhere by approaching this problematic (2006 [1969]). Goffman begins by distinguishing between the objective mathematical risk of a given bet and the subjective risk experienced by players, and as a sociologist he is primarily concerned with the latter. Goffman retains this mathematical framing for the problem of subjectively understood risk. His primary insight stems from this combination of statistical probability and perception. For Goffman, the ‘expected utility’ of a pot (i.e. the usefulness accorded to the money one might win by a player weighted by the probability of their winning it) is shot through with other subjective factors. These include the excitement of gambling and the ability of a pot to make a consequential difference to the player’s life after the game is concluded. Goffman defines the thrill of risk as ‘action’ and describes sociological reasons why people are attracted to ‘action’ in whatever form it can be found. Goffman offers an entry point into the kind of analysis we might want to adopt, one where the social massages the way mathematics plays out in practice, even if in Goffman’s work those factors are not directly implicated in the mathematics going on within the game.

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Anthropological understandings of gambling in what were called ‘pre-’ and ‘proto-capitalist’ societies like Papua New Guinea have been underpinned by a less sophisticated use of probability alongside indigenous understandings. Anthropologists persistently use statements about other societies’ gambling games being ‘basically chance’.7 Since at least Malinowski’s Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935), anthropologists of Melanesian societies have been well aware of the otherness of their models of causality, and the existing anthropology of gambling in Melanesia has documented ways in which social prescriptions on proper gameplay work against the more random elements (e.g. Zimmer 1987: 25; Maclean 1984: 48–49; but see Sexton 1987: 42). Laycock (1966, 1967), Mitchell (1988), Sexton (1987) and Zimmer (1986) all analysed a particular card gambling game in Papua New Guinea on the basis of it being ‘pure chance’. Zimmer’s writing is at its best when explaining gambling’s redistributive effects by focusing on the give and take surrounding gameplay (1986: 249–53; see also Zimmer 1987). Mitchell and also Zimmer profitably explore how players take winning and losing as an instantiation of their ability to beat each other by summoning a winning hand from their inner quality and investigate the means by which people manipulate their likelihood of winning by, for instance, teaming up. Their models for card gambling as redistributive systems are primarily based on the chanciness of the game (though they differ on whether equality or inequality are the result, see Pickles 2014a).8 The caveat that games are nevertheless ‘basically chance’ forces a wedge between an analyst’s understandings of a game’s effects and their subjects’ own ideas. This inevitably invites functionalism. Such models are in keeping with Woodburn’s (1982) classic analysis of a Hadza (African) gambling game used to distribute goods equally among persons and communities in the context of a fiercely egalitarian society. Woodburn separated gambling’s role from the perceptions of those playing, thereby denying a truly interactive relationship with gambling or an equitable engagement with any models that informants may have. In effect, the players are mere dupes of the game. In the end, couching the question in terms of mitigating gambling’s effects through surrounding exchanges begs the question: why use gambling for redistribution in the first place; why not stick to more familiar kinds of transaction? After all gambling is not a very predictable system for redistribution over the short term, and is particularly ill suited to egalitarians, for whom even small inequalities are often the subject of intense jealousy and the threat of violence. I contend that instead people’s calculative pragmatics infiltrate games’ mathematics to the point of disrupting chance-based explanations. I therefore give more attention to indigenous calculations as they relate to gambling and its outcomes. Informants’ considerations actually altered or negated the probabilities of gambling and not just their effects. In combination with

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the previous chapter on gameplay, betting practices concretized local understandings into the mathematics of likelihood and the distribution of wealth. This opens the gate to a far more expansive understanding of the forces at play in gambling with money, one in which, like poker players bluffing their way to a jackpot, you use money to make your own luck. Goroka, Money and Melanesia

A gambler needs to understand the game to play the game and also understand and utilize the wealth they bet. In Goroka, this means state-issued currency. To treat livelihoods in a Papua New Guinea town seriously is to understand money as a prerequisite for urban life (M. Strathern 1975) but also to appreciate that both the urban and money take Papua New Guinean forms.9 In the money-centred urban context of Goroka, people used their own understandings of words familiar to the economist: ‘profit’, ‘market’, ‘value’, ‘gambling’, ‘chance’ and ‘luck’. My fieldwork was thus conducted in languages (primarily Tok Pisin, a neo-Melanesian Creole, but also in English) that use much of the vocabulary of formal economics. In discussions of cash money, Gorokans often use the English word ‘value’ (valyu). I was asked over and over about the value in PNG Kina of my home currency and its relationship to the price of goods here and there. I never felt satisfied that I had been understood when I tried to communicate that one UK Pound was worth about four PNG Kina but that it did not necessarily mean that you could buy something that costs a Kina for the equivalent of one Kina (25 pence) in the UK and how the difference was a complicated matter involving costs, demands, geography and state policies. In fact, I often came away from these conversations less sure about my own understandings, and I frequently failed to communicate effectively. It gradually dawned on me that Gorokans were very interested in value, as well as with the material experience of transacting in a large, post-industrial economy like the UK. I now realize that my naive explanations were inadequate because they were predicated on a great number of assumptions about the invisible hand of the market that I took to be shared. A central structural constraint on and enabler of Gorokan money pragmatics and one of the reasons they were interested in my experiences in the UK is the spartan use of banking services in Papua New Guinea. I was prepared to pay attention to banking during my first fieldwork and found on arrival that there were branches of the three main banks (Bank of the South Pacific, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited and Westpac) in the centre of Goroka. Over time, however, I found that the use of banking services was actually less important and less prevalent than I had expected.

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Papua New Guinea remains among the least banked economies both regionally and globally. With only 1.7 bank branches per 100k people, Papua New Guinea was the world’s 11th most unbanked population (for which data was available to the World Bank) in 2010; the United States had 35.3 in the same year (Commercial Bank Branches (per 100,000 adults) 2013). Meanwhile, mobile banking, which is currently in vogue among development agencies as a spur to ‘financial inclusion’, has not made the kind of impact that has been seen in some African countries (IM4DC 2015). A microfinance initiative by the Asian Development Bank has also struggled, citing a much higher demand for savings products than more profitable loan products and high operating costs due to rugged terrain and poor infrastructure (ADB 2011: 10). Other significant barriers to ‘financial inclusion’ include the high level of collateralization required to obtain loans and the large share of land that is customarily owned and that therefore cannot be used as collateral (IMF 2015: 4). In both rural and urban areas alike, long-established networks of store credit and informal loans from individuals together outstrip commercial credit by more than ten to one (ibid.: 24). Even in an urban area like Goroka, then, the use of bank accounts was highly restricted, despite the long lines that could be seen outside the banks. My own observations suggest that banking was a useful means of earmarking and safeguarding funds but that aside from public servants it was only worthwhile for the comparatively wealthy or for those expecting a windfall from selling cash crops. The average settlement dweller was excluded from financial services due to the charges imposed for setting up an account and for various transactions; research confirms that the proportion of income that Papua New Guinea banks gain from non-interest-related activity is higher than in other emerging markets (PFTAC 2011: 8). The primary focal points for money management among Gorokans were the informal networks of transfers that sometimes did, but most often did not, permeate the formal banking sector. For many (especially newcomers to town), there was still considerable confusion about the role of banking: I was asked on a number of occasions whether I was given unlimited cash from ATM machines or whether I too had to make deposits (I do, unfortunately). Explaining the role of banks in the economy was part of my regular repertoire of conversation. My knowledge of the nature of the communication problem I had with people about money began to take shape in my mind when I learnt that Gorokans recognized and manipulated shifts in ‘value’ during gambling. People were involving themselves in intriguing modes of quantification that seemed to actively resist a standardized value for individual moneys resulting from the control of an ‘invisible hand’. This occurred as part of my gambling education and as I adjusted my expectations to an economy revolving around

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cash. I have tried to condense part of that education into a story about Daniel playing a game of cards. Daniel and the Tyranny of Denomination

Daniel might have preferred to play with change, but change was not easily attained in the settlement. People prefer not to give each other change because they were loath to reveal their money. Revealing what you have because you are seeking change makes distribution of part of that money to those who saw it very hard to avoid; this is especially the case if you find change because then you have no excuse for not giving something away. So Daniel had to use a larger denomination to bet the agreed stake during this game lest he watch his hard-earned money dissipate. There was a free place in the game; Daniel crouched and put down his K20, he looked at the other four players: I will call them Beverly, Colin, Dominic and Ellen. Each of them took it for granted that Daniel only wanted to wager K2 of his K20. Without words they acknowledged and accepted Daniel’s bet, at which point one of two scenarios began. Both scenarios involve quick arithmetic, showcasing Gorokan capacities for rapid calculation; it was some time before I could keep up, let alone join in the games. That Gorokans prefer complicated calculations to using counters testifies to their desire to play for real cash, to see the transfers in motion. In fact, the complicated betting is a bigger barrier to joining in a game than the rules. In Scenario 1, Daniel’s K2 bet will stap insait (lit. ‘stop inside’) the K20, K18 of which remains conceptually out of play, even while the note is in the pot. The wager creates a state of lok (lit. ‘lock’, to be locked in): the K20 note is stuck in the middle because the K2 inside it is ‘locked’ into the game – i.e. nobody owns the note completely until it is bought out. This is a means of getting beyond the classic problem that while a K20 note is fungible (it can be substituted for K10 and 2 x K5 or suchlike) the note itself cannot be changed – it is indivisible. Gorokans were highly sensitive to the state of particular notes, often refusing only partially ripped notes and even crinkled old ones.10 People maintain a strong sense of not only the divisibility of money in terms of its numerical worth (see also M. Strathern 1999: 96) but also the indivisibility money possesses in its sedimented forms: t10, K1, K5, K20 etc.11 When they bet, Gorokans take potential divisibility but practical indivisibility as essential parameters of their mathematics of money and act upon their interplay as a means of getting money. As I will outline, playing with a K20 note was therefore more than a mathematical problem; it was a statement made in mathematical terms. All the other players acknowledged Daniel’s

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intent and put their K2 notes into the middle. Beverly then won the pot, not only collecting K8 in K2 notes but also taking over K2 of Daniel’s K20 note. Next round. Most of Beverly’s winnings (aside from what is now her K2 stuck inside the K20) sat with her. Beverly used the K2 portion of the K20 note she won as her stake in the upcoming round because it was the easiest thing to do. By doing so she made sure that if she lost the next round she would give up money that was locked into the K20 anyway, enabling her to leave if she wanted to. Colin, Dominic and Ellen drew money from their reserves, and Daniel played another K2 from within his K20 note. In effect K4 of the K20 was then in play. Within the game players began to feel the pull of the K20 note as it started to swallow up the pot. This was one of the capacities that a large note had: it pulled in others’ monies every round (see also Brandewie 1967: 46). Beverly would have most likely been uneasy about not having her winnings in ready cash, but there would also have been a lure in taking control over a portion of the big note’s attractive capacity. She could end up being the one that sucked in others’ monies and was left with the K20 if she played well. Players wanted to gain control over large monies rather than small notes and coins, which held less force and were highly subject to the give and take of daily life; people dismissed these low denominations as money to give without thought. For instance, a common term for a K1 coin (which has a hole in its centre) was a ‘washer’. This was a joke dismissal because it equated the highest value coin in circulation with an almost valueless piece of metal used to distribute the pressure of a nut or bolt. In fact, each denomination was characterized as having different uses and capacities. The usual attitude, phrased negatively, was that big monies should go to supporting one’s family or for making statements such as giving to a bridewealth payment or showing off at a slot machine joint. Larger notes were less subject to being broken up, and they could legitimately be refused to others because of their disproportionate value (Pickles 2013a).12 You could have reached into your pocket and given K2 to your cigarette-starved associate, but only a fool or a show off would have pulled out a K20. Phrased positively, to play with large notes was to act with the kind of brazen attitude to wealth that in turn attracts further wealth and generosity. Colin won the next pot. He coolly scooped up K6 directly from the pot and slid it into his pocket (his own stake, Dominic’s and Ellen’s), and he also took control of K4 (Daniel’s and Beverly’s stakes) from the K20 note, which remained in the centre. Then Colin released K2 of the K4 he had ‘locked’ in the K20 as his stake in the next round. At that time Colin owned part of the note outside the game, just like Daniel did, and the conflict meant both parties were fused together. Drawn in by this note, they were ‘locked’ along with their money. They both staked K2s from hap blo em (‘their part’).13 Meanwhile,

The Tyranny of Denomination 75

Beverly went back to staking the smaller monies she still held. Dominic and Ellen did likewise. A K20, with its ability to make people sit up and take notice, drew Beverly, Colin, Dominic and Ellen in, and they played on when otherwise they might have left the game. At this point, Daniel still felt an advantage. A person who played a large note was thought to desire a long game because it takes time to lose the note, and this is one reason why larger notes had potentially greater value. Players with smaller reserves of money tended to run out while attempting to win large denominations because players like Daniel could play on for a long time waiting for an opportunity to win the rest of his note back. This was why the player with a K20 invited a certain kind of regard and aroused certain demands and expectations. Playing high denominations was not something to be done lightly; it impacted the game. The other players’ response to Daniel is therefore also a response to his provocation. Instead of refusing the note, which people sometimes did, they played for it; they took on the challenge. Next round Beverly won a second time. Her winnings were mounting up, with K4 of the K20 note along with K6 from the rest of the pot to add to the K6 in winnings she already had. Meanwhile Colin retained a K2 stake in the K20 note, and Daniel had K14 in there. This time it was Beverly who staked K2 and kept K2 in the K20 note, while Colin used his remaining K2 of the K20 for his own stake and Daniel staked yet another K2 from the K14 he still commanded. A full K6 of the K20 note was then in play. Beverly and Colin perhaps made a living off such games; some achieved this without having inordinate skill but by utilizing their staying power and the pulling power of denominations. While a long-time player might be statistically equally likely to lose a great deal (following the logic of a ‘chance’ model of gaming), in fact this possibility was mitigated by players whose reserves were small and who therefore only played for a short time, losing a couple of rounds and then leaving. If such players were well off, they often cared more about participating than winning (see Pickles 2014c). Money remained in the field of circulation for those who were still around to pick up the leavings. This worked because the law of averages means that in a ‘pure chance’ game, each player would end up with the same amount they started with; it is not the case, as anthropologists often think, that money will be evened out across a community. Laws of probability applied to gambling in New Guinea generally fail to take account of the capacities of denominations and the comings and goings of people, which all act upon the game to confound simplistic models of chance. These matters were central for Gorokan players. As one informant from the same settlement put it, ‘if we do not gamble, we don’t see the face of money’. Bear in mind that there is only one denomination of PNG currency that has a human face printed on it, the K50, and so the meaning of ‘face’ is

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quite different here. ‘Face’ implies the literal surface of denominations of kina (for a discussion of which see Foster (1998, 1999)). The face is often seen as a display of capacities in Highland Papua New Guinea (see O’Hanlon 1989). Little provides an excellent summary of the importance of the ‘face’ in Goroka that I cannot put any better: In addition to having a unique ‘name’, each person is also associated with a unique ‘face’ (fes/pes) that is, as Munn (1986(1)06) notes, the second center of a person’s identity. Most literally and as often used, ‘face’ refers to the front part of a one’s head, although the term is also sometimes interpreted to refer to one’s physical form more generally. Similar to the way in which one acquires a name, one’s face is said to be inherited from previous generations of ancestors. Men explain that the strength of their semen is what causes a resemblance between the face of father and child. As a result of this intergenerational transmission, children have the ‘face’ of their fathers who, in turn, have the face of their fathers, and so on. Thus, like names, ‘faces’ only circulate within particular social networks and, while each person’s face is uniquely one’s own, it simultaneously refers back to other male ancestors. Whereas name is known primarily through its discursive circulation, ‘face’ is known only through sight, so that to know someone’s ‘face’ is to have seen and observed them directly. Interlocutors commenting on whether or not they know another person will respond, for instance, by explaining whether they have or have not ‘seen the face’ (lukim fes) of a particular person. Those who interlocutors have never seen will be described as ‘new faces’ (niupla fes) or ‘unknown faces’ (unknown fes) and those who have been seen repeatedly are referred to as ‘known faces’ (save fes). (Little 2016: 246) I take the statement ‘if we do not gamble, we don’t see the face of money’ to mean that gambling brings out the character of money – i.e. its capacities to pull in and act upon people. It is by bringing this characteristic of money to the forefront by playing one off another in a communalized one-way transfer that the true face of money, its amenability to manipulation, is bared naked in open competition. After winning once again in round four, Beverly took possession of K8 of the K20. With a further K16 in change, she was able to buy Daniel out of the K20 altogether. He need not have accepted this buy-out, but in practice players who had lost so much of their note in successive rounds were unlikely to refuse because having change gave them a way out. Beverly was sitting pretty with a K20 note that was now fully her own and K4 in change. Colin was up by K2, while Daniel, Dominic and Ellen each fed K8 into the game with no return; the latter two allowed the note to change hands quickly because they

The Tyranny of Denomination 77

fed in small denominations to substitute for the K20. Beverly could now use the force of this K20 note in the game, or take it elsewhere, but would still be aware that all the players and spectators had already seen its face. A second method for dealing with Daniel’s K20 note, which I will call Scenario 2, makes it clear that the way people used money to make such manipulations was not simply a matter of expediency given certain material constraints, it was a strategic arena. Faced with the same situation, this time Daniel put his K20 into the middle, but in this case the other four players immediately gave Daniel their K2 stakes before playing, the full K10 pot being contained within the K20. This time when Beverly won the first round, she gained control of K10 in a state of lok inside the K20 note, Daniel retained the other K10. Following round one, Daniel and Beverly each staked another K2 from inside the K20. Once again the players reached a position where they were playing for portions of a note, the difference being that Daniel’s K20 note was collectively consumed much faster than in the first scenario. There was evidently a qualitative difference for Gorokans between allowing the K20 note to be progressively incorporated into gameplay (1) and assimilating the note fully into the game as soon as possible (2). I have since discovered that the presence and elaboration of such strategies varies considerably across the country. The two ‘scenarios’ often came into play at different times in the one game, and they even coincided. In fact, if Beverly continued to play, and was forced to stake the K20 note, it could have brought about Scenario 2 rather than 1. I remember a game where no one seemed to have the correct change, and three out of five of us in a K1 game were using larger notes: a K5, a K10 and a K20. Wagers were made inside different notes at different times, and they became verbal notes without money changing hands. Thankfully for me, after each round people were careful to clarify where everyone’s money was just then. This brought up a host of everyday gambling utterances like mi autim tu kina blo yu (lit. ‘I have ousted K2 of yours’, meaning I have taken over K2 of your K5 note), mi dinau lo yu, no ken bet (lit. ‘I have lent to you, don’t bet’, meaning you are borrowing part of my note to bet, so do not put in your note (it is too large)) and tupla blo em lus, em betim tripla nau (lit. ‘two of this is lost, he/she bets the third now’, meaning K2 from that K5 note has already left it, this is his/her third kina from it). A Contrast

At first glance, it appears that both Scenarios 1 and 2 refer to an identical situation, so the choice between them must be based on preferences that Gorokans have but that are not immediately apparent to the unversed. What could be

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the matter of decision? What is the problem? Why is it preferable to centralize the large note in some circumstances and wager portions of it in others? Why not keep their monies apart so each player can keep track of their wins and losses? Why make things more complicated? If we take money to be equally fungible and denominations as unimportant then this is a non-decision, but it becomes pertinent in a place where different denominations have non-fungible capacities. The key lies in one of the most stimulating and consistent observations made about money in Papua New Guinea: the interest people have in its divisibility. In 1995, Marilyn Strathern’s informant Manga dwelt on how money’s divisibility promoted Hagen people’s new concern with holding part of their money back, something that seemed impossible before with indivisible live pigs or shells. Rather than shells or pigs aiding in the configuration of people into a single unit because all the interests in a shell or pig are subsumed when it is given whole, money encouraged people to think of many transactions at once. Manga thought this made money much more useful than other valuables. That usefulness and divisibility stimulated people to think about the price of everything, and so Hageners sold what they once gave. For Manga this excess of thinking meant that money divided the mind, a familiar notion for Melanesianists (Akin and J. Robbins 1999; see chapter two). M. Strathern takes this idea and uses it to extrapolate what inflation might look like within what she calls a ‘gift economy’. Instead of price inflation, she said, in Papua New Guinea the number of exchangeables increases relative to the relations capable of absorbing them, leading to an expansion of relationships through either intensified exchanges with existing relations or (by implication) increasing the number of relationships one has by spreading exchangeables broadly (M. Strathern 1999: 105–6; Maclean 1984: 56). In either case, she says, ‘relationality’ (the primacy of relations) gets accelerated (M. Strathern 1999: 106). Gorokan people’s use of money for gambling is one context in which people have both increased transactions and thus intensified existing relationships and (in an urban context) created opportunities to transact with new people in a relatively transparent and safe way. Through that lens, progressively playing from within a large note with strangers or consuming the same note more rapidly with existing relations expresses both forms of ‘relational inflation’ (see also M. Strathern 1975, 1992). Gambling is a literal expansion of the transactive sphere, and thereby allows for greater potential for generating and manipulating value. The difference between both scenarios is premised on an assumption that the size of the note and thus the discrepancy between high conceptual divisibility and low material divisibility changes the game in a very real sense, and therefore the same amount of money comprised of a single denomination

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on the one hand or of a few smaller denominations on the other was both of equivalent and different value.14 The weit (lit. ‘weight’) of larger monies forced players to adjust their strategies and goals (cf. Munn 1986: 10–11), and this allowed for certain strategies or ‘scenarios’. This is not to imply that Gorokans did not recognize that two K10 notes are of equivalent monetary value to a K20 note, but the material indivisibility of that note allowed different, more powerful, impressive, imperative and attractive gestures to appear in even ostensibly identical situations. As I described in Scenario 1, Gorokans recognized that with a large note to play for, the target for each player had effectively been hijacked by that player so as to attract in more small monies to up everyone’s commitment. This was not categorically either desirable or undesirable; it could be phrased both positively and negatively, but it was a simple Gorokan fact: wealth attracts more wealth and competition (see also Mosko 2014: 252). The difference between the scenarios represented ways of engaging with the capacities of different notes, so what did those strategies do to those capacities and the resulting transfers? The advantage of Scenario 2 (where all players give their stake to the player with the large note) was that it could be used at any time in order to turn a large note, which appears to imbalance the game, into a single prize, rather than a complex mixture of small wins and portions of the note. Scenario 2 usually happened when players wanted to get the play going, to heighten interest without using the K20 to attract wealth to one person in particular. As some of the note could be shared by the participants prior to play, the force of the money was less strongly associated with the player who introduced it: Daniel would have been blame-free. This method was usually preferred to Scenario 1 among people known to one another, as the money becomes predominantly a central pot that players can attempt to attract equally, without one player having an imbalanced control or influence over it. It was more prevalent in places like settlements (where people knew each other and many of them were poor) because players would feel the impact of differential wealth more acutely than elsewhere. I also found this method to be dominant in villages. In short, Scenario 2 was a more magnanimous transfer strategy in which the disproportionate pull of a large denomination was more or less neutralized, while Scenario 1 was overtly aggressive in employing the denomination’s full capacity to punch above its number, and was thus associated with public spaces and strangers. Scenario 1 was a transfer strategy for players who did not entirely trust each other and did not feel the compunction to mitigate the attractive power of their note. Mutual cooperation or antagonism was expressed through these choices. Daniel (like many people) got a thrill from gambling with big denominations, and he often wanted to feel the attractive power and the buzz of his money without the associated accusations of irresponsibility. Hence, larger

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denominations tended to be played in public places among strangers who were not able to exert coercive pressure on players like Daniel. If he had had little money in low denominations, Daniel might have preferred to gamble close to home, but he deliberately went elsewhere on his paydays to gamble, to locations where people did not know him and he could spend his money freely without being subject to all the demands of being known to have money. Daniel was not alone in this: 25 per cent of over sixteens I surveyed deliberately went outside of their local area to gamble. The most popular destinations were the central betel nut markets, taking 43 per cent of those gambling commuters. These places are the focus of the following chapter. Daniel usually joined a gambling game where he knew some of the players but not all of them, at the main entrance to the settlement and still some way from his house. Both scenarios were therefore possible, or alternatively, his denomination could have been refused altogether. Quite often I saw someone who introduced a K20 in a low-key settlement game told to go away and not to be a bikhet (lit. ‘big head’, meaning ‘too big for your boots’). This would not have happened in the betel nut markets. When people refused large denominations, it was not usually because they felt lazy to do the mathematics; people complain instead that even though the bets would remain the same, if they allowed the large note then the game would become too serious. The decision to play Scenario 1 or 2, with 1 being more antagonistically effective and the other generously self-effacing, is a problematic belonging to a distinctive way of dealing with currency. It forefronted changes in value and made them objects of conscious manipulation.15 From an analysis of everyday betting we can see that gambling was not simply an activity in which one spends or wins money; gambling was of money, and money was of gambling in turn. Gambling was in large part a play on the powers of moneys to extend people’s influence through transfers (cf. Munn 1986). Game and money formed a single complex arena for a play of efficacies emanating from many sources and subject to the control of those able to recognize and manipulate the concrete forms that these efficacies took, and the attractive powers of different monies were able to work for/against people. In the case I described, a K20’s attractive power worked against Daniel, who tied up the other gamblers in his note until their persistence wrested it from his grasp. To summarize what I learnt, money became both commensurable and incommensurable. Each variation in price could not, I think, be summed up in a mean average price. This would be a deceit. Money’s value was continually distorted consciously and with a preoccupation with (in)commensurability. Gorokan people quantified in a moment of valuation, and I think they found my abstract way of talking about value downright odd. Akin and J. Robbins edited the volume Money and Modernity (1999), which describes money as a

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complex arena for understanding and competing in the contemporary worlds of Melanesians.16 Contributors to that volume reveal that posing money as a problem to a social order that depends upon ‘traditional exchange’ elides important complications. Money is in some circumstances readily incorporated, while other domains of the exchange system struggle. The analytical problem is exacerbated by archetypes such as ‘traditional exchange’, ‘demand sharing’, or the ‘capitalist market’. I certainly agree and think there is more left to say about how types of transactions are constituted in a money economy through the manipulation of the money’s value. I bring up Akin and Robbins’ volume now because within it Jane Guyer makes a gentle but telling critique of Melanesianist characterizations of indigenous currencies that helps me to move forward. Guyer noted that Melanesianist anthropologists have traditionally based their theorizations on the observation that people did not really need the objects they were transacting, but they desperately wanted them. Think of those oversized kula necklaces you could never wear. By extrapolation, she says, wealth objects became conceptualized as units of account establishing prestige, which was the thing they really desired. Guyer thought this accounted somewhat for Melanesians’ preoccupation with establishing equivalences when comparing objects and people. State-issued currency, Guyer observes, would therefore seem a relatively simple concept for people to understand, given its stated goal of deriving equivalences. Guyer asks the apparently innocent question that follows on from this point: do people think that certain transactions express inequality? (Guyer 1999: 242–43). Guyer’s implied critique prods Melanesianists to try out different conceptual terms as a means of addressing the complex manipulation of transactions that creates inequalities in equality and equalities in inequality on a daily basis, including in activities like gambling. To get at this point directly, I will now focus on another arena for monetary manipulation that happened during Daniel’s game. Pragmatics of Value

Having played a few rounds of cards, Daniel ran out of money. At this point he would be given a luk (lit. ‘look’, a free turn) as a form of compensation.17 Like the playing of a large note, a ‘look’ arouses no comment from any of the participants. Beverly, Colin, Dominic and Ellen just tacitly agreed that Daniel should be dealt a hand without having to contribute to the pot. Earlier I qualified my statement that with an agreed stake of K2 for five players the pot is normally K10. I did this because of the effect of a luk on the pot. When a luk was given to one or two players, the pot went down to K8/K6. A luk offered the player participation without an initiating transfer, instead calling on

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the obligation generated by their previous outgoing transfers. Participation in the game became compensation. A player usually either asked for a luk directly or stated they had run out of money and therefore asked implicitly. Other players merely nodded to each other or the dealer simply dealt to all of them without saying a word. For players with only small denominations like Dominic and Ellen, this occurred when they lost all their money. The compensation of a luk was manifested intentionally within the game, not just in compensatory transfers outside or as an (un)intentional consequence of ‘chance’. The pot changed magnitude as a result of the need to do socially well by others while guarding against the ill feeling that might lead to one’s own downfall (Pickles 2014a). A luk could also be given as compensation for the loss of a significant denomination. I thought it must be an affront to take advantage by accepting a luk only to reveal you had more money all along, but after his luk, Daniel simply pulled out another note from his pocket to play the next round, and no one appeared deceived or duped. When I understood the luk, I realized that the compensatory actions of others added up to a literal increase in a large note’s value vis-à-vis the equivalent in smaller denominations because you received more games from that note than one would have if you played with the same amount of money in small change. Put this together with the ‘scenarios’ for betting with large notes and one’s chances of success could be cast as partially dependent on the way that people react to the money one puts into circulation. Having money was not just a prerequisite for playing in a given round, at which point the laws of chance took over, and then after chance had its say people compensated those who lost out. Instead, money was allowed to interact with the game in a parallel way to how we might think of the effect of large bets during hands of poker, in lending itself towards compensatory or aggressive acts that affected whether one was successful and the direction of compensation (see also Mauss 1954). Daniel’s betting brings forth this flexibility, and outcomes of games rest upon knowledge of this interplay. The transfers making up these transactions are therefore better represented as spatio-temporal statements that manipulate value in order to transmit good will and contribute to the socially enhancing activities of gamblers; or signal overt acquisitive desires in a forum that recognizes the transactive nature of everyday life (in this I take my cue from Nancy Munn (1986)). I can say with confidence that in Goroka people were no dupes of their games; they were doing the work of redistribution, resulting in flows of wealth which look superficially egalitarian but are in reality complex articulations between persons, kin and their social others. Using pragmatics that surface across the full range of transactions, it becomes easy to parse the ethnographic phenomena that anthropologists saw as gifting outside of the game

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and those they saw as gambling inside it. They are all part of a pragmatics that tinker with intentionality and value. I found that, viewed properly, the meeting of different forms of mathematics in Papua New Guinean gambling activities, a space where indigenous transactional practices met with a globally hegemonic currency regime and the international material culture of gaming forms, affords an opportunity to get to grips with how one might think differently about other transactions (see also Pickles 2009). To make the point that value manipulation in gambling is far from unusual and that this is actually just a particular manifestation of a much wider phenomenon, I will bring in a noteworthy example from another time and place. I nearly used poker players for this purpose, but Aztecs and conquistadors make for better reading. In 1519, Montezuma (the Aztec ruler) welcomed Cortés (the Spanish conquistador) and his soldiers into his palace at Tenochtitlan as returning deities, offering them unbridled hospitality and lavish gifts of gold and silver. Cortés, in return, made Montezuma his prisoner. During Montezuma’s captivity and up until his death, he and his captor Cortés gambled incessantly for gold and jewels at a game called Totoloque (played with golden dice), continuing even after Montezuma discovered that the scorekeeper for Cortés was cheating. What is most curious about this encounter is that neither kept their winnings. Cortés gave his winnings to Montezuma’s attendants, while Montezuma passed his winnings to Cortés’ soldiers – which, given Cortés’ cheating, may have been either somewhat less or, if they were clever in the way they cheated, somewhat more (Del Castillo, Maudslay and Leonard 1956: 245–46). It is not known for certain who initiated this form of gambling diplomacy, but I venture to speculate that it was Montezuma, given that during his captivity he repeatedly refused to suffer anything he relinquished possession of to be returned, even when the items were stolen. Also, being under no illusions by this point as to his captivity, Montezuma was at pains to play the leader still and to rank himself above Cortés’ soldiers. Among the most exalted principals gambling must also be about the politics of diplomacy and the proper relationship between subordinates and leader, and this gets mediated by their valuation of things.18 In this extreme case, the likelihood of winning was countermanded by the players’ stance towards the value of the wealth they staked, so players lost wealth when they won but gained standing. Compared to this example of grand cosmopolitics through gambling, it seems entirely prosaic that less extreme, more subtle machinations with wealth could occur in places like Goroka, where so many wealth items have been overthrown and replaced. During gambling games in Goroka, little value manipulations might happen at a rate of once a minute, and the effect is like a vortex. The capacities that the money being circulated has are swept up and modified, such

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that a K20 note can become worth more than K20. Gorokans play on the value of wealth items using their material properties. This creates a shifting model of value and destabilizes conventional understandings of money as the supremely fungible and commensurable medium of exchange. Correspondingly, Goroka’s residents often speculated upon whether this or that was of lesser/higher valyu (lit. ‘valyu’) or had gained/lost valyu at specific times and places. Statements like i nogat valyu blo em (lit. ‘[this item] has no value belonging to it’) or insait long pokies valyu blo mani i go taunblo (lit. ‘in the slot machine [joint, the] value belonging to money it goes down below’) could be heard daily around town. With such an ambiguous and potentially expansive word in English that has taken many routes in academic discourse, I feel it necessary to clarify what kind of ‘value’ I am referring to. When some anthropologists talk of values (Dumont 1986; J. Robbins 2004; Sahlins 1985), they put their informants’ idiosyncratic ideas into a single meta-category, ‘values’, which converts them into commensurable and equitable individual ‘values’ that can be ranked on a single scale. Whether this is useful in given contexts is open to discussion, and strong opinions have been given recently on this topic (Graeber 2013; J. Robbins 2013), but this semiotic approach is not relevant to my analysis of Goroka. Instead, I deal solely with what people in Goroka see as value – i.e. transactable items that are or have become (not unproblematically) comparable on a single scale and thus of a single system of valuation. In that respect, my aim is not to identify values as discrete entities that may be compared and commensurated but the evolving and contingent pragmatics of valuation by which things are brought into comparison (see Graeber 2001). Following the Gorokan usage, I take a simple position; I treat value as a single scale set up to measure the relative effectiveness of items. For my purposes, like Guyer’s (2004), value is the comparison of one item against others that are considered comparable under the same cardinal scale. I find it strangely self-defeating to define value, since value is created in acts of definition. The more effective approach is to examine the relative flexibility of the defining acts that perpetuate valuation. As Eiss and Pedersen (2002: 287) point out, the study of value can overcome reductive analytical and disciplinary boundaries because ‘value’ interprets and changes the categories that it puts into circulation. In order to clarify, I shall quickly compare my own definition of value to Marx’s labour theory of value. Marx never systematically tried to prove the reality of value or inquired into its nature (Eiss and Pedersen 2002; Elson 1979; Ollman 1971: 176). However, Marx thought that the proportion of labour – labour is the sum total of creative energy that is for sale on a market as labour – put into any given material product is its value. Value for Marx was a box concept that contained his broad array of theoretical inductions on the contradictions of capitalism and allowed him

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to articulate differences between the possible and the actual forms of gestalt. Marx argued that the kind of quantification that led to an appreciation of value (conceived through the false lens of commodity fetishism) was only possible because of the emergence of a market for labour. Nevertheless, for Marx, this value is not related to how people actually priced objects; instead it reflects a hidden but nevertheless objectifiable ‘true’ quantification outside of action (see Pedersen 2008). People in Goroka do not control the commensurability of currency, and they do not control the value of commodity prices, which are policed by a globally dominant economic hegemony perpetuated by the profit motive of the haves and delivered to Papua New Guinean people through the vehicle of hegemonic mathematics. While gambling Gorokans work at the interstices between market prices and their own situation-specific mode of valuation. It is the interested manipulation of that which is assumed to already exist and hold power that legitimates and perpetuates their value. If, as I suggest, one should not assume that money confuses because it is new and instead money has become another imaginative vehicle of inventiveness with its own forms and constraints on Melanesian people, what then can this contribute to the burgeoning field of money theory? Abstracted Money

Georg Simmel thought that money creates ‘a matter-of-fact attitude in dealing with men and with things … [as] it reduces all quality and individuality to the question: How much? All intimate emotional relations between persons are founded in their individuality, whereas in rational relations man is reckoned with like a number, like an element which is in itself indifferent’ (Simmel 1964 [1921]: 411). Once in place this ‘automatic mechanism’, as he put it, constantly gains power to the detriment of the person, alienating the self and fostering a blasé attitude. For Simmel, the social forms characterizing a rise of money were distance, strangers and blasé and cold-hearted calculation: the ‘[m]odern mind has become more and more calculating. The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas’ (ibid.: 412). According to Simmel, this process of abstraction is total and inevitable; his represents the earliest iteration of the ‘money as acid’ point of view, in which money dissolves all social relations to numbers. For the prototypical theorists of money like Simmel, but also Habermas and Marx, the ‘mathematical character’ of money filled social life with ‘measuring and weighting’, with an ‘ideal of numerical calculability’, which

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necessarily ‘blunted personal, social, and moral distinctiveness’ (Zelizer 1997: 200, quoting Simmel 1990 [1907]: 444–45). Running counter to this tendency, Zelizer asked when ‘monetary transactions multiply, do they render social life cold, distant, and calculating?’ (1997: 2). This straightforward question epitomizes an anthropological response to economic theory. Zelizer and other allied theorists (e.g. Granovetter 1985; Weatherford 1998) represent a counter-trend in anthropology that has as its foundational text The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi (1957) (see Gregory 1997). Polanyi was concerned with re-embedding the rise of economics within societal shifts, as opposed to seeing money as an agent in itself; his book became a rallying call for anthropologists. Zelizer, for example, points out that even in post-industrial economies money is continually being reclaimed from its abstract and distant starting point (see also Hart 2000; Hann and Hart 2011). I find within these attempts at re-entanglement or re-embedding an artificial juxtaposition that reinforces Simmel’s original opposition between the individuality of ‘nature’ and the mechanistic ‘culture’ of money: neither coldness nor distance is necessarily or even straightforwardly relatable to calculation. Neither is there anything necessarily abstract in calculation, or in the use of money, that then requires embedding (see Guyer 2004; Verran 2001). Images of the unemotional killer, or the taxman, or perhaps the ruthless politician are immediately brought to mind by such words as calculation, but why is it so? Authors like Shell (1978, 1995), Zelizer (1997) and Hacking (1990) are to be applauded for their re-entangling of money and mathematics with meaningful context, but the initial disentanglement reinforces Simmel’s position and prevents understanding of social life from really penetrating this bastion of money theory.19 The current disentanglement of money-thought and emotion or fetish is an ethnographic phenomenon in many places, but it was never a Gorokan problem, so what is needed is an ethnographically inspired way of thinking that does away with the initial dualism. The luk, for instance, is a mode of calculation with money that communicates through a play on the mathematical character of money, but at no point does money emerge from or come near the cold. My material suggests that the use of money is every bit as calculating among Gorokans as among budget-slashing accountants. At the same time, it is based upon a system of valuation and calculation that is not distantiated and unemotional but engaged and emotive. Indeed, what is more emotionally charged, thoughtful and immediate than wealth calculation in Papua New Guinea more broadly (see for example Munn 1986; Reed 2007; Young 1971)? The aforementioned writings always seem to rest on an assumption that abstraction is the same everywhere. Abstraction is seen as emotional distantiation or objectivity, and decisions that are based upon a desire for money prioritize an abstract mode of thought (because money is an ‘abstraction’)

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that is by definition separated from the emotions of everyday life. The person is thought of as cold and distant, looking past the virtuous and moral at the numbers. Calculations with money need not be devoid of morality, emotion or whatever. This is not to argue simply for the concrete rather than the abstract; it is an attempt to describe how value transcends and mediates what has been translated into dualisms by theories (Eiss and Pedersen 2002). Jane Guyer said that while money invites the construction of a single scale of comparison such as I observed for Goroka, the ‘process of scale construction is analytically separable from other aspects of “commoditization”, such as abstraction, alienation, and appropriation’ (2004: 19); they are not necessarily linked in the way they appear prima facie. Dealing with Gorokan mathematics of monetary exchanges leads me to question the straightforwardness of money as a mathematical trick involving abstraction. Bill Maurer explicates related issues in Mutual Life, Limited (2005). He demonstrates the morality and values imbued in certain conventional mathematical practices with money that occur in Islamic banking practices and alternative currency movements. The abstraction of economic thought and the perceived imperative to re-entangle it into the social is shown to be a peculiarly Euro-American phenomenon. This is why academics tie themselves up in getting to the bottom of an immutable ‘truth’ about real economics (Maurer 2005: 113). Whereas Simmel and Zelizer attempt to ‘reveal’ money and social life as in reality connected, Maurer joins Žižek (1995) and Nelson (1999) in confronting and further elucidating the illusion that ‘consists in overlooking the illusion which is structuring our real, effective [and affective] relationship to reality’ (Žižek 1995: 316). Maurer draws on Nelson’s point that ‘[p]laying detective and getting down to how the fetish “really” works completely misses the magic act’ (1999: 77). This opens a space for looking at indigenous meanings of money whilst holding to the notion that there is always some kind of ‘magic act’ going on wherever money is in play and that the permutations in this ‘magic act’ could be an analytic alternative to searching for the essence of money. Maurer’s insight comes from his attention to ‘mathematics: not whether and how the mathematics are used, not the meanings attached to it, not its metaphorical functions – but the mathematical form … itself ’ (2005: 104), which he understands to be of a moral character. The ratios and calculative activities in his ethnographic material are morally charged rather than being seen as ethically empty mathematics. The alternative moralities that infuse economic reason in a shared mathematical register reveal different possibilities within a single system, rather than reproducing a fruitless dichotomy between abstract versus immanent money. Yet alternative enumerations with money remain peripheral to the literature at large, and therein lies the potential for the Gorokan material.20 Neither the luk nor the two scenarios offered

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appear to have much to do with abstraction or immanence, their enumeration relies upon a pragmatics that conveys amity or antagonism through the denominations involved in money transfers, and it shall require an exploration of the meanings that are instantiated in these calculative choices to bring out the character of money in Goroka. To my mind, the only classical theorist of money to truly recognize its alternative potentials was actually the maligned Germanophile Oswald Spengler (1926). Spengler’s grand concern was the rise and fall of great civilizations, and he produced an immensely timely explanatory framework for the Great War in 1918. He is remembered as a kind of proto-Nazi, but in anthropological terms he is better described as a proto-Dumontian. For Spengler, each culture rose and fell as their ‘prime symbol’ played itself out and into absurdity. The ‘prime symbol’ was most obvious in mathematics and money, but Spengler felt hampered by the lack of records of actual data on the money of other civilizations in the early twentieth century. ‘[E]very Culture has its own mode of thinking in money, so also it has its proper money-symbol through which it brings to visible expression its principle of valuation in the economic field. This something, a sense-actualizing of the thought, is in importance fully the equal of the spoken, written, or drawn figures and other symbols of the mathematic’ (1926: 486). While classical theorists like Simmel basically adopted Adam Smith’s understanding of money as an abstract mathematical marker and later thinkers disputed how abstracted or disentangled actual dealings with money are, the mathematical precept that money is abstraction (as the x in the equation of specific values) or that abstraction is uniform has never been wholly interrogated, with Spengler hinting at the problem. As Maurer puts it, all the questions posed by Simmel, Giddens and others ‘assume that quantification necessarily involves standardization, homogenization, and universal commodification’ (2005: 103). Those critical of seeing ‘money as acid’, like Zelizer (1997), Parry and Bloch (1989) and Akin and J. Robbins (1999), among others, while making important points in their own right, nevertheless assume ‘monetization goes hand in hand with calculation’ (Maurer 2005: 103; see also Hart 2000; Maurer 2006) and that this calculation is of a similar character the world over. Spengler pre-empts the work of Shell, Zelizer and Hacking and opens possibilities for more ethnographic theories of money. Ethnographic theories of money like Maurer’s, or Guyer’s, then trouble the singular bounds of cultures (which was Spengler’s big assumption, probably because he had a horse in the race) by interrogating precisely the kind of calculations that otherwise allow us to assume that cultures are bounded. Of considerable import to this argument are the books Marginal Gains by Jane Guyer (2004), Science and an African Logic by Helen Verran (2001) and The Fame of Gawa by Nancy Munn (1986). Guyer gathers a compendium of

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transactional possibilities from Atlantic Africa containing multiple analogies for each of my own points of focus. Verran uses a reiterative narrative structure that covers the same material repeatedly through contrasting conceptual lenses in an attempt to reveal the coagulation of situational logics and mathematics education in Yorubaland. Munn’s ethnography of an island in Papua New Guinea’s kula ring redrew the boundaries of imagination for conceptualizing humans and objects across space and time in the style of her Melanesian informants, developing a conceptual language that feels intuitive and that I lean on at times in describing transfers in Goroka. By adopting this approach, by assuming that monetary calculations are not distantiating and abstract, I am enabled to frame other, more stimulating research questions: what if the calculations that people made to ‘distort’ the value of money were actually the primary enumerative technique within Gorokan money-thought? What then would the mathematic do as opposed to generating abstract calculations and moral quandaries (Guyer 2004)? What if the value of money was a variable within a pragmatic that conveyed comparative valuations of people instead of reducing people to abstract numbers or to bland equality (Verran 2001)? What if the emphasis on distorting value transformed the logic of money into an inharmonious, inconsistent vehicle for eliciting differences between people (Munn 1986)? People said, and gambling demonstrates, that in Goroka money had the capacity to attract people as well as money to it – other capacities shall be revealed during the course of the book. What if we did not attribute these capacities to a world of market capitalism that causes people to get confused and mistakenly ascribe agency to money (Hart 2001) but instead saw it as a part of the character of monies themselves, as people in Goroka saw money’s ‘face’?21 As anthropologists have documented, money is fetishized wherever it travels, but the crucial twist is to refigure that reality into its own calculus because, as Guyer (1995: 6) points out, money ‘is a vastly important reality to vast numbers of people, all but an infinitesimal number of who have absolutely no idea of the official doctrines under which it “makes sense” but whose own constructions … are a necessary component of that “sense” as it works out in practice’. Conclusion

Daniel’s K20 note stimulated the consumption of other monies in compensating for its loss, and given that revealing one’s wealth obliged one to compensate people, the K20 also anticipated its own consumption. I chose gambling as a frame for excavating these kinds of pragmatics, but the force that money exerted was equally visible in related forms at other locations like slot machine joints or on market stalls, at bridewealth payments or by the

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meat section in supermarkets. Still, gambling was one of the most consistent and pervasive ways that the attractive force of money was made apparent and transparent; as my informant said, it was the place to see the face of money.22 Gambling was a way of elaborating on existing transactional forms that were consonant with the new super-transactable called money. These transactional forms were (until mathematical education) inextricable from local mathematics; they were the same thing (Biersack 1982; Mimica 1988; Wassman and Dasen 1994). It makes sense, therefore, that numbers feel negotiable. For Gorokans, money was a set of marked plastic and metal shapes whose numerical value was known to be ultimately commensurable and fungible (cardinally related) but whose actual value at different times and places was negotiated during situations in which monies were separated from each other. At these times, people were able to manipulate the impact and therefore effective value of the money they encountered. Gorokans took this reality, where value was dependent on various contextual and physical attributes, as a baseline for their understanding of what money could do (cf. Zelizer 1997). Value was seen as an extension of agents’ acts rather than the result of abstract forces collectivized into an invisible hand. If we are to take seriously a Gorokan money-thought then our points of reference in the literature should now be those of Melanesian anthropology and especially what they have to say about transactions, viewed through contemporary Gorokan gambling. I have thus far described Gorokan models of causality and transformation, as well as the way gambling plays on the materiality of currency to make locally significant transactional gestures. The next chapter will add contours to this urban landscape, unveiling a broad range of gambling possibilities and their correlation to different places and the transactions appropriate within those places. Notes  1. Side bets were also allowed but do not affect the main pot.  2. Due to a list of imported mathematical ideas too long to be thoroughly considered here (cf. Hacking 1990; Reith 1999; Schwartz 2006).  3. Taken here as a collective term including Decision Theory, Game Theory, Rational Choice Theory, among others.  4. As the gambling industry became more sophisticated, they also found ways to legally misrepresent odds on their slot machines, which have become their primary sources of revenue. They also conspired with and funded researchers who overemphasized the individual’s role in gambling addiction, with the aim of diminishing the industry’s legal responsibilities to customers (Schüll 2012).  5. E.g. Cassidy (2002); Oldman (1974); Henslin (1967).  6. E.g. Malaby (2003); Woodburn (1982).

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 7. In Papua New Guinea, see the otherwise excellent Zimmer (1986); Hayano (1989); Sexton (1987); Maclean (1984); and Laycock (1967).  8. Assertions about redistributive benefit have been used by unscrupulous gaming companies in neighbouring Australia as justification for putting their gaming machines and casinos into Aboriginal settlements, though they are certainly very far from redistributive, taking revenue out of the community. This has become a significant policy issue (see Brady 2004).  9. Discussions of money’s introduction to Papua New Guinea societies are available elsewhere (e.g. Foster 1995a, 2002; M. Strathern 1975). 10. See also Stewart and A. Strathern (2002); Healey (1985); Nihill (1989); Foster (1998). 11. To draw the contrast, in the UK the divisibility of money is heavily foregrounded in an e-banking and credit card dominated financial landscape. Money can be transferred to two decimal points of the primary currency in any quantity numerically required, and the indivisibility of denominations is usually noticed more in terms of needing correct change for machines, understood as a nuisance rather than a cause of currency fluctuation (see Sargent and Velde 2002). When it comes to large-scale financial transactions, the divisions can be even finer (see Maurer 2005; Zaloom 2003). 12. For an intriguingly comparable situation using indigenous money, see Armstrong (1924) on Rossel Island (Massim) money. 13. The word hap (lit. ‘half ’) can be used to mean any fraction, so that a player may own a bikpela hap (lit. ‘big half ’) of a K20 note, say K14, or a liklik hap (lit. ‘little half ’) like Colin’s K2. Hap may also mean ‘there’, as in long hap (lit. ‘over there’, but also ‘that other part of this place’). It is interesting to note that the only word used for fractions has this flexibility. 14. A partial analogy would be the fetishism of displaying ‘platinum’ credit cards in Wall Street and the City of London in the 1980s and 1990s, though platinum cards cannot be taken over in the same way as K20 notes can. 15. Another interesting variation was when two players had K20 notes. People usually gave change to one player, as in Scenario 2, and this player’s note became the primary object of play. The other K20 note was played from progressively as in Scenario 1, until a solution could be found where there was only one large note in the centre. The player whose K20 note became the pot was the insider, and the one who played progressively from their K20 was the outsider, and to my eyes seemed to adopt an overtly antagonistic style that played up to their role. These complications show that my simplified ‘scenarios’ are momentary expressions and instantiations of what was a constantly negotiated pragmatics. 16. None of the contributions to that volume came from an urban perspective, and so my standpoint differs from theirs by default. For an excellent national level analysis, see Foster (2002). 17. Those making side bets on players’ behalves are not offered a luk because their betting is not directly involved in the central pot. 18. After Montezuma’s death, when Cortés took the capital Tenochtitlan, he proclaimed his new power by outlawing all gambling, though it is not clear whether this was only enforced among the soldiery (Gabriel 1996: 131). It is certain that Cortés was concerned about military discipline, for he specifically forbade the gambling of weapons. Cortés justified the stance by claiming the spread of Catholicism and the destruction

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of idolatry as his company’s principal motive (Clendinnen 1993: 43). Under pressure from Spain, Cortés made repeated attempts to limit bets or curtail forms of gambling, but both he and his soldiers often lapsed (Weckmann 1992). In this case, in a short space of time, in a situation in flux, gambling operated in a number of roles: as common ground, as a vehicle for guile, a space for diplomatic generosity, as a tempter, as a mark of distinction between savage and righteous and as a social ill. 19. Readers could take this argument to indicate that I am interested in money’s fetishization, but that is not quite the point either. Michael Taussig (1980) is known for having deployed ethnographic instances in which money is fetishized as a theoretical starting point (see also Gamburd 2004; Keane 2001; Lemon 1998; Stallybrass 1998). To fetishize is to host an excessive, irrational or supernaturally inspired commitment to a particular object, and when these dispositions are directed towards money they are contrasted with rational calculation and sound accounting practice. Taussig’s Colombian interlocutors were peasants coming to terms with a money economy and were concerned about the power of money to attract more money, just as Gorokan gamblers were. However, their concern was with those in their community who chose to make money productive in the capitalist sense by, for instance, secretly contriving to have a bill baptized in the place of their own godchild and then setting this bill in motion with the assurance that it will return with prodigious interest (1980: 126–27). For Taussig, this illicit supernatural strategy (which not only derives money unfairly but also consigns a human to purgatory) shows that money could not bear interest on its own according to local conception, a point that is already radically different from Gorokan suppositions.   Taussig maintains that people who are unused to a commodity market in which money literally yields rather than acting purely as a medium (and therefore remaining barren) must resort to a supernatural explanation of its animation. Columbian peasant understandings of the ‘correct’ role of money correlate with an Aristotelian (pre-capitalist) interpretation of the properties of currency in its natural, pre-capitalist state, and the supernatural reversal indicates an ethnographic instance of people grappling with the new role of money in capitalist societies as interpreted by Marx.   The fetishism argument rests on a juxtaposition of rationality as a basis for accountancy as opposed to a false comprehension based more on allegory than accountancy. As such, Taussig’s explication is a convenient exemplar for one model of money rather than a theory with Gorokan significance. Taussig highlights the effects that everyday reasoning has on economy by describing several stolen cash registers that were written off as the consequence of baptized bills. Symbolic and/or fetishistic associations of money are not restricted to revitalizing it as animate or animating its acidity (for hot money see Znoj (1998), for bitter money Shipton (1989), for money that burns like oil Gamburd (2004), for liquid money Ho (2005)). To state my argument in terms of fetishes, it would be that fetish is a part of calculation whether it refers to the apparently irrational or the mundanely instrumental because both institute their ideologies through calculation. 20. For exceptions see Gregory (1997); Guyer (2004); High (2013); Kwon (2007); Walsh (2003). 21. David Graeber has certainly been the most prolific (e.g. 2001; 2004; 2012), and for my money also the most forceful anthropological proponent of using a critical approach to economies as a means to uncover more equitable forms of social organization. His

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ability to manage different scales of analysis and compare hugely diverse and vast ethnographic corpuses is humbling. In so doing, Graeber develops and simultaneously critiques various analytical registers to realize an unparalleled comparative clarity. I developed my own way of talking about Goroka independently of Graeber, though I draw on many of the same influences. I see my aim as parallel, which is to offer my own formulation of possibilities that might help broaden the palette for those who strive to develop a more just and decent way to keep existing (2001: 225–28). I make use of both Melanesian analogies and cross-cultural comparisons. It is a largely unintended but welcome result of the writing process that intra-regional comparisons act as analytical building blocks for the main argument of the book, while the cross-cultural comparisons (which were added at a later stage) provide extra-analytical points of resonance that guide the reader towards the comparative potential of a micro-analysis of transactions as frontiers. 22. See Foster (1995a) on the materiality of Papua New Guinea money.



 4 The Fastest Money in Goroka

Like cards, like money, markets were exogenous: they were first introduced into Goroka and the Highlands in 1955 by Australians exasperated by what they saw as incessant door to door hawking. The Administration then realized that markets provided an opportunity to distribute exotic fruit and vegetable seeds they could later buy back, stimulating development, their taste buds and adding commodification to subsistence with a view to creating what they saw as a proper economy. The idea caught on, and soon markets became almost exclusively Papua New Guinean social spaces; they fulfilled the urban need for comestibles and provided subsistence agriculturalists hungry for imported products with cash to buy them (Jackson 1976: 175; see also Meggitt 1989). Once set into motion, markets emerged as important meeting and trading places, and the category of activity known as maket (lit. ‘to market’, to sell for money, usually on an informal basis) developed into an inescapable part of urban life. Markets are often thriving centres of growth in former colonies (Guyer 2015; Porter, Lyon and Potts 2007). They nevertheless regularly defy economic measurement because they blend formal and informal kinds of accounting. The legacy of existing trade networks and pragmatics means practices of marketing are distinct from the ‘principles of the market’. MacKenzie, Muniesa and Siu (2007) argue that ideologies of ‘market principles’ have to be performed in order to emplace them within any living market. In Papua New Guinea, the imperative to act according to economists’ versions of ‘market principles’ is weak and other, regionally representative pragmatics have become intrinsic to the transactions that make up a successful market. I will illustrate the ways in which market pragmatics, as opposed to ‘market principles’, are reproduced through the tropic points that are agreed upon as the essential stuff of each transaction: weights, measures, denominations, numbers. The chapter hinges on a card game format called chalinj (‘challenge’), which was paradigmatically associated with certain markets. The style of gaming was rare but well known for its frenetic speed and high stakes, much like the markets that hosted it. Chalinj occurred in wholesale betel nut markets, and betel was the most marketed item in Goroka;1 a seed from the areca plant, it is usually combined in the mouth with lime powder and piper betle.

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A reaction begins when these ingredients are chewed, producing a vivid red mash in the mouth and inducing a pleasant, energizing, sometimes heady sensation that also acts as an appetite suppressant. As betel nut did not fruit locally, it was brought from the coast and sold in markets all over the Highlands. So the product, the market and the gambling were all imports. Originally, betel nut selling was banned from the markets of Goroka due to the Administration’s distaste for bright red spittle discolouring their town. Yet with demand exploding and other markets proving so successful, markets specifically for wholesale betel nut and its corollaries sprang up on customary land as near to the centre of town and the main (produce) market as possible. The ban was unique among Highland towns and effectively allowed the differentiation of two types of marketing to occupy separate locations. Fed by growing consumption and without state regulation, the betel nut markets metamorphosed into places radically differentiated from their legal counterparts, and this helped to sustain a particular form of gambling. Between 2009 and 2018, there were two large central markets for betel nut wholesale in Goroka, called Kakaruk Maket (lit. ‘Chicken Market’, so called because it began by selling chickens before moving into betel nut) and Chuave Maket (named after a district in Simbu Province because many of the resident traders had migrated from Chuave). Kakaruk and Chuave were dank, crowded, sludgy places where the ground – no matter how dry it had been – was soft, moist and trampled into shifting peaks and troughs. The older of the two, Kakaruk, was built on a slope, but this had become infilled over the years with husks of betel nut, beer bottle caps, plastic bags and discarded cards. The site resembled a composting heap in need of turning, the spongy ground yielding oily black ooze under foot. A fruit wine brewing company called Live-Lave next door added the pungent aroma of fermenting tropical fruits. Chuave was flatter, soggier, bigger, fresher and newer but otherwise much the same. In contrast to fresh food markets dominated by local producer-sellers (Bourke 1986), the betel nut trade is characterized by a proliferation of intermediaries and large distances between rural producers and urban chewers (Sharp 2016: 80). The betel nut markets were so packed with marketers they spilled out onto the streets. At the roadside, on street corners and outside houses, 32 per cent of street marketing vendors in Goroka sold products supplied by the betel nut markets.2 Much of my time was spent hanging around those who marketed, as gambling melded with marketing in my understanding. Betel nut markets designated their own card game areas: Chuave had four, Kakaruk one large one, sometimes two. Other gambling forms had their places: darts and pool were played for beer, noodles, rice, cola or money, while bingo and a spinning wheel dealt only in cash. They were gambling’s central locations, and when I first mentioned to strangers that

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gambling was my topic, people invariably told me either to head to Kakaruk Maket or warned me to avoid it. With the intensification of marketing and gambling activities occurring at these markets, this chapter has at its core an idea of geographical centrality, of a fixed spatial location whose fame is retained over time. I use the term centrality here to refer to any enduring spatial prominence associated with transactions. This kind of enduring spatial prominence is widely acknowledged as another introduced phenomenon in Papua New Guinea (see Hirsch 1994). Barter was previously conducted only by travelling to other communities with your wares, where ceremonies involving wealth transfers shifted location often; tribal warfare made known meeting points hazardous and hence centrality was a moveable state rather than a fixed place (see Godelier 1986). Centrality may have once been an achieved and ephemeral state enacted by specific people, but markets have since thrived in Goroka and in Papua New Guinea more widely, and marketing in a fixed place became one of the most reliable ways of gaining an income. I maintain that it is no coincidence that centrality crops up in the ways people market in central places and in the way they gamble too. For Gorokans, betel nut markets, money and gambling went hand in hand because of the speed that money changed hands in these locales. Among the many strangers I met in Kakaruk Maket, one explained to me that while white people say ‘time is money’, this does not apply here; here money can come at any time. He meant that with money moving fast, one might be the recipient of money at an unexpected hour. In places of concentrated marketing and thus intensified transfers, the speed of money’s flow increased and with it time became denser, so time was no longer money. Two idiomatic aspects of the betel nut markets were particularly emphasized: the extreme speed of money and the many kinds of pasin (lit. ‘passion’, habits or preferences, cf. Mihalic 1971) that emerged. They were causally connected: fast-moving money brought out all kinds of pasin, some good and some bad. I concentrate solely here on pasin blo kas (lit. ‘passion belonging to cards’),3 though other kinds of pasin were very much in evidence, especially drinking (pasin blo spak, lit. ‘passion belonging to drunk’). Fast money and flaring pasin produced an ideal – and the only – setting for chalinj (‘Challenge’), the fastest form of card gambling in Goroka and the one that provoked the most violent pasin. Only places like Kakaruk and Chuave (where money moved so fast as to generate any number of moral problems) could contain this kind of gambling: the fastest money, the fastest game. Betel nut and its corollaries were bought in bulk and sold for money and so this chapter is also concerned with ‘commodities’ (Appadurai 1986; cf. Carrier 1992; Gell 1992, 144; Gregory 1982). According to Arjun Appadurai, commodities are objects that have been alienated in exchange during at least

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one ‘phase’ of their existence (1986). Yet those who participated in Gorokan betel nut marketing, wherever they did so, were not ‘quits’ after each transaction. As I will show, while one was in principle free to call it quits, marketers deliberately implanted the memory of a transfer within the exchange of money for betel nut so as to impart a sense of enduring obligation (see also Healey 1990: 314–56; A. Strathern and Stewart 2000: 21–41). Bound up with transfers that stick was the generalization of a world of debt and credit and a town saturated with Melanesian-style accountancy. My intention is not to destabilize the notion of commodities, a point as routine in Melanesian anthropology these days as to be mundane, but to articulate a set of transfer pragmatics that bear only a passing resemblance to theories about commodities, despite the fact that betel nut has been described as Papua New Guinea’s ‘quintessential commodity’ (Hirsch 1990: 26). Marketing and gambling iterated these transfer pragmatics in different intensities based upon the notion of speed explored in chapter two, and so after describing chalinj, I make a pilgrimage from the slowest to the fastest forms of marketing, taking in their different forms and concomitant transfer pragmatics. The slower forms of marketing sat alongside games I explained in chapter two, so I leave those games’ rules unarticulated here. My portrayal may evoke in the reader’s mind Clifford Geertz’s description of a Balinese cockfight (1973), where a central place of gambling enacts a ‘culture’ in its most concentrated form. While Geertz aimed to show a culture enacting itself as text, my ambition is to illuminate how new social practices emerged from particularly Melanesian forms that have analogues in the markets of other developing economies.4 I will attempt to demonstrate that marketing, and its twin card gambling, contained a mode of transfer pragmatism peculiar to the Melanesian context instead of either a static cultural enactment or an instance in which a formerly gift-centric system was commoditized. Chalinj

Not strictly speaking a game, chalinj was a type of gaming: a direct contest between two persons or parties. It was said to have arrived in Goroka at various times from 1999 to 2009, but echoes can be found in traditional pitched battles that occurred among warring clans and tribes, which were also called chalinj in Tok Pisin (see Downs 1978: 235). Chalinj was believed to be prevalent further up the Highlands in Hagen and Wabag, where it was supposed to have spawned. Laki, also known as tri-lip, the progenitor of all card games in Goroka, was the typical game adapted for chalinj. Other games like fombe, bom and las kat could have been used in theory, though I never observed

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them, and the only game that was excluded by virtue of its rules was kwin. In Goroka, laki and its frenetic speed were associated with times when the Kina had a higher purchasing power, but its many-player form was long gone from Goroka.5 During 2009–10, laki, in its chalinj form, was confined to deep within the betel nut markets or to the margins of special events like the Goroka Cultural Show or to other drunken culminatory times of wealth and abandon (cf. Mosko 1999). This was so markedly the case that people described places where chalinj games go on as ones that were mani pulap (‘money filled’) or where mani kapsait (‘money overflows/falls down’). Muhammad, an informant who knew the markets more intimately than anyone (he collected rent from betel nut sellers at Kakaruk Maket and ran a successful bingo operation), explained chalinj as a game where: Money flows, it will take the money from inside your pocket; money goes fast. … that is why many people try to stop this game from happening because they want to keep more money; that is why it is now only in Chuave Maket and not in Kakaruk Maket. Challenge is like cockfighting, where two people battle in the middle and other people bet on the two playing.6 Chalinj was fast. It was based on the archetypical fast game laki, which had almost anarchically simple rules: after shuffling, each player received three cards, the total value was calculated ignoring double digits, and a winning total was the closest to a given value, usually nine or ten. A face card was worth ten, so that, for example, a queen (10), a nine (9) and a six (6) would be worth 10+9+6 = 25, removing the first digit leaves 5, which is an unfavourable hand. Combinations of face cards (e.g. Q+Q+K) beat totals of 10, but which combinations of face cards were more valuable varied (e.g. Q+Q+K may beat J+Q+K or vice versa). When this came up during play, the most common solution was to re-deal. Each hand lasted from a few seconds to a minute or two, most of which was taken up by organizing the wagers. Decisive simplicity with the cards was balanced by intricate betting. To illustrate, I will take the reader with me as I approached a game already in motion, as all but two players would have done throughout the day. Inching my way through a throng of curious bystanders and potential players, I saw a man perched on an empty cooking oil drum; he was the ‘referee’, dealing the cards and mediating the betting on a mat floating atop the muddy ground. A queue of varying amounts of money sat by the referee’s side on the mat, and a more beguiling large heap of money was between his legs. Near the centre of the knot of people was a friend called Joka. He wore a comical jester’s hat of the kind fans wear to sporting events, and he had left his settlement Genoka that morning to market betel nut at the town bus stop a quarter of a mile away. Joka bought his betel nut at Chuave Maket and must have stopped for

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a game. He smiled, sunk his teeth into a ripe tomato, and pointed to the K1 coin at the front of the queue; I was just in time. Two people were about to be dealt their three cards: Joka, the challenger from the front of the queue of money, and the incumbent, who won the last round. The incumbent had K65 and Joka only K1, but the amounts of money queuing or standing in the middle did not dictate how much players wagered. Our incumbent, a stranger to me, said he wanted to bet K15 from his winnings, while Joka declared he would bet K4, handing K3 to the referee, who added it to the K1 that was holding his place. The two wagers did not match (K15:K4), and this was where the crowd came in. Some of these people, if they fancied, would join in the betting on either side and thus build up the pot. It was usually the case that several spectators knew one of the bettors, and others just thought they would win; no one ever felt pressured to bet (unlike in Geertz 1973). It was up to our referee, sometimes aided by an assistant, to make sure that the overall sums matched, refusing or negotiating bet sizes from the supporting bettors or one of the two central players until they did. There would often be three or four people joining either side, but to make things simple I will say that only two spectators come forward immediately, myself for Joka and someone wagering K4 on the incumbent; he wanted to bet K5, but I was not willing to match that total for the other side, so the referee said he could only wager K4, while I bet K15. The bets were now balanced at K19:K19. Now that the wagers were equal, cards were dealt, and after anxiously revealing the cards to themselves and then the crowd, an incumbent was quickly ousted or the challenger was bested. At this point, our referee either gave out the winnings to all but the incumbent, whose money remained in the heap and joined their winnings from the previous rounds, or if there was a new incumbent their winnings became the new pile. The latter occurred when Joka won. The next in the queue then stepped up to chalinj. The referee took a small cut from the incumbent’s pot every three rounds; T50 if the bets were modest and K1 and upwards as they increased. If Joka and I lost, the incumbent would have remained in the centre with an extra K15 added to their hoard, and the spectator who bet on the incumbent would have doubled his K4 and took it from the pot. If instead Joka won, the incumbent was expelled and I doubled my K15. Note that the betting structure in chalinj allowed the incumbent to lose and be ejected without losing all their money – in this case, the incumbent left with K50. This prevented a zero-sum situation from applying to those on a roll and was crucial to the building of sizeable winnings. People talked of ‘working’ to make the bets bigger, and this was demonstrably and intriguingly the case. Those who did well from their time in the centre usually played again, while those who lost out often became agitated and played once more

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until a few were much better off and others empty-handed. In this sense also the game was a challenge for supremacy. The ousted incumbent would likely have headed straight to the back of the queue with his remaining K50, so his money soon fed the central heap again. Winners and losers ebbed and flowed, with winnings agglomerating into the hands of a few or eventually even one winner. The central heap of money visibly grew as the day went on, which we shall see was an important aspect of play. The tendency to build bets and the wish to do so was important, as it demonstrated a desire to cooperate and intensify monetary transfers. People really enjoyed seeing this happen, whether they were part of the winning side or not. They pushed money into a concentrated central point so that one person (hopefully them) could surmount it and direct this wealth at will. There was nothing in the structure of the game that guaranteed this and so the build-up was repeatedly curtailed by a winner’s departure, stuttering and then intensifying again, swelling and subsiding. Bets regularly rose above the 100 Kina mark (£25) on weekdays, and K600–800 (£150–200) games often broke out on payday afternoons. To build up the pot, the game was reliant on the nature of its market, its big-money flows and the short-termism prevalent there. Many of the players were betel nut sellers like Joka and more often wholesale traders, who had access to large amounts of money in short time frames. Traders could lose and then return with money only a few short minutes later. It may have taken street sellers like Joka much longer, and this was reflected in the small size of his wager. This style of gaming is quite distinctive, as it lacked the deflected responsibility that was enshrined in the games kwin and bom, and players went head to head often and for high stakes, which regularly led to anger and confrontation. So why were such games appropriate to the betel nut markets? Why the fast turnaround? Why this odd and unique betting structure? Why an emphasis on ‘challenge’ between two individuals, who were constantly replaced? Why this desire to cooperate in building up the pot? Why was building bets equated with ‘work’? And what does it reveal about how people thought about money in Goroka? In order to answer these questions, we need to understand more about the rhythms of money flows, and the best way to do this is to look at the pragmatics of marketing and its symbiotic relationship with cards. Street Marketing Pragmatics

While much has been made of the continuing existence and indeed ‘efflorescence’ (A. Strathern 1979a) of ‘ceremonial exchange’ since colonization and the introduction of money (cf. Gregory 1982), comparatively little attention has been given to selling things or ‘marketing’ (but see Benediktsson 1998,

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2002; Epstein 1982; Modjeska 1985; Sharp 2016), which as a subcategory of transaction has enjoyed a boom, in many ways outstripping its more famous economic sister. This is an example of the bias towards archetype and exotica in economic anthropology. To maket (‘market’) became a huge part of money-getting and self-sustenance activities in postcolonial Papua New Guinea. From my survey of Gorokan households, I found that 70 per cent habitually marketed; still more would market to take advantage of nearby social events or in anticipation of an upcoming marriage or school fee payment. Very few households derived their entire regular income from marketing; more often it supplemented wages, subsistence, rent collection, remittances or retirement funds. There was an average of one person in employment out of 6 residents per household,7 and 69 per cent of households relied on at least one subsistence garden. A household was as likely to be involved in marketing (70 per cent) as to count a wage earner among them (71 per cent of households).8 For street marketers buai (‘betel nut’) and smuk (‘tobacco products’) were the main comestibles sold (see also Marshall 2013). Those who sold other things like sweets, deep fried hand-food or fruit, deliberately sold them near a buaismuk table; if they were sold together, people said these other things only kalaim (lit. ‘colour’, decorate) the main trade in betel nut and tobacco. With 32 per cent of all households marketing betel nut alone, the casual observer would wonder how anyone could possibly make money. Still, people insisted that some earn huge amounts while others make a loss, even with tables next to each other selling ostensibly identical products. Success in this field relied on a well-defined and yet open-ended set of tactics. For instance, Joka often called out to people in the street and offered them a free betel nut, either as a way of initiating a new patron-client relationship or to further convince a known customer of his good nature. Joka asked customers about some aspect of their life, their day, the weather and often initiated running jokes between them. Another friend and supplier to my betel nut habit, Charlie, explained his method: Charlie: My way of marketing is this … I sing out to you, give you betel nut, I want to be your friend. I am not bothered about money, I know that money will still come, so when I give to you, it has a blessing from it which will come to me. I do not have food to give so I give another food … I am a giving man, and I try to get many customers by this. Before I was only one person doing sales here, now many tables have surrounded me and coins go every which way and I need to get customers, so I give some away without thinking, and later it is up to them, they want to buy from me, or they want to buy from another, your save [lit. ‘savvy’, knowledge/understanding] is your own. So the important thing is to make friends with you, if

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you come along with your mouth dry [a sign that you want to chew betel nut] others won’t know your needs but I know them, and I will give to you. AP: Many people do likewise, so do you have your own way? Charlie: I am a man who is very good at skelim [lit. ‘scale’ as a transitive verb, measuring/deciphering] people. I look and I see people, and I can see if someone needs betel nut or cigarettes; if they are desperate for it, I will shout out to them and give them it then … My brain is open, I can skelim you, and so I can give you something through the right channel … If you walk past and you have not chewed betel nut, your face will look different, it will show that you are hungry for betel nut … I will see that your face looks hungry. People are often surprised and ask me ‘how do you know my needs?’ I just say ‘I know that’s all’, and I give to them. I do not tell them I worked it out, I just say I am supporting them and I give to them. … I do not tell them because I do not want to, this knowledge stays with me. I do not want to let this thinking of mine get out to customers. Charlie, like Joka, understood his marketing technique as a process of prenim (‘befriending’); he was particularly well suited for this because he was a reader of people. Just as in gambling, Charlie put his success down to his open mind – that ability to look at the big picture and notice the pattern of people from chapter two. Still, he did not want them to know that he was thinking of a return, as this would have made his ‘free’ betel nut transfer seem an explicitly self-interested transaction, which translates into the anthropological terminology of gift vs. commodity as too commodity-like. Neither did he want others to know he was reading them, which implied that he was interfering with their sovereign thoughts. It was not so much that marketing was a way of getting money but rather a way of making friendly relations through the transfer of valuable and desirable objects without impinging on their sovereignty (Healey 1990). Profiting was crucial, not only to survive but because friendship was manifested in reciprocalized transfers, so Charlie had to turn a profit to be a friend through generosity. Marketers were well aware that their income fluctuated wildly as a result of ‘free’ betel nut giveaways, spoilt betel nuts and their customers’ varying incomes and inclinations. Good marketers were able to ride the flows of transfers. My observations of marketing and gambling resonate with J. Robbins and Akin’s understanding that ‘Melanesian anxieties about money are grounded in the important role that controlling the flows of objects has traditionally had in the societies of the region’ (1999: 7). In marketing, like gambling, the control and redirection of flows of money allowed people to generate short-term

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relations and exert status differences. Some focused on exploiting this system for monetary gain and others concentrated on the relations, so marketing brought forth what were seen as positive or negative personality traits that map onto commodity vs. gift distinctions. Marketing, like gambling, was not simply an elaborate ruse for money: the emphasis was on flows or as Charlie put it ‘channels’ of reciprocity that must be proactively generated. For career marketers, the goal was a mixture of personal or familial regard, long-term profitability and immediate material needs (cf. Gell 1992: 160). Payoffs went beyond loyal customers and high sales; some were given money, alcohol and/or a contribution when they had a wedding or death among relatives. In this sense, marketing was differentiated from working. Employment was conceptualized as ideally a more or less standalone economic activity divorced from community relations, despite people knowing that kin and language mates tended to favour each other at work. Wage-work was obviously accompanied by a wage, and work-related duties were explicitly differentiated from outside duties (cf. Sillitoe 2010: 352). Employment, in as much as it was not controlled by the employee, fell within the sphere of production, while street sales were in the sphere of social reproduction.9 In these ways, Gorokans seemed a bit like Marxists. Instead of thinking of a profit ratio per betel nut or trip to the wholesalers, and therefore marketing as a version of work, marketers subsumed their selling into the whole of their lives, which was to say a world of mutual and reciprocal transfers. They sat and traded, using their networks to derive money, and so they were thought by some to be lazy or at least not working (cf. Sykes 1999). It is instructive to know that tending one’s garden was also work, as both employment and gardening were antecedent to transfers (and concomitantly people were not allowed to collect produce from others’ gardens without asking) while marketing was not. Work was also separated from bisnis (‘business’), where a person was seen as in control of operations and therefore able to channel wealth as they wished, so bisnis was closer to, but higher prestige than, marketing. If, in marketing, one’s labour was used to reproduce social relations, then making money was a necessity for sociality, while in employment, labour was expended for money that was later used for social relations. Employment was thus seen as a precursor to social activity. Gang mates called stealing their ‘work’, which makes sense because afterwards the money was distributed between themselves and with others. It is also worth reminding the reader that building a pot in chalinj was work, and as I shall later discuss, gambling itself was categorically not (cf. Sykes 1999; Sexton 1982). The work/ not-work opposition plays out in production/prestation, gardening/marketing, employment/business, pot-building/gambling. A sharp distinction was thus made between two economic activities that one might normally equate. In activities characterized as ‘work’, the social

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was not allowed into the transaction, while in marketing, business and other ‘non-work’ activities the social was an essential component of each transaction. Gorokan residents resisted the notion that all money-oriented activities distanced people from each other and should be classed as work, complexifying the adage discussed in the previous chapter that money makes people distant and abstracted. There was an important confluence within the sphere of not-work: card gambling and marketing used the same form of attraction. Marketing and Card Gambling: Kindred Modes of Attraction

The symbiosis of markets and gambling was immediately apparent on the streets each day. Where it was safe for card gambling (i.e. away from the eyes of police, under houses or on the street corners of settlements), a market table was almost always beside a game. ‘Career’ marketers said that when people played cards they got excited, they shook, their thoughts were elsewhere and so they wanted to chew and smoke more often. Furthermore, both betel nut chewing (cf. Mosko 1985) and smoking (cf. Reed 2007) were said to make the skin hot and the mind think clearly. One’s concentration and skill at card playing was increased. Money also made people both hot (cf. Mosko 1999) and efficacious (cf. Hirsch 1994: 698), and so the communion of gambling with the market table nearby created an intense and agreeable space of exertion. Eighty-seven percent of betel nut marketing households also gambled locally, and often the marketer would be playing themselves. In fact, just under half of all local gamblers came from the 32 per cent of households who marketed betel nut, so marketers and their co-residents were the paradigmatic gamblers. Marketers habitually combined the playing of the game with gestures of generosity, transferring betel nut and cigarettes to losing players from their own table. They said that this was important in order to make those who lost bel ese (lit. ‘stomach calm’, i.e. at ease) and described their presence in terms of a service to players. A marketer who was losing sometimes dug into their market takings to win their money back. However, people usually preferred to acknowledge the separation of marketing money from card money and would give a marketer a ‘look’, a free game, when they ran out of their playing money, leaving their takings intact. Chapter two revealed the kona (lit. ‘corner’) as an important concept for cards and the name given to a player within a game. The kona is also used to refer to the meeting of roads, as in a street corner. Street corners were vital intersections; many people spent a large part of their days on street corners, particularly so marketers. Street corners could even define a town: a fo kona taun (lit. ‘four corner town’) was a common idiom belittling smaller urban centres, implying they had few meeting places. On almost every one of the

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many corners in Goroka, marketers sat behind mats or small purposely constructed wooden tables all day long, selling their wares and interrupting flows of people and deriving benefit from them. They were the model of a kona man (‘corner man’) and were known as skilful at cards because they knew the craft of being a corner better than anyone. Card gamblers followed their example when they aimed to be a kona man, a person able to deduce the cards another person requires, to withhold them, deny the win and earn themselves a greater likelihood of success. Card gambling and marketing were also responsive to the same forms of magic. Andi, an elderly man, sold magic a stone’s throw away from Kakaruk Maket. One day, as we were talking, he sifted through the paraphernalia used to attract young girls, heal broken bones and the like and dug out a pair of artefacts for cards and marketing (a bright red seed unknown to me and a piece of bark from an undisclosed tree). When I asked why both were affected by the same magic, he explained with the story of how he found the magical substance: You find a tree in which birds who are normally only seen alone gather in, the tree in which it perches, the power of this tree will be nice. Many of this bird who are normally scattered will flock here and eat and eat and eat. Get something from this tree, some bark or a leaf or whatever. You need to rub it then put it in the sun to dry. Then you rub it on your skin and keep it by your skin and try playing cards or try marketing … Here we see that marketing and card playing could be influenced by a tree that was attractive in itself, bringing solitary birds together to feast. Andi continued: If you see this bird then you know that they [cards or people or money] will like you, and you will win. The tree has the power to kisim [‘acquire’] generally, not just to kisim this bird. So whatever you want to kisim, it can kisim it for you. They work with market and cards because these are both things for kisim. They are the same kind of thing … Seeing the bird somewhere nearby suggested that the piece of the tree you were holding was working, and its attractiveness could be used in any activity in which the goal was acquisition. Andi explained how it worked: The flower of this tree makes these birds from all over come to it. As a person if you hold this, then cards and people and money will like you. With marketing you will sit down and all the people will like you and then they will buy things from you quickly. With cards too,

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your blood will be clean. You lick your finger, and then rub the thing between your thumb and index finger, and it will go inside your finger and move the dirty blood and pull in clean blood. Once the clean blood is there, these things will like you. This thing is power. The tree is a pull-power man, it has kisim already. Your face will then light up, and all people will like you because your blood is clean. And so with marketing all the people will continue to come. It is good for cards, as your blood travels in your arm in many ways and then it meets in your fingers. … This cleans your blood, and makes it light up. Held close to the body or in one’s wallet, the object would make your skin glisten, face become bright, and clean the blood in your fingers, so people, cards and money would be attracted to you. Note that money was not separated as an ultimate end; it was just one of those things enticed by a person’s inflated power of attraction. Just as Charlie asserted, neither people nor magic geared themselves towards money and profit in individual transfers, preferring a more comprehensive attraction rewarded over time by the to and fro. It was not a matter of desiring either the object or the relationship but being attractive to all you desire. Andi demonstrates the indistinguishability of marketing and cards as methods of acquisition that share ‘a uniform scheme of practical logic’ (Mosko 1999: 43). Unsurprisingly, then, terms that were used in gambling reflected those of marketing and vice versa. Just as the kona informed people’s conceptions of players within a card game, to maket (‘market’) was applied to the offering of cards to another in the course of gambling. Marketing a card was to offer what one had for others to use as they could. It was also to project future dispensation towards oneself. Now that card gambling and marketing are revealed as alike in the eyes of Gorokans, I divert the reader’s attention to the produce markets, where marketing took an intermediate form between street marketing and wholesale betel nut marketing. Here the giving of freebies was curtailed by a competitive atmosphere, but one in which product differences were visible, unlike in wholesale betel nut markets. I thereby hope to flesh out marketing as ‘not work’ but diachronic elicitation. I can then take this understanding to the uniquely Gorokan betel nut markets, where they again metamorphosed, creating space for chalinj. Produce Markets in Passing

At the game I caught Joka (the street seller and chalinj competitor with the distinctive jester’s hat) just as he bit into a ripe tomato. He had bought a

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couple from the Main Market as a snack. When Joka purchased them, he encountered a different style of marketing to his own. Fresh produce markets in Papua New Guinea have been the topic of some explanatory modelling (see Modjeska 1985; M. Strathern 1992), and my findings will be familiar to those versed in the debates, but the maket pragmatics of produce markets still require some exegesis as background to their illegal cousins. As against Joka and his fellow street marketers, who were confronted with obligations to transfer ‘free’ comestibles, sellers remained quietly by their produce. Vendors never bargained with buyers over price, and competition among sellers appeared absent. Prices were remarkably uniform and inflexible. Instead of weighing what the buyer chose to purchase and then fixing a price, as is standard in the UK, sellers divided their produce into units containing anything from a single discrete fruit or vegetable, a pair or few together, or a pile or bundle of a given foodstuff, always of a single species (see Epstein 1982; Mackenzie 1991: 129; Modjeska 1985). Street betel nut marketers in Goroka on the other hand sold single betel nuts for a single price. Produce marketers’ assemblages were made to conform to a single price: ten Toea, or sixty Toea, for instance, and marked with this price. This is rather like when market stalls in the UK offer the contents of a standard-size bowl of fruit for a pound. Prices were uniform throughout Goroka’s Main Market, so Joka could not have hunted for a good price. Rather than concentrating on the ratio of quantity for quantity, sellers foregrounded the quality per unit offered at a standardized price, and this was what Joka would have had his eyes open for. In markets all over the world, different tropic points (like a denomination of money, a weight, a bowl or a string of cowries) mediate customer and buyer. In Yorubaland the selling of toasted cassava flour called ‘gari’ was metered out using a malleable vessel called the ‘kongo cup’ (Guyer 2004: 61). The ‘kongo cup’ took the place of negotiations over wholesale and retail price, which is kept constant across sellers. Depending on the number of cups customers wish to purchase, the amount of cassava received for a fixed price was increased or diminished by either supporting the ‘kongo cup’ and thereby maximizing its volume or allowing it to sag to varying extents (Wan 2001: 231; see also Ezedinma et al. 2007: 27–28). Different kinds of trader were recognized by the way they held the cup: the large volume traders made more through high turnover than through high profit margin and thus tended to support the cup. The inter-regional trader, the local wholesaler and the local retailer (and volumes that each trader traded in) revealed themselves in how far they splayed their fingers. Margins created in this way and through analogous methods varied across and between different communities, conforming to a long history of regional commerce, fluctuating exchange rates and artisanal counting (e.g. Mann 1887 [cited in Guyer 2004: 56]).

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In Goroka, comparative advantage was gained by sellers discerning the usual rate for tomatoes and arranging their tomato assemblages in such a way as to give the smallest or worst quality assemblage of tomatoes for the eighty Toea (perhaps) they asked for. Unsurprisingly, then, a juicy, ripe, unbroken tomato was often paired with an unripe, overripe, bruised or split tomato under a single price. Joka therefore appraised the overall value of the tomatoes together for the given price, something he did not demand from his customers. Once assemblages were fixed, Joka could not negotiate but only buy or pass by. The sellers together set the terms of trade while the buyer gauged the value of a particular vendor’s tomato combinations. Guyer’s characterization of Yoruba trade practices extend also to Gorokan produce markets; ‘[c]alculations that would break down conventional units’, she says, ‘were avoided in favour of the key procedures of establishing equivalence, marginal gains, and conceptual correspondence by manipulation of threshold numerical concepts’ (2004: 57). T.S. Epstein’s 1967–69 observations of Goroka’s Main Market still hold true today: ‘almost all of these vendors give the impression as if they were completely lethargic and could not care less whether or not they made a sale’ (Epstein 1982: 188). Sellers would also rather take their produce home or throw it away than reduce their prices at the end of the day. This is not to say that sellers held a superior status to buyers (contra Modjeska 1985: 158); instead, marketers stressed the agency of customers like Joka to buy or not buy from them or anyone else. Sellers sometimes gave an extra small item to the buyer on top of what they had bought after its purchase, such as a pair of carrots to go with Joka’s tomatoes, imparting a sense of generosity and relationship craft, and this continued particularly when one repeat-bought from a specific seller; Joka knew this well as a marketer himself. But sellers avoided street betel nut marketers’ tactic of giving things for no immediate return and seemed far less interested in giving people a deal. Other sellers would always badger customers like Joka and myself about the fact that we bought from another person all the time, trying to elicit a sense of obligation towards them. Past, current and future relations were always breaking through the veneer of uniform commodity transactions of produce for money. This was because while prices were fixed, customers were always under pressure to oblige the people who created the units of produce and who did their best to make those units seem like they advantaged the buyer. Just so, Yoruba gari traders likewise offered a bonus at the end of the transaction, called the ‘dash’ (Guyer 2004: 59). Unlike betel nut street sellers, who could be male or female, women made up the majority of vendors in Gorokan produce markets; they were the primary cultivators of marketable produce like tomatoes, various spinaches, sweet potatoes and fresh fruit. Since the successful introduction of coffee and its higher returns, initial male interest in fresh produce marketing dwindled

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(Benediktsson 1998: 164; Jackson 1976: 180). At such a crowded location, marketers and especially female marketers feared conflicting relationships with each other; therefore, a coordinated price strategy was seen as required for sellers in order to allay allegations of unsociability and fix a minimum level of monetary payment. So, in taking their produce to a big open market and by selling their products in a relatively anonymous setting, sellers both recognized the power of obligations to known customers and attempted to avoid being held hostage to them. Yoruba, according to Belasco, view the market not as a means of equilibrium but as possessing a natural tendency toward disequilibrium (1980: 26; see also Adebayo 1999). Their pegging of money to asymmetrical measuring institutions mitigated that uncertainty in the institution of transactions (Guyer 2004: 59), while bonuses allowed both Yoruba and Gorokans to go beyond their collectively contrived equilibrium. Safely conceived to be submitting to the general will of others to fix a fair price, sellers could not be blamed for giving ‘freebies’ to customers like Joka. Within this veneer of standardization they could then generate esteem through the quality, size and number of products offered within a given price band and direct them to particular persons through generous transfer acts. So we must, I think, understand the price-per-unit strategy in terms of the pressure exerted by the collective of sellers on individual sellers rather than as one that was oriented to swindling potential buyers. At one Yoruba market called Ibadan, the traders were also predominantly female. Gari sellers clustered in the same part of the market and displayed in the same manner, beautifying their gari into perfect cones and sieving out rough fibres, which were then hidden behind the cone, with an emphasis on abundance. As in Goroka, inexperienced shoppers found it impossible to determine where the best buy was. There were nevertheless three types of traders: 1) traders who process cassava into gari and bring it to urban markets to resell; 2) traders who purchase gari in producing towns and villages and bring it to urban markets to resell; and 3) traders who purchase gari in urban markets from others to retail. New customers in both Goroka and Yorubaland would be forgiven for mistaking elaborate trading strategies for a provincial naivety of ‘market principles’. A ‘barter model of value’, Marilyn Strathern says (1992), assumes an a priori ‘unitness’ to objects of trade and thus substitutable and comparable relations between sellers and buyers. In her counter-formulation, people are of course composite collections of other peoples’ actions, so in order to act they must be elicited into giving (I would say transferring) a part of themselves by a social other and thereby come to define their own being as singular along with the item. I see this evidenced in the bundling of produce with a unit price. Like a hand of cards, the collection was offered as a unit (say K1) but was always rearrangeable into different units by making different

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combinations. Importantly though, this was not done in consultation with the potential buyer but prior to or between interactions with them, and it was always hidden or downplayed.10 This stance on the side of sellers seems widespread: Epstein’s Tolai (East New Britain) researcher ToKalaman even came to blows with a Chinese buyer who repeatedly attempted to bargain with different sellers at Rabaul market (1982: 200). I see the Chinese buyer as violating the sovereign power of people to set forth the valuation they desire, which led ToKalaman into an empathetic rage. Epstein then found that the whole research team were incensed by the idea of bargaining or haggling, each contributing to the fine that was given to ToKalaman in solidarity. It was the right of any sovereign being, whether playing cards or marketing, to be master of their own configuration and then to offer that configuration for comparison. Like the Chinese traders in Goroka market, the British attempted to introduce measurement of cowries by volume to the Yoruba-speaking part of West Africa in 1841 as an attempt to rationalize the market according to their principles, but their new system was wholly rejected as antithetical to accepted marketing pragmatics that relied upon a flexible system of measurement that institutionalized variations in value through the number of cowries contained on a string (M. Johnson 1970). The unitization of collections of tomatoes was offered to Joka as an evaluation of the overall value of mass along with quality. Two tomatoes were only a potential unit until it was realized by Joka, who elicited its unitization, otherwise the objects would have shifted into other arrangements for a given unit price and remained composite possible combinations. As such, they may have returned to the seller’s house at the end of the day as a composite part of household production and been consumed within the household rather than suffering the indignity of having had the agency of one’s own attempts to enumerate a valuation interfered with. Strathern’s theory also allows for the gifting of ‘freebies’ by sellers, as an extra incentive to overvalue their produce units in the future and to ensnare them into relations of obligation rather than as separated pre-unitized transactors who are ‘quits’. This analysis conflicts with assumptions about the development of market economies, where comparable and substitutable relations are supposedly set up through money. This is because Joka was not simply comparing products but unitizations, and sellers tried to influence Joka’s perceptions of them and their unitizations by showing generosity. In the process, the flows of exchangeables that Charlie was so erudite about took on particular values at the moment when a transaction was achieved. Buying things with money was an act of confirming and accepting unitizations, creating value for the money and leaving a residual value in the obligations of that buyer-seller relationship. In combination with an analysis of bets, we know already that the value of the money was as much in play as the tomatoes.

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Buyer-seller oppositions were fragile and constantly in danger of collapse: for example, if Joka happened to be the neighbour of the tomato vendor, Joka would have appealed to the obligations of neighbourliness and thereby undermined the ‘customer’ relation that the marketers collectively worked hard to achieve, in which the seller would have appeared generous for giving Joka free things. As a marketer himself, Joka would have been well aware that appealing too much to these obligations could hurt his sales later as they in turn called upon their neighbourliness for free betel nut, so everyone trod a fine line. Without the goodwill that came when a transaction was explicitly seen to favour one party because of a perceptible imbalance between the two transfers, other transactions lacked value. There is thus a sense in which even seemingly one-off exchanges projected obligations into the past and future as they created value, and as we shall see later, truly individual transactions were only really apparent in the betel nut markets, leading to a completely different set of marketing tactics and, in turn, the challenge game. Kakaruk and Chuave Markets

Betel nut, the deep red energizer and animator of street life, was a trade in which one could potentially make a lot of money, and hence the central locations of betel nut trade in town were places where money was said to ‘flow’ most strongly. Thus far in the book, I have focused on the manipulation of flows of people, money and cards to elicit value; yet flow involves a temporal element I have barely touched upon. For street marketers, local card gamblers and produce marketers, there was a familiar, leisurely rhythm and flow such that Charlie and Joka could feel sure of their generosity being repaid in good time. In places of concentrated marketing, the speed of flow steps up several notches. The intensity of the betel nut markets often invoked highly energetic descriptions of flowing money and the need for even more acute opportunism and vigilance. The money in Kakaruk Maket moved so fast that after the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001 – when most Gorokans became aware of the Twin Towers – Kakaruk was bestowed with the tongue-in-cheek name ‘The New World Trade Centre’. Betel nut markets are quite a sight. Traders – who had made the hazardous journey down the Okuk Highway to the coast and then scoured the villages of the lowlands for their prize – arrived in convoys of buses and headed straight to the markets while their bounty remained fresh. Jubilant returnees often drank and gambled copiously as the money flowed into their pockets throughout the next few days. Others came to the markets to sell or buy the traders’ betel nut, to drink, to gamble, or just to be part of the excitement. Places that were home to radically accelerated flows of wealth were exciting,

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dangerous and morally ambivalent places that in turn influenced their occupants. The market was more than just a centre of trade in betel nut; it was a powerful imaginary space that stood for money-making but also corruption, the illicit, the immoral and bad thinking. As if to pierce this narcotic haze, the most flamboyant selling tactics of all occurred in Kakaruk and Chuave markets, and the sellers considered themselves the very best. In an inversion of the regular street practice of downplaying their success in order to demonstrate their generosity, most of the sellers in the markets sat above their mats with a huge pile of money between their legs, either neatly arranged or impressively disorganized. Within a crowded marketplace, where Joka and the others went specifically to get a good price and good quality betel nut, the money indexed the quality of the betel nut they had to offer. Money evidenced the quantity of past purchases while the betel nut continued to flow out of their bag and onto the mat, itself leaving no visible sign of success. It was the money that verified the value of betel nuts. Unlike produce, betel nuts were not assembled into bundles in Kakaruk or Chuave. They were arranged in a pile like a Yoruba gari cone, designed to demonstrate the attractiveness of the betel nut in its abundance. Two years or so of judging betel nuts has taught me only that it is not easy to judge quality, so money is used to perform this function. Each great pile was marked with

Figure 4.1 A betel nut seller displays his takings and the betel nuts on offer. Photograph by the author.

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a price, usually K1 or K2, but you did not get the whole pile for this amount. The thin veneer of a standard charge was exposed as sellers shouted out how many more they would offer you for the price, which immediately struck me as very different to produce marketers. A potential customer perhaps tried the product, gained a rapport and a fee for a number of betel nuts from a given pile for a given price was then offered by the seller. The buyer was then able to pick their own from the pile. This arrangement allowed for sellers to compete amongst themselves, offering ever higher numbers of betel nut while keeping the price fixed. The showiness of the traders was quite a distinguishing feature. Other kinds of marketers were usually at pains to hide their money, to emphasize their lack of it and their generosity in spite of their poverty. Wholesale betel nut marketers’ willingness to show off came along with the wide scope of their trade. Many village and street corner marketers of betel nut from the surrounding province travelled long distances to obtain this valuable trade item. As such, there was more uncertainty about seeing customers regularly. In a parallel inversion of the practices in the produce markets, sellers therefore called out to people and gave them free betel nut before they bought. They were forced to show friendship even when they fully expected not to see the person again. The betel nut markets, as places of accelerated monetary flow, highly undifferentiated products and customers of disparate origins, required a one-off transaction-based strategy, and it was the presence of money piles that indexed this to customers while exaggerated generosity ensnared strangers to future transactions. In so doing, vendors quickly cultivated a relationship where customers could see value created in sellers’ unitizations (see Table 4.1 for a full breakdown of differences between the three forms of marketing). For repeat customers like Joka and Charlie, relationships played a serious role in the trade. Joka explained to me how he had many acquaintances in the market who gave him a good deal, but equally even if they did not have good betel nut he still had to avoid ill feeling by buying some. He would receive extra betel nut after the purchase as a bonus, called a ‘discount’ (see also Sharp 2016: 83–85). Betel nut sellers in the markets were good salespeople precisely because of this ability to manipulate people; they were the ultimate speculators on the intentions of others and the generators of instantaneous value. One might be tempted to consider wholesale betel nut marketers more individualistic and their rapport as less genuine; after all, they were not oriented towards repeat transactions with the bulk of their customers. J. Robbins and Akin, for instance, impress the need to contextualize the perhaps universal process whereby money gives rise to individualism in terms that are particularly Melanesian. … [M]oney creates

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Melanesian forms of individualism by bolstering already existing kinds of individualist power at the expense of other, more socially constructive kinds of agency. Individualist forms of agency are not entirely novel, then, but money strengthens them and allows them a wider sphere of influence. (1999: 31) While individualism would be a clumsy explanation for the calculating and flamboyant acts of betel nut market sellers, perhaps an emphasis on individual transactions in Goroka has some analytical potential as a contrast. Concentrating on individual transactions certainly allowed for a level of freedom and boisterousness in people’s interactions with each other in this setting. Chalinj Revisited

Having set up a range of marketing/card playing pragmatics based on principles of flow, attraction and generosity, and varying due to likelihood of repeat exchange, I now try to demonstrate that an extreme manifestation is found in chalinj games through a discussion of four of the game’s attributes. Readers Table 4.1 Breakdown of marketing practices across the three forms discussed. Practices

Street betel nut sellers

Produce marketers

Betel nut wholesale vendors

Freebies?

On-going

After buying

Before buying

Displaying wealth?

No

No

Yes

Pre-unitized goods?

Yes

Yes

No

Units sold

One betel nut per unit

Set bundles per unit

Variable bundles per unit

Frequency of transactions with known customers

Frequent

Less frequent

Infrequent

Attitude to customers

Friendly

Disinterested

Aggressively friendly

Nearby competitors?

Few

Many

Lots

Differentiated products?

No

Yes

No

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will recall that a chalinj game was very fast and involved queuing up money to bet one-on-one with an incumbent while bystanders joined in to make the pot even. Because incumbents did not usually lose all their money, they returned to the game with what remained, and the pot built up over time as money was concentrated into a few hands. The first aspect to consider in the light of maket pragmatics is that the pot was deliberately built up. For this to happen, the game had to rely upon the nature of its market, its big-money flows and the short-termism prevalent there. Many of the players were betel nut sellers and traders, who had access to large amounts of money in short time frames. Building bets and the desire to do so indexed a willingness to cooperate and intensify monetary contributions. This was considered work, while the game itself was not. Building the pot could be conceptualized as ‘work’, as it involved effort and yet was antecedent to winning and losing (see also Sexton 1987: 41–42). The ability to leave with your winnings and not feel pressured to distribute to others was central: it turned making the bets rise into an exertion and thus ‘work’ as opposed to an inevitable consequence of people’s desire to win money back. Second, while the pots built up, both wholesale betel nut marketing and chalinj games placed an emphasis on individual transactions. People liked chalinj for this reason, citing the ability to slip into the crowd as a reason for hosting the game in the market. Chalinj contrasted with continual attritional gameplay and mutual support that was seen in street marketing or multiplayer gambling games outside the betel nut markets, which were not work (cf. Maclean 1984). Flamboyant and intense but above all short-termist marketing was matched by concentrated short-termist gambling. Anticipating this short-termism, a big pile of money sat in the centre, enticing and beguiling. Just as the piles of money at betel nut sellers’ feet indexed the fecundity of their produce and sales, generating value by demonstrating their reliability, so did the pile of money for the game. The money in the centre at a chalinj game indexed the value created by people’s work in concentrating money. Though nobody said so explicitly, one could thereby understand a challenge game as replicating the marketer-customer relation in speeded up form: the incumbent was the marketer with all the money, the challenger was the customer who by a turn of fate could then be the one in the chair with all the money, using it to attract customers just as they were once attracted. The game remained constant while people could interact with it with short-term transactions. It aped the betel nut market’s version of market pragmatism. The only difference was that the money pile could have been yours; its destination as a transfer was not predetermined. It was the ultimate iteration of the ideology of possibility and vigilance embodied in markets. Third, chalinj placed numerous partners in play against each other in succession – one remaining and the other discarded. This is very much like

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the act of wholesale betel nut marketing in its relentless pace of individual transactions, where the only moment to best an opponent was the immediate one. Speed was the variable that changed from the street to the betel nut market and corresponded to the increasing anonymity of transactions and the impulse to replicate a sense of continuation. It is appropriate that a place where the lack of obligations towards social others allowed for the social acceptability of a game that was so utterly, antagonistically, one-on-one. Only where one did not know their neighbour, and where money moved so fast anyway that one lost attachment to it, could such a provocative game be sufficiently defused. Fourth and finally, there was the facility to join in the betting of other people, to make collaborative wagers. I suggest that this activity represented the latent collaborative element of everyday marketing and life in Goroka. Supporting another person through mutual betting was a version of the transactional empathy formed by imbalanced transfers and which was the baseline upon which challenge games elaborated. It allowed challenge games to be antagonistic because there were enough players supporting each side to prevent conflict. Through the four aspects I have just discussed, it is thus possible to understand this game as both contiguous with the pragmatics of marketing and card playing throughout Goroka and a dense knot of pragmatics in a central place. The attainment of money and its persistent and constant use did not remove the empathy from social life in favour of cold-hearted calculation. Instead, the empathetic or emotional was forefronted and specialized in the figure of the marketer, whose ability to adjudge persons and their ability to reciprocate was done through the medium of money and the chalinj gambler who fed off marketing as an activity. So while the urban betel nut markets of Goroka were for many the ultimate source of money – where money overflowed – it failed to have total control over people and in fact performed another, Papua New Guinean elaboration. Instead of betel nut markets becoming impersonal places of capitalist commodification, they instead became centres of radical social engagement of the generally attractive kind. Nigerian markets likewise knot around a male-dominated hyper-fast gambling game called ‘igba-ita’ that is exclusive to the market setting. The example I found is from among the Igbo, rather than from Yorubaland, but the existence of such gambling games is believed to have been widespread. I consulted Yoruba experts, who find their presence plausible though they could not categorically confirm it.11 The game was set apart from the everyday gambling game ‘okwe’, known internationally as mancala and described briefly in chapter two (sometimes described as the ‘African chess’, which gives a sense of its cerebral character). Igba-ita was called ‘one of the fastest ways of winning and losing money ever devised by man’ by Anglican missionary

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G.T. Basden (1966: 352). The game was a version of pitch and toss that hinged on which way up twelve (sometimes four) cowrie shells land. Players formed a circle of between two and a dozen bettors, each with a heap of cowries as a bank. One player then ‘challenged’ others to bet against him by speculating on his throw, with set rules for which results won and which lost. Up to three players could conspire to match the challenger’s pot. After the ‘challenger’ had lost their bank, they passed on to the player to their right, who had the privilege of challenging next. If instead the challenger was winning and wanted to leave, they sought the consent of the other players. As some men retired, others took their place. The play happened like lightning, kicking up a literal dust cloud. The dynamics of igba-ita are tellingly similar to chalinj, most notably in the centrality of a single ‘challenger’. The correlation between individual transactions of commodities in the market setting and the elevation of an antagonistic (and primarily male) form of game is also strikingly similar. It would not be going too far to suggest that both cases represent local spatial segregations of variants on transactive pragmatics. The basis of this segmentation appears to be the expectation of repeated interaction with customers and competitors, and given the similarly configured use of tropic points during accounting practices, the kinds of transactions that arise appear correlated. Conclusion

This chapter took the well-trodden path from the street corner to the betel nut markets, passing by the produce markets on the way. I left the firm knowledge of the settlements and streets, mingled with strangers and encountered one-off trades. I tried to demonstrate that a certain perpetuity persists across this transect while making room for obvious differences. Gorokan market pragmatics take numerous forms in my discussion. Money and town life stimulated a central place of short-termist concerns that took a peculiarly local character. While transactions may have multiplied in town, thoughts of money were intimately connected to its sources and prospective uses. Work as the prerequisite for social efficacy (be it gardening, employment or building a pot) was opposed to the ‘career’ transacting of marketers, gamblers and those involved in business. Therefore, the attainment of money and its persistent and constant use did not remove the social from social life in favour of calculation. Instead, the social was forefronted and specialized in the figure of the marketer; their ability to adjudge persons and their capacities to reciprocate through the marketing medium created value in the process of eliciting intersubjectivity with customers. I defined value as a single scale of measurement where people rank items in terms of their

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effectiveness as against other items and argued that value can be increased if the perceived effectiveness of the item is also increased by carrying with it a sense of obligation. Simmel wrote that ‘[w]e are rarely aware of the fact that our whole life, from the point of view of consciousness, consists in experiencing and judging values, and that it acquires meaning and significance only from the fact that the mechanically unfolding elements of reality possess an infinite variety of values beyond their objective substance’ (1990 [1907]: 60). I argue that Gorokans were very aware of the enumerative quality of transactions, and this awareness allowed them to affect items’ values by treating transactions as opportunities to unbalance transfers. In Goroka, monetary value was considered relative to the situation of each individual transaction, including the assumed valuation of others and their goals and responsibilities. I know that the market is imperfect, but in the way I interact with those I buy from and (on the odd occasion) sell to in the UK, we both act as if it were not. What was happening in Goroka was imperfection assumed rather than a general contrivance of broad applicability with limited distortions.12 A Gorokan market was fleshed out with all the other agencies of persons and things: magic, attractiveness, kinship, jealousy, purity of thought, singularity of intention, projection of the future. Price and quantity were a part of this, where motivations to maximize these aspects above others constantly shifted from transfer to transfer, transaction to transaction, dependent upon perspective and priorities. Through the course of exploring what a place which does not try to hide the manipulation of value looks like, I hope to make the reader think back, as I do, to the many situations in which similar ways of seeing transactions occur in more familiar surrounds and to think about how our economies could be conceived differently if we assumed imperfection. From here on in, we leave card gambling for the more expensive and more collective forms that gambling took. I build on the attribute of speed by examining just how the value of money was driven up or down through the efforts of powerful individuals and collectives and through various gambling media. Notes  1. The betel trade began after World War II when Mekeo people of Central Province started supplying betel to Port Moresby; in the 1980s Highlanders began to take over the retail trade within the city (see Hirsch 1990; Mosko 1999).  2. All statistics used in this chapter, unless otherwise stated, were collected by my field assistant Loui Ipatu in 2009–2010 via a series of surveys.  3. Pasin is here translated as ‘passion’, but it also encompasses the terms habit and behaviour. In this circumstance, passion seems the most accurate translation.

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 4. Bear in mind that Geertz did not problematize the money changing hands around his cockfight, itself a non-indigenous exchange form, and thus I hope by example to demonstrate the scope of ‘interpretation’ left open by Geertz’ omission.  5. Gorokans said that in villages people still played laki because money held no value there. A form of laki persists in other rural settings in Papua New Guinea (see Mosko 2012, 2014).  6. Despite further shades of Clifford Geertz, this is actually the only reference to cockfighting that anybody in Goroka made during my fieldwork. I never heard of a cockfight actually occurring.  7. This figure was taken from a reduced sample of 412 households; two of the sample groups (security guard company employees and National Sports Institute employees) were removed because their selection was based on their employment, which would have biased the results.  8. The employment figure was also taken from the reduced sample. Many of those working at the security company and the National Sports Institute live in accommodation supplied by the employer, but as this does not affect marketing participation, the former figure is taken from the full sample of 563 households.  9. For other definitions of work in Melanesia, see Sykes (1999). 10. See Holbraad (2005) for a comparable encoding of relations within a price in Cuba. 11. These were email exchanges with Professor Karin Barber and Professor Toyin Falola. 12. For a related attempt to build an analysis of economies based on different principles, see Guyer (2004: 40, 83–84, 110–13); for an analysis of the role of social actors in bringing principles to bear on markets through performance, see Callon (2010); MacKenzie, Muniesa and Siu (2007).



 5 The Big-Shots at Old Slots

‘Call for NA H’lands MPs to Be Intact’, by Mal Taime NATIONAL Alliance supporters in the Highlands region have called on the National Alliance Members of Parliament from Highlands to be intact. They made the call following the proposed cabinet reshuffle announced by Prime Minister Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare early this week. The reshuffle may take place when Sir Michael is ready and likely to announce the changes. Speaking on their behalf prominent leader [BLANK] said in Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province yesterday. —Newspaper clipping, Papua New Guinea Post-Courier, Friday 12 February 2010 This newspaper article calls for unity among Highlands politicians in an effort to retain Highlanders’ control over key ministerial positions. Following a reported fracture in the then ruling National Alliance Party and a possible reshuffle of the cabinet, Highlands ministers and other prominent regional leaders pressured then Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare not to underrepresent their region. The regionalism of Papua New Guinea politics comes through, as well as the fragility of political parties, where political orientation was far less important than the opportunities that parties presented to MPs. Readers could always detect the voice of a prominent person echoing between the lines of national newspaper stories. In the highly competitive world of Highlands leadership, it was also standard that a leader called for unity. This time the opinion was voiced by my adopted father, local ‘big-shot’ and ‘prominent leader’ Tom Liam, who I know as Daddy Tom. His story was intimately linked with gambling but in forms that seem far removed from the contexts I have discussed in previous chapters. In this chapter, I move away from efficacy testing through cards to describe some of the inequalities that were readily apparent in Goroka. I draw the reader’s attention to a truly high stakes game, one as unexceptional as the

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card games kwin and bom but that had a restricted clientele of high rollers, separating Gorokans on the basis of big money and big-manship. Goroka’s political elite argued that pokies (slot machines) matched their status and their wallets better than cards. With such a concentration of money at pokie joints, novel forms of leadership emerged in a cloud of conspicuous consumption and in the process of denuding money’s value. Pokies became one of a number of emergent sources of finance that allowed big-men across the Highlands to make monetary transfers to each other. They thus developed a pragmatics that brought variant strains of big-manship into coalition in a novel locale that retains shades of the men’s house. During the course of this chapter, I compare pokie players in Goroka and futures traders in Chicago and the City of London. As financial activities, pokies and futures are only half a world away (Zaloom 2006). Futures contracts fix the price to be paid to producers for the products they will later produce. The contracts provide assured income to producers, enabling them to invest in longer-term strategies. Speculators buy and sell these futures contracts for profit. The ‘risk’ that comes from the fluctuating price of commodities is therefore transferred to transactors, who specialize in handling it. Caitlyn Zaloom documents the difficulties of adapting to the distillation of risk into decontextualized numerical representations on computer monitors in London. In both contexts, then, we see elites refocusing their acquisitive enterprises away from direct contact with people and onto screens dominated by interpretable symbols. Pokies brought gambling firmly into the town centre when they arrived in 1994; they became a fixture of night-time entertainment among those who had for whatever reason just acquired money, as well as for perennially wealthy patrons; barred doors and aggressive security personnel kept out poverty-stricken young men and those who were overly drunk. At the time of my fieldwork, there were five pokie joints dotted around the centre of the town area in places where wealthy people were likely to be: pokies were appended to hotels and close to government buildings, banks, shops, nightclubs, the airstrip and houses of wealthy residents. With an estimated average of twenty machines in each joint, around a hundred pokie machines serviced an official population of 23,277 (PNG National Statistics Office 2011). On a busy day, the largest joint banked K16,000–17,000 (or £4,300–4,600) in revenue. In Papua New Guinea as a whole, there were 130 pokie joints and almost 2,000 machines (National Gaming Control Board pers. comm. 2010). As a commercial industry, machine gambling relies heavily on permissive state regulation, and the gambling industry funds a significant amount of social science research, exercising soft power over the theoretical paradigms

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within which academics operate. Tied as they are to evidence-based policy, the gambling field is consequently dominated by psychology, criminology, sociology, microeconomics and the health sciences. With some commendable exceptions (Cassidy 2014; Schüll 2012), anthropological writings and the works they reference usually circumvent this literature, pointing out the historically and geographically contingent development of the concepts involved (Hacking 1990; Reith 1999). One of the most valuable attributes of anthropological studies of the gambling industry is the ethnographic necessity for critical engagement with the same concepts that are used by industry, by related academic fields and in the lives of gamblers themselves; e.g. ‘leisure’, ‘addiction’, ‘responsible gambling’, ‘problem gambling’, ‘compulsive gambling’ and ‘pathological gambling’.1 Critical appraisals of social science approaches to gambling stemming from anthropology and sociology represent a potent counter-narrative, but these accounts are rarely taken seriously in the more instrumental, policy-oriented gambling studies literature (McGowan 2004). The most prominent case of sociocultural anthropology actively resisting industry-promoted concepts and trends is Natasha Dow Schüll’s Addiction by Design; an ethnography of the machine gambling (slot machine) industry in Las Vegas (2012). Schüll follows the affective link from players to machines and through to the architects of escape, those who make the machines, process the data and engineer the casino floors. And it is escape that is offered; not something for nothing, but nothing as something. Schüll’s informant-players are beyond the desire for a win; they wish to kindle a space where ‘you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with’ (ibid.: 2). There is no escape, for addiction and its treatments are shown to be couched in the same language of actuarial self-management as gambling is.2 Strategic creativity among players is allowed for by the machines only as a means to draw players into further losses, instituting its own version of persistent inequality. The players not only lose but also adopt a language that medicalizes the self and locates fault within themselves. Against this background, Gorokan interactions with slot machines will stand out as also instituting inequality but in a local conceptual mould that apprehends the machines differently. The pokie machines in Papua New Guinea were owned by international companies presumed to be of ‘White’ or ‘Asian’ origin and placed in the care of establishments often run by Papua New Guineans, but the companies retain a large amount of control over the opening times and the running of these establishments. Annual revenue from pokies was K250 million in 2010 and is rising. Following the Gaming Control Act of 2007, each day all the revenue from pokies went into a trust account held by the National Gaming Control Board, from which 46 per cent of gross profits were submitted to the national

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government as betting tax; 14 per cent went to a ‘Community Benefit Fund Account’ that became notorious for corruption; 5 per cent went to the National Gaming Control Board for running costs; 10 per cent went to the owners of the machines (known as the ‘operator’) and the final 25 per cent went to the owner of the premises (the permit holder). The intersection of different types of business created tensions, as the more fluid cash flow of Papua New Guinean businesses met a cast iron accounting procedure and international gaming machine operators who were used to exacting centralized control. Such frictions were laid stark by the computer-operated system: its accounting procedure told the central office in Port Moresby exactly how much money should have been in the account, and Port Moresby required that exact amount to be banked by the permit holder. One pokie joint kept two sets of bookkeeping ledgers. One for Port Moresby and the other used to mobilize money for other business ventures like entertaining, or to compensate those who lost large amounts of money. The permit holders made up the rest from their personal funds so that they could bank the amount required. The games had not changed since their first arrival from Australia in 1994. The Australian slots market is known as a particularly ‘sophisticated’ one by global industry experts (Schüll 2012: 123). By this it is meant that a high proportion of the population play and most importantly repeat play, intimating that people are discerning about their pokies (but see Livingston 2001; Livingston and Woolley 2007). Repeat players in Australia are usually low rollers, and the industry has geared itself towards these patrons’ desire for more time gambling with lower losses on individual spins. Schüll describes how Australia pioneered the development of video slot machines based upon the ‘multiplier’ formula, which was already a fixture of some mechanical slot machines and in which players may apportion their bets upon multiple lines through the symbols on the reels (2012: 120). Betting on multiple lines increases the chances of winning on any given spin, though the amount one wins is usually less than one bets. The machines slowly ‘bleed’ players, providing them with more ‘time-on-device’ while ‘reinforcing’ their habit by giving small rewards as they lose. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Australian game designers experimented with increasing the number of lines that players could bet upon. This intensified ‘reinforcement’ and increased the apparent decision-making capacities for players, even as it smoothed out the loss rate (Schüll 2012). When Papua New Guinea brought in its own legislation allowing slot machines to operate, the most sophisticated Australian pokie machines permitted betting on five lines; now they market 100-line machines. In 2009–10, the most popular machines in Papua New Guinea were still the seven-line State of Origin machines (copyrighted by Olympic Video Gaming in 1994); they represented about 80 per cent of the pokies in Goroka.

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A monitor displayed symbols that spun and stopped each turn; for a player to win, the symbols had to align in certain combinations. Unlike card games, a player was not faced with competitors and piles of money, only a silent machine and a numerical display of their score, winnings and bet sizes. Pokies players, like Chicago and London futures traders, stared at their screens discerning the pattern (Zaloom 2006), and the singular nature of gameplay precluded cards-like expressions of amity/antagonism within the game; instead, pokies highlighted inequalities between patrons and others. A high price tag made pokies unaffordable to many, and pokie joints were most often frequented by either people who had just come across a windfall or the comparatively wealthy, most notably big-men. According to my survey, the average fortnightly income per household in Goroka was K510 (£138); pokie-playing households earned K717 (£194). Players were also drawn more heavily from higher income areas: amongst settlement dwellers (who had a lower average income) surveyed, only 1 per cent of residents over sixteen years old admitted regular pokie playing. In a high income part of West Goroka, 8 per cent of over sixteens (women and men) regularly played pokies. In West Goroka 48 per cent of those who sometimes left their residential surrounds in order to gamble went to pokies (the figure was just 4 per cent among the corresponding settlement gamblers). Fifty-two households played pokies, and among the same households fifteen (29 per cent) boasted a high level professional; nineteen had a public servant (37 per cent); seven had a high level manager (13 per cent); seven of them ran a successful business (13 per cent); and three had large interests in the coffee industry (6 per cent). Only two households had none of the above. The internal pragmatics of all the gambling games in Goroka (including wagers) modelled the types of sociality surrounding them; pokies were notable for modelling inequalities. The internal pragmatics were therefore both similar and different to those involved in card gambling. Machines set up situations that played into the hands of big-men because they absorbed their attention and allowed them to act nonchalantly towards money. While winnings and losses played out on screen, the action occurred between bigmen and followers and, through followers, between big-men and big-men, all the while each faced away from each other at their respective machines. Pokie machines allowed this to happen, and so their internal mechanics were crucial even though they appeared peripheral to the socially significant transfers of money, beer and betel nut between people. I concentrate on the mode by which big-men used pokie machines’ internal mechanics for their own ends. People’s differential access to money and support outside of the pokies – and the fact that pokies made profits from players rather than recirculating money – meant that inequalities that existed outside pokie joints were marked within.

The Big-Shots at Old Slots 125

Big-Men and Finance

Melanesian big-men hold a special place in anthropology.3 They have contributed much to kinship studies, theories of social organization, political and economic anthropology and theories of the gift.4 Big-manship ethnography was a novel and radical challenge to unilineal and statist ideas of power borne out of anthropology’s African boom of the 1940s and 1950s. Today ‘big-men’ are even found in the Neolithic and Iron Ages, among the Inuit, the Spanish, on online communities and inside the boardrooms of multinationals.5 As a shorthand for nonhereditary male leaders who attain renown because of their acumen and physical prowess, it is catchy. Big-men play pokies, but the way they do so involves a specific approach to finance. In this section, I will analyse big-manship in terms of finance in considerable detail. My overriding concern is not actually with the categorization of men as big-men but with the way named big-men conduct their finances, which synchronizes with the way pokie machines are played and how man and machine conspire to create financial barriers and ultimately inequality. The label ‘big-man’ emerged as a result of indigenous Melanesian usage, and some colonial-period ethnographers of Melanesia chose to describe the leaders they encountered as ‘big-men’ too because it chimed better than ‘chief ’, with its hereditary associations.6 It gained anthropological prominence when Marshall Sahlins published his productive if sweeping article ‘Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-man, Chief ’ (1963). Sahlins’ evolutionary model posited a westeast political progression from small Melanesian meritocratic polities led by big-men to large Polynesian hierarchical polities led by hereditary chiefs. Qualifications and critiques of Sahlins’ characterization soon followed as new ethnographic material showed a wealth of polities across ‘regions’.7 Highland Papua New Guinea ethnography was emergent at the time of Sahlins’ article, and a number of ethnographers found Highlanders the archetype of Sahlins’ big-man systems (see Feil 1987) while others strenuously denied it (see Sillitoe 1979: 48, 2010). A more careful gradation of Melanesian and Highlands leadership patterns began to emerge. Some preferred a distinction between big-men and great men;8 others favoured a sliding scale of big-manship based upon polity size and use of resources.9 All agreed that big-manship, insofar as it did exist, was most pronounced in the then Western Highlands among Melpa- and Enga-speaking peoples. These peoples practised the most elaborate of ceremonial transactions with live pigs and in so doing their big-men appeared most distinctively and yet meritocratically in control of the people who followed them. East and southward of this epicentre, big-manship progressively diminished in line with the dwindling scope of ceremonial transactions. Meanwhile, the increasing use of Tok Pisin and English in Papua New Guinea meant indigenous use of the term

126  Money Games

big-man was joined or replaced by a plethora of other names of distinction (in Goroka these included ‘leader-man’, ‘boss’, ‘big-shot’ and ‘chief ’, see also Martin 2010), while anthropological critique actually entrenched the bigman as either ideal type or straw man within the discipline (Lindstrom 1981). The following argument about novel forms of big-manship builds upon the work of Rena Lederman (1990: 3), herself elaborating on the framework provided by Andrew Strathern (1966, 1969). A. Strathern’s comparative approach took people from (roughly from east to west) Siane, Simbu, speakers of Maring, of Melpa, of Enga and people from Mendi and looked at the ceremonial transactions they practised. This he compared to the emphasis placed on home production or financial partnerships between big-men and outsiders. Finance meant men strategically extending credit to each other (especially beyond their kin) in the form of transfers of pigs and shells that they called upon at a later time. Among Melpa- and Enga-speaking peoples, these financial arrangements created long interwoven paths of obligations. These found their apogee in enormous moka and tee ceremonies at which thousands of live pigs were transferred along lengthy chains of transactors. 10 The most credit-worthy individuals effectively guaranteed the contributions of others and gained big-man status as a result (A. Strathern 1969: 57), becoming ‘nodes’ of ‘redistributive exchange systems’ (Rubel and Rosman 1978: 290). A. Strathern suggested that with greater scope for finance (the capacity to lend out to debtors) comes ‘greater scope for men to establish pre-eminence in exchanges’ (A. Strathern 1969: 45), garnering supporting contributions from clan members who gained eminence synecdochally through them. In the Eastern part of the Highlands, A. Strathern argued, killing pigs before distribution barred the pigs from financing further transactions because they had to be consumed in short order, and this in turn prevented the chains of transaction seen among Melpa- and Enga-speaking peoples.11 Without this, he implied, big-men could not become pre-eminent. Rena Lederman (1990) drew on A. Strathern’s contrast between Eastern and Western Highlands, picking on the fact that in the Southern Highlands (further west still from Eastern Highlands) large transfers of pigs did not link together in chains, as in Enga tee and Melpa moka, and these gifts were not identified with particular big-men but rather situationally organized factions of men. At the same time, the big-man complex was less apparent in the societies of the Southern Highlands (Sillitoe 2010), leading one to suspect (following A. Strathern’s argument) that they lacked the requisite forms of finance. In contrast to A. Strathern’s hypothesis, Lederman observed that among the Mendi where she worked and more broadly in the Southern Highlands, people actually had even more developed systems of finance. She points to Southern Highlanders’ extensive use of finance (lending pigs back and forth) to bring together pigs for a ceremonial contribution and showed

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that this lending was not limited to nor dominated by big-men (see also Lederman 1986: 204–5). As opposed to big-manship simply growing proportionally to finance, Lederman showed that big-men could be constrained by widespread finance, since it compromised clan solidarity and limited the contributions clansmen made exclusively to big-men, who depended upon contributions to build their names (Lederman 1990: 8–9). Lederman argued that therefore it was culturally circumscribed forms of finance and big-men’s dominance over it that allowed them to become particularly big; ‘pushed to an extreme so that everyone is doing it, “finance” is no longer simply a means by which big-men break loose from the production constraints of their local groups’ (ibid.: 11). Eastern Highlands big-manship and ceremonial exchanges were also distinctive from their westerly counterparts: they did not organize competitive transfers of live pigs, and their big-men seemed more consensus-oriented. Pig festivals were expected not to impoverish one’s competitors; givers negotiated the size of festivals with opponents to ensure pay back was possible.12 There was also an ethic of solidarity most evident in the fact intra-clan contributions were not supposed to be monitored for exacting reciprocity (Salisbury 1962); A. Strathern argued that this also limited the capacity of big-men to build up a following through personal debt (finance) (1969: 50). Without one-upmanship style transactions, Eastern Highlands leadership was gained through accomplishment in warfare, through oratory and the ability to show respect while bending others to one’s will.13 In Goroka and the Eastern Highlands (and unlike among Melpa and Enga to the west) older people were traditionally given the title big-man out of respect (see Hawkes 1978). Read (1959) and Salisbury (1964) were nevertheless careful to demonstrate that people perceived a difference between seniors and ‘true big-men’. There remained a sense during my fieldwork in which all senior men were de facto big-men, whether they had achieved prominence or not, but in this chapter I use big-man for ‘truly big-men’, as Hawkes described them (1978: 163). These men of high social status are said to ‘have a name’ (gat nem), a ‘big name’ (bikpla nem), a name that ‘makes noise’ (pairap), a ‘name that is known’ (save long nem) or a ‘name that moves around’ (nem save raunraun) (Little 2016: 244). Truly big-men’s names circulated across space well beyond their immediate social network. In the Eastern Highlands ‘essentially equalitarian, consensus-oriented societies’, successful leadership was achieved by men who were able to convey an air of autonomy, to ‘manipulate public opinion and if necessary defer to it without relinquishing either his control or his individuality’, thereby balancing the two most important values: strength and equivalence (Read 1959: 425–27; see also Salisbury 1964). In the context of constant kinship demands and affinal obligations, to be autonomous was to encompass the wills and

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demands of others and make them seem your own. Their ability to bend the rules and their awareness that they bent the rules and others’ wills meant that leaders described themselves as ‘bad men’ (Read 1959: 434). My adopted father Tom Liam (of Simbu origin but having lived his life in Goroka) fitted this profile well: his voice was loud, his body broad and tall and he had a reputation for intimidating strength. Tom’s attitude to all things and people was that of friendly gestures coupled with a studied indifference to others’ agency; he would be confrontational if pressed. It was as if he could suck up all you had to give with a few words. This strength lay alongside an ability to respect your wishes and to do so in such a way as to exceed your expectations. Daddy Tom always described himself to me as a ‘bad man’. He was strong, aware of the necessity for the pretence of equality, and I watched him knowingly and skilfully break the rules to his own ends. He was also a great transactor, managing debts and controlling others through his financial prowess. In Tom Liam’s time, big-men had new skills: his generation of Gorokans grew up with the theatrics of an urbanized form of leadership that required urbane skills. Town dwelling, in all its complexity, broke with A. Strathern’s and Lederman’s ideas about finance defining forms that leadership takes. By 2009–10, big-men, or as they liked to be variously called: ‘boss’, ‘leader-man’, or ‘big-shot’, were business men, official political leaders, civil servants, coffee plantation owners and sporting celebrities (cf. Martin 2010). Tom owned a slot machine joint, two clubs and a piggery and had large coffee holdings. New opportunities for income, finance and consumption (including gambling at pokie joints), I argue, made recent Gorokan big-men comparable with other styles of big-man in the Highlands and allowed big-men from different areas to talk the language of money, Papua New Guinea style. Gorokan big-men received money from many ‘corners’ and used it to interact with followers and other big-men in novel transactions that primarily took the form of one-way transfers. These transactions created a network of personal followers outside of kinship networks. As such, the pokie joint represents a kind of meta-men’s house, operating at the level of a town rather than a clan. Gorokans had made a new sort of distinction between a big-man, which was applied to both seniors and ‘directors’, and ‘boss’, ‘chief ’ or ‘big-shot’, which applied to the ‘directors’ alone, giving a sense of the financial weight they ascribed to contemporary leaders.14 Despite these changes, there is still much mileage in the financial distinction drawn by A. Strathern and Lederman. Lederman, for instance, frames her argument by suggesting that variations among Highlands societies’ approaches to finance give us a key to grasping socio-economic change because ‘[b]oth variation and change are occasioned by culturally specific kinds of creativity, transformative extensions of historically given modes of

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acting in and on the world to unfamiliar circumstances’ (Lederman 1990: 12; see also Gordon and Meggitt 1985; Sexton 1982). I argue that Gorokan (and possibly wider) use of terms like big-shot evidenced a shift in finance arrangements (see also Martin 2007, 2010). The above newspaper article, for instance, expressed an emergent regional solidarity among big-men with respect to sources of finance. Increased scope for finance enabled local leaders to play the part of ‘Highlands-wide big-man’, mixing elements that appeared categorical in earlier ethnographies of Eastern, Western and Southern Highlands and cementing distinctions between themselves and those who were described simply as ‘normal’. The ‘big-shots’ that I interacted with during nights at the pokies often traced their origins to other areas of the Highlands and transacted with different types of big-man. I frame my material by describing one such evening. Pokies Night

As Tom Liam arrived at the Bird of Paradise Pokies Lounge in the centre of town, word rippled across both rooms. It was 6.30pm on a Friday. Outside, twilight had given way to nightfall, and the bustling streets were all but empty, the final stragglers drifting gingerly homewards to make the unofficial nighttime curfew imposed on Goroka due to fear of rape, theft and violence. Afterhours travellers were stereotypically male, with some exceptions. Tom Liam often strolled around at night; his name preceded him, and few would dare cross him. The six of us together were the largest entourage that night.15 Safe in their company, I spent many an evening ambling flippantly or catching a free lift between joints. The K50 and K100 notes (£13/£25 in 2009) that circulated in pokie joints on those nights made them dazzling, heady places to be. In 1994, the Papua New Guinea National Gaming Control Board decided to price out those on low incomes to avoid the exploitation they saw in Australia, starting at K20, rising to K30, K50 during my first fieldwork and most recently K100. Some low earners played on, but there was a consensus that pokies were now the province of the well-to-do. This is not to say that pokie joints were luxurious palaces of consumption; they were more often than not shabby breeze-block structures barred by welded steel. Bare, strip-lit rooms with peeling paint lay full of battered machines. Many were broken. The toilets were invariably a mess. The electric atmosphere that bedazzled occasional participants like me accompanied the personalities as they swaggered in then out and around rather than residing in the site itself. So, as the betel nut markets were places of fast games and fast money, pokie joints were places of bikpela man (lit. ‘bigmen’) and bikpela mani (lit. ‘big money’).

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That night, while Tom watched Australian rugby league on the television (his Rabbitohs were playing), I hung around a damaged pool table in the bar area talking with a middle-aged schoolteacher called Alwin about the punters. It was 7.30pm. I had observed people giving when they won, so I decided to follow this line of questioning. After struggling to get his point across, Alwin snatched a pen from his friend’s shirt pocket and the notebook out of my hand. He scribbled two diagrams down. Figure 5.1 shows the distribution of goods ‘in the past and in villages’ and Figure 5.2 shows how big-men distribute slot machine wins in Goroka today. Alwin explained that in the past wealth items would come into a community and go to the leader. It happened in public, and the leader would distribute in public too. The leader in the village or ‘before’ (as Alwin put it) had to give or he would lose ‘honour’. He therefore distributed in public to emphasize his fairness. One large transfer came in, and under the watchful eyes of onlookers, proportionally small transfers were distributed. Alwin’s model fits exactly with the general model put forth by A. Strathern (1969): the big-man of each social network acts as spokesperson and distributor for their assemblage, each of whom feel entitled to a transfer based on their own, home, production (see S. Robbins 1982; Salisbury 1962). According to Alwin, the contemporary gambling winner was instead surrounded by friends, language mates, colleagues and helpers (what I have called the entourage) and chose whether to give to them or not. Pokies therefore offered different distribution decisions to big-men. In my notebook, Alwin wrote in English: ‘the difference between a village leader and a modern gambling leader is a gambling leader has the honour to say “yes I give” or to keep. The village leader has the obligation to give with [sic] any reason

Figure 5.1 Past/village distribution patterns according to Alwin. Figure created by the author.

Figure 5.2 A big-man’s distribution at pokies according to Alwin. Figure created by the author.

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or circumstances.’ Alwin’s hypothetic gambling situation was still considered public, but links between people were ambiguous and not irrefutably kinship-based, and the hold that winners had on the money they won was strong. Those around a winner were associates rather than intimates until the winner chose to make an associate into an intimate by transfer. Doing so, Alwin said, conferred ‘honour’ on those receiving at the expense of others who received nothing just as much as the opportunity to make the decision was the ‘honour’ of today’s leader. So shifts in the way wealth came to bigmen at pokies allowed them to set up relationships that extended beyond their clan networks, or finance. According to Alwin, the distribution choice that each winner made revealed which of the three types of public gamblers they were: one type put their winnings in their pocket and left; the two other types gave to their helpers, friends, language mates and colleagues. Of the latter two, one bought people soft drinks and did not give too much. This was how a big-man acted, doing well by distributing while exercising judgement. The other bought two cartons of beer and gave it to all the people. That person was a ‘true man’, a man to be loved, but who was ultimately doomed to lose out politically. Crucially, the truly generous man, who might previously have been a leader in the Eastern Highlands, became the loser that should have exercised greater judgement. Big-Men and ‘Lesser Men’

After a while, I stepped inside the pokie room and joined Ralph. Ralph grew up in a Goroka settlement called Pis-Wara. He was a regular member of Tom’s entourage, the two of them having campaigned together – Ralph for district councillor and Tom for Member of Parliament. Ralph’s time as a councillor ended after a term, and he had been without work for a number of years. I asked Ralph to go through the current players and say what each was known for and who the big-men were. This was something I asked at different points in the night every time we went out to pokies. It always revealed a great knowledge of other people’s affairs. Some successful business persons, such as the pokie joint owner, were considered lesser leaders than, for instance, a former magistrate. It was not so much that wealth equalled leadership, because being wealthy, while alluring, was not admirable unless that wealth was mobilized in particular ways. Big-men were still defined by the way they manipulated wealth, and the best way of demonstrating this is to cite an insult given to those who do not do it well. In Goroka maniman (‘money-man’) meant men who had become very wealthy and were then able to contribute to whatever event they wanted

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without having to consider it. Untroubled by the need to prioritize their gifts to some events over others, these individuals cut an ambiguous figure as good people to know but not necessarily to emulate. In a perverse way, the maniman had his capability for autonomous decision removed by having too much money: giving to an event displayed no skill because money was of so little value to them. They did not participate in financial arrangements because they did not need assistance. Big-men usually had a high profile job in public service or in well-known businesses. They invariably owned one or more businesses on the side, such as a pig-rearing enterprise, beer shops or building pool tables. The separation of waged and business enterprises was key, as most used their wages to support their families, and their ‘businesses’ (often lacking comprehensive accounting procedures) were used to make all sorts of other ventures; they could manoeuvre their money in a flexible way, utilizing kin and other forms of relationship. Business ownership was highly regarded. Most were trading companies set up on the basis of a favour that gave them preferential access to goods Table 5.1 Pokie players and their statuses at the Lahanis Pokies Lounge, 8.30pm, 26 November 2009. Income

Status

Natural gas project landowner

‘Big-man’

Former Health Extension Officer then working with a large development bank

‘Big-man’

Public servant

‘Big-man’

Former magistrate

‘Big-man’

Headmaster of a large high school

‘Big-man’

Real estate consultant

‘Big-man’

Unidentified

‘Big-man’

Unidentified

‘Big-man’

Unidentified

‘Big-man’

Unidentified

‘Big-man’

Pokie-joint owning businessman

‘Normal’

Coffee processing company supervisor

‘Normal’

Quality controller for a coffee exporter

‘Normal’

Coffee exporter

‘Normal’

Note: Ralph used the word ‘normal’ for those who were not a ‘big-man’. It simply meant that they were equal to the others and not special.

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or customers. Typical examples were security businesses, which often began when a known associate granted a contract to provide security for a business/government premises to a person who then started a business to provide the service. Once up and running, the business as property was owned both collectively and individually. Individually through use and development; collectively in that its success and ultimate end belonged to the whole clan (cf. Finney 1973; Wagner 1974). Successful big-men could rely upon their kin and supporters to help their businesses flourish, setting up further deals with associates and other companies and guaranteeing their custom. At the same time, demands were made upon the business ‘owner’, and these involved participating in unprofitable activities or donating inflated amounts of money to various events. The person and their ability to contribute were not separated from their business dealings and therefore business was a mode by which people did finance. For this reason, many Gorokans reflected that short-term businesses success was easy, but sustaining or growing businesses was hard because they depended upon the obligation-balancing skill of one big-shot (see Finney 1968, 1973). Part of the issue was that money from business, like winnings from gambling, was said to be ‘free money’. It was not owed directly to another and was therefore free in the sense that it could be used to initiate new prospective transfers. In accordance with the need to bridge networks of people beyond orthodox business arrangements, money was often given to existing and potential supporters (as well as other big-shots) during daily transfers or at the pokies. The hope was both that the recipients would frequent their businesses and ultimately come to the big-man when they had a life crisis, enchaining them securely in their web of reciprocal support. The success of one’s business, participation in traditional transactions and contributions to others were intimately bound up together in the making of one’s ‘name’. The reverse was also true: the power of one’s name attracted customers to one’s business. Tom, who owned a pokie joint himself, used his name to bring customers in and that, he thought, depended on his own presence at other pokie joints. Fame, garnered in part by lavish spending at pokies, fed back into its own pragmatics. Often the strain of such demands and the uncertainty of business meant aspiring big-men could not sustain their success and found themselves brought down by the demands of others and/or a lack of frugality, including over-indulgence at the pokies. A true big-man treaded the fine line of popularity and social distance by employing innovative and traditional transactional methods. In other words, deploying finance judiciously through whatever means were available. At pokies, while big-men fixated on their machines, men of lower standing – those people whom Ralph described as ‘normal’ – bobbed between them. Big-men were thought generous just for coming to pokies, for fraternizing

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with those of a lower ‘level’ and for meeting them as equals. ‘Normal’ men accompanied leaders as their bodigad (‘bodyguard’), eskot (‘escort’) or in order to halpim em (‘help them’), rarely playing themselves. I shall characterize them as followers and, as they described themselves in the moment of comparison, ‘lesser men’ (liklik mangi, lit. ‘small boys’). These ‘lesser men’ took positions standing by a player, encouraging them, watching intently or taking orders from their player for beer, cigarettes, betel nut, to put another K50 on the machine or take the winnings out for them. Big-men said followers protected them from thieves, jealous people and poisoned drinks and allowed them to concentrate entirely on the game.16 Sometimes they expressed emotion on their behalf as well. Followers flitted between leaders they felt they could approach or remained loyal to the one. While ‘real’ gamblers’ eyes remained fixed to their screens, they still played to an audience reflected through the gossip of ‘lesser men’ and would often change location if they thought there were not enough fellow big-men around. Keeping your concentration meant money was passed to followers who went to buy beer, betel nut or cigarettes on big-shots’ behalves; the follower received some in turn. If they handed over small monies, big-men rarely asked for change. Small winnings were also transferred to followers to keep them satisfied. It was thus possible for ‘lesser men’ to benefit monetarily from pokies without playing themselves. In their immobile singularity, big-men were a magnet for ‘lesser men’ who did not care about the big-man, only the money, and close followers had the job of guarding big-men from these chancers. Some very shrewd but vilified people made their entire living from being sponsored to play or by being around the pokie joints ready to benefit from other people’s payouts. To prevent pokie joints from being swamped by such people, access was strictly controlled by iron gates and security personnel. In the dark outside, marketers, a crowd of chancers and the inebriated often gathered in the hope of a good time. Both futures trading in Chicago/London and playing pokies in Goroka had significant financial barriers to entry. This created semi-closed networks of disproportionately male leaders, and the atmosphere in both cases was male and highly competitive. There was an emphasis on size and bigness as defining male attributes, and like penis size, male size was rendered in explicit quantitative and spatial form. Among traders, ‘big men’ were those who traded many futures contracts at once. In the Chicago pits high rollers stood above low rollers on raised platforms that heightened their ability to see and be seen. At pokies, it was the denominations they flouted, the bets they placed, the crowds they drew and the number of machines and time they stayed on them that demarcated big men from ‘lesser men’. Both contained a stratum of aspirants to bigness, the majority of whom fell, unable to sustain their losses.

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Despite obvious status disparities between big-men and others at the pokie joints, there was a strong rhetoric of equality. Big-men perpetually said that everyone was equal here, that big and small associate freely. Big-men often claimed that they were lesser people to their equals. Like many parts of Papua New Guinea, in Goroka ‘hierarchy and equality [were] … coexisting modalities of a single system’ (Flanagan 1989: 261). Equality in Goroka was an achieved state. Nurture during one’s early years was seen as a debt incurred on one’s behalf by the nurturers, particularly the mother. Boys also incurred significant debt to their clan when they contributed to his bridewealth payment at marriage. When boys repaid these debts they became men and notionally equal. Only afterwards could they gain a name for themselves (see Read 1959). The achievement of equality among men took spatial form in the men’s house. Men’s houses vary in size, design and number of doors across the Highlands, but they are all larger than the houses occupied by women. To the northeast of Eastern Highlands Province, boys were incorporated into the men’s house later and with more fanfare than occurred to the west. At the beginning of lengthy initiations, boys of a particular age grade were violently wrenched away from their mothers, with whom they had close relationships until that moment. Initiations then emphasized male unity in the face of endemic warfare and the constant threat of annihilation. Women were vilified as inimical to men, and boys were taught never to be seen to be weak or soft towards them (Feil 1987). This occurs in the context of a physical separation of boys from women and their dramatic relocation into the guarded men’s house. An exploration of men’s houses allows pokie joints to be viewed in a new light. Pokie joints as structures have one door, are guarded by adult male security guards and are blocked to unsuccessful or young men if they do not accompany a big-man. When inside pokies, the younger, less established and less wealthy men are diminished if not humiliated by comparison all at the moment that they are supposed to be equals. Wealthy men may be any age, but those who were seen as having proven themselves over time were generally of middle age, creating an analogue of the age grades that have remained central. Within the pokie joint lies a great deal of stored wealth, just as shell valuables were often kept in a men’s house, but at pokies that wealth is not the property of any individual without their winning it first. Pokies, frequented by adults and particularly men, were primarily a place for those who had already come to equality, giving them the freedom to invest their income as they chose (though not without obligations). Stressing equality in pokie joints was saying that ‘we are equal in our potential’: amongst us anyone can excel by their qualities. This is in keeping with previous accounts that stress the ‘equalitarian’ nature of Eastern Highlands men’s societies (see Read 1959; Salisbury 1962). In the literature on moka and tee, it was those men who had made good their debts who could participate in ‘finance’ without being scorned by

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their own kin (A. Strathern 1971), and at pokies people seemed to suggest, often too emphatically, that they were all equally able to do so. Playing Pokies

After the Rabbitohs won their game, and aware of the necessity to play and display wealth, Tom Liam made his way beyond the partition, scanned the room and found a machine. He pulled out his wallet and thumbed through a fat wad of notes wedged inside. People would often distinguish big-men from those who ‘came with only K50 to spend’. Men were thought to go to pokies with amounts and denominations corresponding to their size, and Tom was well aware of this when he flashed his cash. He handed one of his K50 notes to Ralph, who sauntered over to a booth in the far corner of the room. Inside, a young man was hunched in his chair. Ralph slid the K50 through the letter-box sized hole in the Plexiglas and said ‘12’, the machine that Tom had chosen. Behind the translucent wall, the operator, ‘Sax’, placed the K50 in his till, glanced at his computer screen, clicked an icon, then punched ‘50’ and ‘Enter’ into the keypad. One thousand credits instantaneously appeared on screen over at Tom’s machine; the series of buttons below the cathode ray tube video monitor began flashing. Tom Liam was expected to bet high, and he tapped the buttons that committed him to the largest bet in credits: seventy (K3.50), giving him a chance of winning the maximum on a single spin: K10,000. The five reels appeared to spin irregularly downward, slowing to a halt from left to right, aping mechanical slot machines – machines that very few in Goroka would have ever seen. After several spins (his bets yielding no returns), Tom switched to staking fifty credits. A number of lines flashed as they generated returns, doubling his score. Tom took a gnarled toothpick from the corner of his mouth and jammed it between button and its border, forcing the machine to play on automatically. He stood four feet back, folded his arms and watched on without expression. Likewise, if a futures trader invests too much personally in a trade or a prospect, they tend not to cut their losses and then fail to see and take advantage of other opportunities (Zaloom 2006: 134). Drawing from Geertz, the pit is described by Zaloom (ibid.: 95) as a form of ‘deep play’ in the heart of capitalism, in which character is gambled as traders subject themselves to the judgement of their peers, risking both financial and social annihilation. Tom Liam, playing seventy/fifty credits with a toothpick, was considered a ‘real gambler’, a gambling character; two machines apart was a man playing three credits, and he was thought to pilai laki (literally ‘play luck’). People who tried to ‘play luck’ hoped that the little money they brought would be enough

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to see them make a win. Stereotypically, these players only attend pokies during daytime; with less to lose they play slowly and timidly, betting small amounts on many lines often, all the time trying to ‘mastermind’ the game. Their limbs are said to shake from nerves, but their defining characteristic is that they play alone without help, often secretly. They had a set budget as a result of their solitary play and were characterized as ‘working class’ people who came in during their lunch break,17 played for an hour, and sometimes returned after work. Their solitary play and shaky nerves compare to gamblers elsewhere (Schüll 2012), but most pilai laki players lacked the kind of credit-based banking that meant they could juggle money between accounts and extend their budget. To get hold of more money, pilai laki players would require known people to lend it to them, and those players usually lacked the weight to gain loans from others inside the pokie joint. This distinguishes them from those big-men who were ‘real gamblers’. ‘Real gamblers’ like Tom Liam were said to play at any time they want; they were business men and thus not tied to working hours. Usually this meant they came at night and particularly on the weekends, accompanied by followers. My records show an average of two supporters per player on a given night. ‘Real gamblers’ bet differently to pilai laki (‘play luck’) pokie players; for instance, ostentatiously putting K150 on a machine at one time just to save trips to the operator for them or their followers. They played more than one machine simultaneously: Tom started playing the machine between him and the ‘working class’ man. He was tapping rhythmically on its buttons having left the toothpick to play for him on the first machine. I once saw four machines ‘played’ at once in this way. Like their betel-nut trading, chalinj-playing counterparts, ‘real gamblers’ were said to play fast (i.e. run through their money quickly by betting big) because they had more money and were assured that, win or lose, money would still come to them through the many ‘corners’ of their networks and businesses. They only rarely resorted to the cautious tactics of working people. Both types of player wanted to win, but many believed that big-shot ‘real gamblers’ did not particularly care if they lost, an image they were careful to propagate. In contrast to their working counterparts, these players usually acted insulted at the mere suggestion that they had a budget. ‘Luck’ was a loudly proclaimed irrelevance to the ‘real gambler’ because he wanted people to think he had enough money to wait out the next win. Some thought that these businessmen’s skins were covered with money (mani pulap lo skin, lit. ‘money full on [their] skin’) so they played without concern, just to relax (cf. M. Strathern 1975). Big-men emphasized that they felt more relaxed playing pokies because they played wan wan against a machine that had no connection to the obligations that influenced their actions outside of the pokie joint. As successful lynchpins

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of a kinship network, these leaders were constantly confronted with requests and demands at home or on the street, but the machine was disinterested and acted without any pre-existent relationship to the player. Men at pokies claimed that they entered a different world that was separate from their obligations, but they simultaneously postured about how much free money they could indulge in this fantasy (see also Read 1965: 25–26). In their chosen worlds, players chose paths connecting symbols, some of which would win but more would lose. This made some ponder whether they should have bet lower on that spin or on fewer lines. Players adjusted their strategy to avoid wastefulness, just like Tom, who switched from ten credits on all seven lines (seventy credits) to ten on five lines (fifty credits). All the choices the machines presented gave players the appearance of effective decision-making, so many thought that they could outwit the machine. By coming to understand the pattern between card symbols on the screen, over time the players supposedly got closer to ‘masterminding’ the machines. This meant correctly judging fortuitous or forbidding signs amid the symbols, noticing combinations that had appeared before, just like cards. More idiosyncratic knowledge of these patterns made up a player’s individual aidia (‘ideas’). This information was kept secret from other players, supposedly securing wins for oneself and preventing the machine from adjusting to your style of play. Such ways of playing were sometimes thought to be intrinsically unique to individual players and would not have had an impact on another’s likelihood of winning, because people’s aidia are inseparable from their own thoughts. Here are a few examples from State of Origin: 1. If three or four ‘J’ symbols come up then it meant that goalpost symbols would soon come in force and lead to a bonus round. 2. If you make bets of 35 credits, goalposts come. 3. If the shoe or whistle symbols are dispersed rather than clustered then the machine has adjusted itself to people and will not pay out. 4. A shoe and a ‘J’ on the same screen or many 8s means you should bet heavy because a win is coming. 5. Two or more As on a spin tells you you should bet low. 6. Machines pay out at the end of the month. Pokies could be learnt, but they were also ambiguous enough to allow people to theorize upon them. Deciding when to come to pokies also depended on a wide array of factors from recent wins and losses at certain joints, machines and times to whether one was in the correct frame of mind and financial position to play. People’s aidia were a part of their stail (lit. ‘style’). Sax, the operator who was sat in the booth when Ralph came over, had thought a lot on the subject of tactics and stail:

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Despite the machines being in control of payouts, the thinking of a man can overcome the machines and make them payout; they can overpower them with their style, by masterminding them. To do this they have to be good at doubling up [during bonus rounds], and they collect 400 or so each time. Different styles are required to beat different machines though. I want to find out how the machines work, but I do not know; the technicians do though. Sometimes I come in early and just look hard at the screens and machines to find a pattern. But we [the staff] are still unclear. Sax was talking from an everyday person’s or pilai laki perspective, but ‘real’ gamblers’ tactics often went further; they encompassed these strategies and took other people’s agency and pattern into consideration, something seldom brought up by pilai laki players. Tom, for instance, said that if he played heavy like everyone did, with wagers of fifty or seventy credits every time, the machine would not pay out; it would just act as if what was happening was normal, taking leaders’ money as it always does. Instead, he enticed the machine to give to him. Tom used his sensitivity to others as a framework for understanding how this ‘machine’ might work. He seamlessly added that he did this kind of thing on all other occasions as well; that this ‘style’ of his was in his blood; he was born a leader and he cannot change it. If you are a man blo givim (lit. ‘man belonging to giving’, a generous man), Tom announced, then you will just give. Then he claimed that if he had money, all the people would know because it would ‘flow around’. Tom applied his understanding of how to transact with people to machines. The social context and the game were wrapped together tactically. Chicago and London futures traders share a corporeal investment in numbers as more than vehicles for rational calculation, becoming indicators of the social. Zaloom documents how they develop a feel for the numbers on display and how for some ‘the first step’ of becoming a successful trader ‘is learning not to calculate’ (Zaloom 2003: 264; see also Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2000; Maurer 2006: 26). The most intriguing consonance between the workings of pokies and futures trading lies in the numbers, particularly in the way the machines encouraged the localized decommensuration of money. Traders hold accounts that tell them their profits or losses for the day, but traders transform their balances into ‘ticks’, the generic term for the price intervals of any market (Zaloom 2006: 130–31). To avoid thinking in terms of their actual balance and potentially impairing their trading instincts with things like the family finances, the traders exert ‘discipline’. Like pokie players, some traders experienced decommensuration and abstraction from their kin and obligations as liberating. In both cases, ‘outside events’ (ibid.: 135) affected the flows inside, but attention is deliberately

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focused away from these factors and into the machines, developing the same ‘zone’ that occupies slot machine players in both Las Vegas and PNG, and traders in Chicago and London. These are the rare times when one loses all connection to the outside and its anxieties as well as the value of the money one brought with you. Futures traders decommensurated money in order to engage in ‘the market’, while pokie players decommensurated money using pokies to engage in politicized, non-kin-centric transfers. If and when money came back out of pokies, then the focus on others became obvious. Players could take out any multiple of K10 above their original stake at any time by returning to the operator and asking for the money. Tom and other big-men used this feature to keep the flow of money coming. Despite losing a lot, Tom never missed an opportunity to buy beer for his followers when his score crept up. I have repeatedly described how gambling brought money into the open, decoupled it from obligations and freed it up for distribution, and this was the case for big-men even when they lost. The way big-men thought about interacting with the machines, with followers, and especially with other big-men, appeared to me to be an elaboration on the historic analogy of finance; in the spirit of transformative games, this was a ‘financial’ game, and the stakes were leadership. ‘Financial’ Winnings

Reaction among ‘real gamblers’ was often understated. At 9.45pm, on a single spin, Tom won K1,500; he remained stony faced. Just like big-men in days gone by as they prepared their distributions and displayed their wealth in its abundance, ‘real gamblers’ showed their potency in their indifference.18 Followers, other big-shots and unknowns went and congratulated Tom Liam with a hand on his back and a quiet quip in his ear. That was when the financial side of pokies really began. Tom collected his own loot from the operator. At the booth he asked Sax to give him K100 in K20s, K400 in K100s and the rest in K50s. He immediately gave the five K20s to Ralph and the four other followers who helped him while he played; I was given K100 in two K50 notes, as a visitor and a relative. Tom gave Richard, another of the followers, a further K50 to buy two jugs of beer for us while Tom swigged from an expensive bottle of red wine. We all left the pokie room together and sat down in the bar. As we sat, Tom sauntered back, and I raced to the viewing window to see what was happening. He put his head round the pokie room entrance and handed K50 to his friend and fellow big-man, which he called his ‘pokies mate’. A pokies mate received more money than any other person when someone won. I sometimes asked people what they would do if they won, and it was

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completely up to them who to meet and who to give money to. I was surprised to find that most informants filtered out all but their immediate family and the pokies mate. I learnt later that a family unit accepted much smaller amounts because they considered themselves ‘acting as one’ at the moment they give to an outsider, and they were usually pleased that their collective name was set to travel. People indicated that big-men’s contributions stood as metonyms for their kinship network as a whole, which brought them all prestige if done well. When I asked why Tom gave to this man separately, he said he received money when this big-man won in the past. If he had given out all his donations at one time, he would have made the other recipients jealous and they would have ‘begged’ for money. He demarcated the pokies mate from those ephemeral followers who were simply ‘fed’ by Tom Liam’s money and who were thought to be categorically below Tom’s ‘level’. This pokies mate relationship began by mutual acknowledgement of each other’s presence within the pokies. An initiatory transfer of money or beer acted as a test of either equality or inferiority. Able to sustain reciprocal transfers over time, they became a pokies mate. Tom might have given money to this man exclusively while in front of his dedicated followers (and I saw him do so on other occasions) because a pokies mate had to be made to feel above others as a result of their previous transfers. Doing so in the presence of others also let him know that the money was attained by gambling, linking them in others’ eyes. In future, when the spectators to this transfer think about either participant, they will recall the relationship between them. Because the money’s origin was gambling, a pokies mate had a greater hold on it, as their relationship was based upon the same class of relation as the one that the winner had to their winnings. The more politically minded the man, the more they tended to prioritize transfers to a pokies mate, and hence political elites seemed to be more prolific ‘real gamblers’. Two spatio-temporal limits affected the size of gifts between a pair of pokies mates. First of all, many ‘real gamblers’ thought their obligation to a pokies mate was restricted to pokie joints alone, and when they were not playing nothing changed hands. Within an evening though, news of winners travelled quickly, not only inside the pokie joint but also from one pokie joint to the next. That night when we moved to the next joint, called Lahanis, Tom made a transfer of money to each pokies mate he encountered. There was always a time depreciation to one’s transfers too because winnings soon become other kinds of money. If the win was not fresh, Tom could avoid revealing money. The monies ceased to be winnings, severing the potential links it could have made across space-time. In this, the pokie joint resembled the men’s house and ceremonial display grounds rolled into one; or, more presciently, they resembled the men’s houses used during election campaigns

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since the 1970s as sites of distribution from candidates to potential voters (Hatanaka 1972). Secondly, the pokies mate relationship was intensified by the pokie joint. Its heady atmosphere of big-men, for whom money (supposedly) flowed so easily, made the value of money depreciate and the transfers rise in volume and intensity. Pokies represented one extreme of the value spectrum because all the transactions (both those made against the ‘house’ and one’s fellows) involved big money. Money was said to have no value inside the pokies, as Richard (after returning with the jugs of beer) made concrete to me: Inside the pokie joint, K20 is normal in there; it is like 10t or 20t. Outside the pokie joint, K20 is too big, too much to give to a person without thought. You must give it for a good reason; inside they give K20 without thought. Outside, people do not deal with money alone; inside we play and we deal with money, so a man will win and he will be happy and he will give without thought. Money has no value at pokies. The value of objects was again brought into question. At pokies, people felt alarmingly happy to sherim natin natin (lit. ‘sharing nothing nothing’, to share prolifically without concern, a kind of one-way transfer) because of the relatively low value of money. While Tom was quite frugal with his distribution, those whose experience of windfalls was limited often joyfully gave all their money away. I saw Alwin’s description of a ‘true man’ come true many times, big-men happily took the money distributed by these merry winners. Meanwhile, behind their backs, the big-men called the donor a foolish spendthrift. With money freed up by gambling, even big-men were not above requesting money from other big-men when they heard the news. In Lahanis, Tom asked another pokies mate for money when that man won K480; Tom received K20. The devaluation of money was apparent in the mock argument that followed. Tom said ‘this money is not for food, you should give more’. Tom played in veiled antagonism with the grammar of monetary denominations: K20 was a lot of money for a meal and would only be explicitly laden with such a purpose when given to a big-man, whose appetite was in that moment made metaphorically proportionate to his standing. Tom played on their location, where the need to consume and circulate money was of a higher order, and argued that showing regard to him at pokies, considering his size and power, required more. Genuine big-men like Tom say they only deal with each other in K50 notes and above, though obviously this was not always the case. ‘Lesser men’ could give big-men lower notes, down to say K20, but they all said receiving below K10 might be taken as an insult. From among the bravado, pragmatic language emerged complete with styles of oratory. The

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syntax was provided by the notes, which set the terms of transfers. Amounts transferred then evaluated the size of donor and recipient. Above the threshold set by location and interlocutor, people indicated that the size of a return transfer of winmani (‘winnings’) was not dictated by the original contribution but by the proportion of the original win given. In fact, some informants likened pokies mates to insurance: if the partner was more fortunate than oneself, then one would benefit from them; if one was more fortunate than the partner, then it was a pleasurable thing to give and a marker of status that insures oneself. This form of reciprocation was far more exactly accounted for than the ‘feeding’ of followers. The pokies mate was an expression of leaders’ autonomy from each other, as equals who created pokie friendships rather than members of a kinship assemblage who were obligated to each other by default. As a form of finance, it was analogous to that found in the Western and Southern Highlands, where opportunities to strategically lend out wealth items abounded (Lederman 1990; A. Strathern 1969). Game-Led Finance

The lack of direct competition between big-men in-game allowed alliance-making money transfers to flourish. For a player to win, the symbols must align in certain combinations; therefore, a player’s attention must focus intensely on the screen. Card games, on the other hand, involve a number of competitors, and focus points, including the hidden propensities of other players’ hands as well as those players’ intentions. The hidden capacities and intentions in card games are therefore crucially tied to people who, as I mentioned, are bound to other players through ties of obligation and interpenetrating thoughts. Also, and again unlike the card games discussed in previous chapters, pokie machines were thought to be beyond local people’s control. Those who preferred cards emphasized that you play against people, and the money flowed between them, but with pokies you played against a computer that you had no control over. Big-men lauded the fact that you played wan-man wanman (lit. ‘one-man one-man’, i.e. separated from other gamblers and making one’s own decisions) and that no one could interfere with you (Pickles 2013b). As people saw it, machines were ‘set’ or ‘controlled’ in the capital Port Moresby. Moresby set the time and place for wins and losses but not the person who would be playing at the time, and decisions made on-screen could outwit a machine’s ‘programme’. People recognized that pokies were exploitative, but the distance and clandestine nature of the machine’s setting meant that the machines were not thought to be set against individual players; this made

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pokies distinctive from cards, which were manipulated by other players using certain forms of magic. Pokies’ severe immunity from local influence and receptiveness to Port Moresby made them highly attractive to wealthy people in particular. Herein lies the crucial difference between pokies and futures trading. While electronic dealing systems ‘clarify’ the information necessary for dealing by removing social data (Zaloom 2006: 144) and narrowing the scope of information (ibid.: 151), the pokies removed the social data that characterized social gambling like cards and replaced that information with an illusory flow of numbers that was intentionally disconnected from the data that might emerge from the social. The information was not narrowed, it was neutered. Numbers and card symbols were elevated to stand for all the information that one should need to engineer their success, without referring to exogenous actions. The non-interpretive facts that are the numbers were nevertheless scoured for social agency. In Goroka, the social agent was a distant and powerful Port Moresby, which had already admitted to controlling the times and the flows of money, which was somehow hidden in the numbers. In London, it was the big actors, the market and their Chicago and Frankfurt counterparts that were in fact hidden somewhere in the numbers. In both cases, patrons and traders sought out social information in the numbers by consulting with their fellows, but while in London the social is there inside the numbers, in the pokie machine there is just the illusion of metropolitan connection. Nevertheless, big-men felt they were the subject of much more jealousy than others because of their success, and the inability of jealousy to affect pokies was a strong reason to favour them. Playing individually against a machine meant not compensating losers when they won. They consequently felt they had more freedom to spend the money as they wished. In Goroka, as elsewhere, acting wan wan was to act without the assumption that relationships were leading one’s actions, and doing so was seen as a critique of traditional Papua New Guinean sensibilities.19 Acting alone was typically associated with ol waitman (‘white people’) and contrasted with acting wan-taim (lit. ‘one-time’, with others), which was stereotypically Papua New Guinean. In pokies, playing wan wan against the machine served as a critical starting point from which to extend relationships with the money that gambling brought out. Acting alone was a pretext to another, more self-controlled way of interacting. The pokie machines were a kind of laundering process for money and relationship-making. Pokie machines allowed this to happen, and so their internal logic, while superficially singularizing, was crucial to the transactions between people. Big-men, characterized as ‘real gamblers’, were the ones not fully absorbed in gameplay, or rather were capable of encompassing and using the singular attention that pokies invoked as a foil for political manoeuvring.

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Another factor aiding the mobilization of more elaborate forms of finance was that a big-man remained with the machine where they could appear perfectly indifferent. Followers allowed big-men to look both ways, at the machine and their pokies met. Big-men often likened pokies to a golf club (that is a specific golf club in Port Moresby where politicians famously played), where big deals were made as the result of ‘small’ transfers between associates while big-men’s concentration appeared to be elsewhere. They saw themselves as laying the foundations for national level politics by building up financial relationships with important personages. In reaching out to this broader scale of politics, big-men in Goroka created novel financial arrangements that intersected with the machinations of big-men from other areas, establishing themselves as big-men or big-shots through their business deals. Big-men in Goroka broke what A. Strathern thought were the constraints upon the use of finance by utilizing new potentials for income and laundering their money through consumption at pokies. They said that whereas before they fought, they now drink beer together and play pokies, and they suggested this was a good thing. Big-men have therefore become tightly enmeshed and shared the aim of protecting and expanding their collective regional interests. That was why I began the chapter with a seemingly generic newspaper clipping because, in part at least, the rhetoric of regional solidarity among politicians was a result of pokie joint finance. Conclusion

Every aspiring big-man recognized that finance was the key to their success. Pokies provided a place where big-men met and donated to each other, displaying the extent of their resources and providing a jovial, men’s house-like atmosphere in which to compete and ally. Pokies helped because they were not susceptible to jealousy, and they allowed big-men to act distracted and defuse otherwise overly competitive transactions. According to Lederman’s material from the Southern Highlands, where everybody seemed to be doing finance, this should put a brake on big-manship, as individuals do finance for themselves at the expense of clan leaders. Yet in Goroka, it seemed that multiple sources of finance and the skill required to manage them effectively meant that some men were able to rise above their competitors. Men who realized they lacked the sources of finance to compete preferred to benefit as a follower than break their own bank. In this they resembled Melpa- and Enga-speaking people’s method of synecdochally identifying themselves with the success of their leaders (A. Strathern 1969). Two tiers emerged. In keeping with Eastern Highlands’ attitudes to dealing with insiders without exacting reciprocity, followers were like lowly

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initiants who needed to be ‘fed’. On the higher tier, reciprocity was exacting but set down by the particular type of finance that was offered by the form of pokie gameplay as they consumed their money on machines. Thus it seemed that elements of each ‘form’ of big-manship came into play at pokies. Gambling in the Gorokan setting automatically created a certain set of potential relationships that accentuated Gorokan concerns; in this case, pokies drew out and cemented the inequalities that people attempted to build between themselves and others. Simple economic logic fails to explain the commitment of both pokie players and futures traders, but the failure falls at the opposite ends of the logical spectrum. In the pits, there were men who could retire a hundred times over, and these actors passed into economic irrationality for continuing to dally with financial annihilation. At pokies, everyone lost. Long-term success at pokies is statistically implausible; there is no secret pattern to be detected. The longer you spend, the more you lose. Yet even here there is similarity. It is unevenness that unites them because the challenge of trading and the challenge of pokie playing in Goroka are in the ability to continue to play on where others fail. As far as the participants were concerned, it was more significant that players play the game, not that they play to win (Zaloom 2006: 108). ‘Actors push the possibilities of annihilation of the self through economic risk-taking’ (ibid.: 109), asserting the self at the same time. The futures market and the pokies are chiasmatic inversions of each other: pokie players lose money inside their screens to compete antagonistically with each other, while traders compete antagonistically outside their machines to win inside them. The result, however, is the same at a national level, the inflation of a wealthy and exclusionary elite that reproduces itself in a closed space in which the value of money is decommensurated and denuded. At the international level, the flow of wealth continues to be drained out of Papua New Guinea and into the coffers of companies whose profits are themselves the object of financial speculation. Wealth was not just about establishing equivalences; it could simultaneously be used to demarcate. All this as part of a complicated pragmatics of competition. One could say that the value of money was corrupted within this space and in this process, devalued from its normal state of absolute value. But as I attempt to show throughout the book, this state of fluctuation was in fact the status quo in Goroka. Nevertheless, the upscaling of the social setting that I have described in this chapter hints at the ability of those with access to money to rig the interface between global capital and local interests in their own favour.

The Big-Shots at Old Slots 147

Notes  1. Exemplars of such studies include horse racing in the UK (Cassidy 2002), croupiers in a Slovenian casino (Pisac 2013), casino gambling in the United States and South Africa (Rizzo 2004; Sallaz 2009), and participation in the South African Lottery (Van Wyk 2012). The emerging field of online gambling is as yet somewhat of a blind spot (but see Gariban, Kingma and Zhorowska 2013).  2. Schüll refuses to shy away from exposing industry-affiliated research. She reveals the means by which the gambling industry manipulates opportunities for funding so that research is forced to concentrate on individuals’ propensity to addiction and steer clear of the interplay of machine and person.  3. See Sahlins (1963); Lindstrom (1981).  4. See Godelier (1986); Godelier and M. Strathern (1991).  5. Brown (1990) citing Van Bakel, Hagesteijn and Van de Velde (1986); see Campbell, Fletcher and Greenhill (2009).  6. See Chowning (1979: 66–67); Read (1950: 216).  7. See B. Douglas (1979); Lindstrom (1978); cf. Hays et al. (1993).  8. E.g. Godelier (1986); Godelier and M. Strathern (1991). Godelier’s model of big versus great men based upon the payment of bridewealth versus sister exchange respectively would put Gorokans firmly in the big-man category. I therefore do not concern myself with this argument here.  9. E.g. A. Strathern (1969); Lederman (1990). 10. The increased use of shells as wealth in this part of the Highlands was also given as a reason for a greater emphasis on ‘finance’ (A. Strathern (1985) following Feil (1984)). However, since money had replaced shells throughout the Highlands by the time of my fieldwork, I do not concern myself with this contrast. 11. For a discussion of how leadership has changed among Melpa speakers, see Stewart and A. Strathern (2005). 12. S. Robbins (1982); Salisbury (1962). 13. E.g. Read (1959); Newman (1965); Salisbury (1962). 14. The self-application of the term ‘big-shot’ and its ambivalent connotations at the time of fieldwork distinguish its usage in Goroka from that seen in Rabaul (East New Britain) by Martin (2007, 2010). There is a consensus among these Tolai peoples that ‘big-men’ no longer exist and that ‘big-shots’ ignore customary obligations in the pursuit of money. In Goroka, however, ‘big-shots’ were thought to be contemporary iterations of the ‘big-men’ of the past precisely because of their innovative success in a number of different fields. 15. Before colonization, the ability to roam without being harmed was also a sign of pre-eminence (Salisbury 1962: 101). 16. When we were alone, leaders often bemoaned these same people and characterized them as beggars. 17. Note that working class is usually a statement of high praise, and these people who have employment are considered to be on a higher ‘level’ than the unemployed majority. 18. See Read (1965); Salisbury (1966: 124); Burns, Cooper and Wild (1972: 107). 19. See Reed (2003); J. Robbins (2004).



 6 The Origin of Pooling

At big ceremonial occasions in Goroka, wealth tends to get pooled together before being transferred. The archetypical ceremonies are bridewealth payments. I first describe a bridewealth payment I witnessed in 2009 as a contemporary manifestation of ‘traditional’-style pooling. But the chapter is not about bridewealth, at least not explicitly. Bridewealth sets up the real focus on collective bets. Pooled bets arose annually when the State of Origin rugby league competition happened in neighbouring Australia, and most of the chapter is devoted to the kind of bets that this event allows for. I juxtapose my experiences against Lorraine Sexton’s ethnography of women’s ‘finance’ organizations called Wok Meri (lit. ‘Women’s Work’), which took hold in and around Goroka District and eastern Simbu Province in the 1970s and 80s (1982; see also Dickerson-Putman 1994). In the 1970s, new forms of transaction like those in Wok Meri savings groups appeared to subvert men’s traditional control over wealth. Along kinship links acquired through marriage, women pooled their meagre savings and loaned parts of the total to other savings groups, encouraging them by example. New assemblages became their instigator’s ‘daughters’, and the transfer of wealth between ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ was stylized as the giving of money (symbolized as a girl and often accompanied by a doll) in marriage to the ‘daughter’, who gave bridewealth in return. Having pooled sufficient funds, Wok Meri assemblages held ‘washing hands’ ceremonies, where they gave a second bride and acquired more bridewealth from ‘daughters’; they also received loans from neighbouring assemblages. Money was then distributed among the ‘mothers’ participants, who often pooled their money again to make large purchases (such as trucks). I maintain an analogy with Wok Meri primarily because this then-novel practice helped Lorraine Sexton to think about the pragmatics of pooling from a fresh perspective. Thirty years on, Wok Meri provides a backdrop to the kind of transformations that can be observed in today’s pooled bets and bridewealth ceremonies. They are a stepping stone to the ethnographic present. Pooled bets are synonymous with The State of Origin rugby league competition, which is played in Australia. Its externality, like that of pokies, meant the result was considered beyond local influence; in State, this preordained

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that when people made a wager they had no control over which side would end up becoming the donors of their wealth. People seemed to enjoy nothing more than when affiliation to one side or another of a transaction was as contingent as the difference between liking one team or another. Gambling allowed imaginative and carnivalesque pragmatics that elaborated upon indigenous priorities. This is a big point of distinction to a bridewealth payment (and to Wok Meri), where the groom’s party is sure they are going to make a disbursement; they never unexpectedly return home with more wealth and without a daughter. I therefore examined pooling as an end in itself that could be compared across events as different as bridewealth and bets. Underlying bridewealth, Wok Meri and State of Origin bets were the added value that came from uniting wealth from multiple sources. There were several strategies for achieving this that knot together into the last pragmatic of the book. The outward form of an exchange is imagined as if through the back end of a kaleidoscope, where the fluctuating pieces conjoin over time to produce the patterned form that is so often seen when you understand exchanges from the top down (see also Hirsch 1994: 692). Why people pool the way they pool, and whether pooling itself could be thought of as conceptually prior to the event that brings people together, remains largely unexplored as a topic. This route avoids debating whether underlying similarities mean that pooled bets are ‘traditional’; or whether the differences between them and bridewealth payments are enough to make them ‘modern’ (see Foster 1995b). Instead, I focus on an aesthetic of accumulation and opposition that finds a form in each historical moment. When Gorokan people routinely collected and acted, they fashioned a social reality that was of its moment, consuming the old and new in the present. A cross-cultural comparison will help to brighten the connections between local scales of transactive innovation and the ideals that guide them. This time it is the Great Plains at the turn of the twentieth century (as described by Alexander Lesser (1969 [1933])) and the presence of a traditional form of gambling that involves analogous kinds of pooling. Their organizing pragmatics are different in a revealing way. This time I found it more productive to make the comparison after giving a full description of Gorokan practices because the contrast helps to telescope out to the scale of conclusion. Pooling – Some Familiar Scenes

Eight weeks after I arrived in Goroka, I had seen extravagant displays of wealth at pokies, learnt a couple of card games and some Tok Pisin and ignited my lust for markets. I emerged one morning from my room at the National Sports Institute (NSI) at 9.30am, after a night at the pokies with

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its inevitable hangover. I sat on the veranda drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. From the path leading outside my door, Amy, a passing employee, warned me that something was happening in the employees’ compound and that there I would see some ‘real culture’.1 Caffeine and nicotine absorbed, I lurched into action, notebook in hand and clunky camera swinging in my right combat pocket, arriving at the first house in the compound just in time to help an unwilling, surprisingly pink sow backwards off a tractor trailer. The pig had been bought for K700 from a piggery specializing in pigs for urban dwellers with porcine obligations but no means to look after them. Engulfing the few familiar faces were others that were clearly rural and definitely related. I approached Pasde, Head of Kitchen at NSI, in charge of supplies and catering for those using the Institute’s sporting and conference facilities. That day, Pasde was due to make the major instalment of the bridewealth for his third consecutive wife (after two previous marriages had failed). The bride-to-be was from a neighbouring hamlet only a few minutes’ walk from Pasde’s own. In preparation for the arrival of his betrothed’s kin, an earth oven behind his house was prepared in which lamb flaps, sweet potatoes and edible leaves were steam-cooked. It was presided over by men while women beheaded, plucked, gutted and boiled chickens. NSI’s kitchen also prepared, among other things, a delicious fried rice dish with tinned pork. Meanwhile, Pasde, a couple of his male clan mates and an old friend and colleague from the NSI were pondering the arrangement of wealth for transferral to the bride’s clan, trying to make the pile seem full and lavish. Massive uncooked sweet potatoes provided height; bunches of special occasion bananas on the perimeter accentuated stature with abundance; a bundle of sugar cane, one of taro and the two or three unmistakeably phallic red pandanus fruits were artfully organized about them; and a stricken chicken lay with bound legs at the very front. Finally, four boxes of defrosting lamb flaps augmented the stack on one side. The arrangement was made all the more critical because, as a third marriage, this was supposed to be a relatively inexpensive affair, and so the desired abundance was difficult to portray with what they had managed to gather. When NSI staff, spouses and family arrived, further items were added, and it was reordered into three different piles. Two were aimed at the two mothers of the bride (Lauren’s father had two wives), one was given a larger pile because Pasde said this mother visited less often and therefore received less from him, so he had to show her a lot of respect at this time. The third pile was for general collection; all were beautifully arranged, and while small by Gorokan standards, it looked plentiful to my eyes. Lauren had been living with Pasde for a couple of years as a trial marriage, but that day she arrived anew with her kin on the back of a truck. Her head was adorned with costly Princess Stephanie black bird of paradise plumes,

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but it was only their hypnotic swaying that could be seen behind a throng of men and women. At the front of the train, a stretcher bore another large pig, but this time it had been slaughtered, splayed and cooked for their hosts on a kind of rack. The visitors seemed hostile and unimpressed by the culinary bounty awaiting them, just as they should have before hard bargaining began (see also Read 1965). Behind his pile, behind his clan that was its backdrop, Pasde was leaning against a wire fence trying not to look nervous. According to his local custom, neither groom nor bride played an active part in negotiations. NSI staff sat or stood towards the groom as interested contributors but as side players and relative outsiders to proceedings. I judged my place was with them. In the negotiations over price that followed (speeches went back and forth six times before agreement) all the food was only icing on the cake; the real item of interest was the money in a pocket out of sight. Money had long since become the principle medium for bridewealth payments in Goroka. The debate that day was entirely over money, and contributions to the event were measured by their relative value in Kina. Pasde had taken written notes of all the contributions of food and money and compiled a spreadsheet the following day as an aide memoire, which he kindly allowed me to copy (see Pickles 2017): The columns are ‘Name’, ‘Cash’, ‘Food’, ‘Value in Kina’ and ‘Total’. ‘Value in Kina’ converted food into its cash equivalent, which was added to the cash contributions to make the ‘Total’. The ‘Grand Total’ was K5,512, divided into cash contribution (K3,126) and food items (K2,386). Items of ‘Food’ were understood to have an underlying cash value, and Pasde used cash value to understand his list (see also M. Strathern 1975, 1999). The resemblance between this spreadsheet and the accounting procedures of ‘bookkeepers’ for Wok Meri assemblages is striking; Sexton describes how the ‘bookkeeper’ took note of cash contributions, not as a mode of exacting reciprocity between the individual and outside individuals but as a method of marking precisely the stake that contributors made to the total collected, and thus what they should have later received when their own Wok Meri organization distributed their receipts (Sexton 1982: 187–88). In another echo of Wok Meri practices, when Pasde talked about his future efforts to return the generosity shown him, he stressed that he would base any future return upon the cash value of the contributions received, irrespective of their original form, though this would guide the form his later return took. He was far more assertive on this front with NSI members than with kin. With kin, Pasde had many overlapping obligations, so the bridewealth was a less reliable guide to his future transfers; he expected he would contribute appropriately to each future event instead. As was the case last chapter, exacting reciprocity was inappropriate for insiders, but it was recorded.

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Table 6.1 A spreadsheet of Pasde’s bridewealth payment. Source: Pasde, personal communication. BRIDE PRICE CEREMONY CONTRIBUTION LIST NATIONAL SPORTS STAFF AND FAMILIES NAME

CASH

FOOD

VALUE IN KINA

Mrs L.

200

N.S.

180

1/2 carton lamb flaps

76

1 banana,1 chicken

50

V.

2 chickens, yams & sweet potato

100

E.

1 chicken, 1 pandanus fruit, 1 banana

60

Taro

10

Mrs B Mrs N.

N.O.

20

50

Ms O.

Absent

Ms N.K.

1 chicken

K.M.

2 chickens, 1 banana

70

O.K.

1 chicken, 1 banana

50

1 banana

30

P.L.

1 banana, 1 chicken

50

N.B.

1 banana, 1 chicken

50

1 chicken, taro

40

U.K.

20

T.E.

10

U.T.

6

L.M.

100

P. K.M.

10

K.H.

50

Total

646

586

FAMILY AND OUTSIDE HELP N.

1 carton lamb flaps

140

L.

1 carton lamb flaps

140

O.

140

B. K.

TOTAL

20

1 carton lamb flaps

140

yam, taro, pandanus fruit

70

1232

The Origin of Pooling 153

E.

1 carton lamb flaps

140

2 bananas, 1 bundle sugar cane

60

Taro

20

N.

1 chicken, 1 banana, sweet potato

50

M.’s mother

1 carton lamb flaps

140

Z.

1 banana

30

1 banana

30

1 pig

700

C.

100

Uncle J. Papa E.

20

T.D. B.,E.,L.

200

K.

120

S.

20

Pasde

2000

Sub total

2480

Grand Total

1800

4280 5512

Notes: Names were changed and abbreviated by the author; in a few cases Tok Pisin terms were translated and obvious typos corrected. ‘1 banana’ refers to one stick of bananas.

Wok Meri groups struggled to distil kinship obligations into money transfers and establish money as the principle upon which they measured their interaction, using their obligations to the group as a way of distilling and taking control of their personal finances. At its peak, much of the Wok Meri procedure took the form and rhetoric of a marriage, while in 2009 accounting for money at bridewealth ceremonies looked like Wok Meri practices. It had been a struggle for Pasde to gather money together to make a transfer that would return a wife because it was his third marriage. He himself raised K2,000 in cash and bought a K700 pig, almost precisely half the value of the full bridewealth, and over the next months he was anticipating a regime of street selling for extra income and earth-oven cooking to save on expenditure. Pasde’s close kin, or what S. Robbins called a ‘pooling unit’, only contributed a fraction of what the cost would have been upon Pasde’s first marriage (1982: 92). A ‘pooling unit’ was S. Robbins’ answer to the problem of the extreme flexibility of group boundaries in this part of New Guinea, and one of its defining characteristics was pooling wealth to transfer to people outside of their own unit (ibid.: 86). I will use it as shorthand for now. Pasde’s ‘pooling unit’ had this time brought only K480 in cash and K1,100 in food items. Their cash contribution was bettered by Pasde’s colleagues

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(K646),2 who had acted as if they belonged to the ‘pooling unit’ by raising K1,232 in bridewealth (including food), even though many of them were only there because, as Pasde put it, it would be ‘rude not to invite them’. Pasde was also tacitly expected to contribute to other events at NSI though he was not close to the individuals involved. The need to act as a ‘pooling unit’ was facilitated by proximity and the moral imperative to pool rather than any pre-existing kinship relation, even though Pasde separated them in his notation. Indeed, the definition of a ‘pooling unit’ seems less important than the principle of inclusion, unless one counts NSI itself as a member of the ‘pooling unit’, which Pasde clearly did not. During the bridewealth ceremony, most of the money was pooled in one place. I say most because the groom’s party would have been expected to increase their initial offer, and they had a wad ready in another pocket that was ‘reluctantly’ transferred over along with the original offering as one transfer. In the bridewealth payment, wife-givers forced wife-takers to ritually reveal what was always assumed to be kept in reserve, forcing the partner to divulge the potency of easily hide-able money (cf. Graeber 1996). The point may seem obvious, but it would have been ridiculous to suggest that each contributor give their money individually to the other side. Sexton found the same to be true for Wok Meri, where loans made between individuals of different organizations would deliberately have their personal possession of the debt or credit hidden by the two corporate Wok Meri groups (Sexton 1982: 188). This is an elementary part of the pragmatics of subsuming money into a collective individual. Aside from the incorporation of employees, the account of bridewealth negotiations given here is not at all unusual; analogous earlier situations were found further up the Asaro Valley and in other parts of the Highlands.3 Nor is it unusual across all of Melanesia to see abundant donations or to see wealth collected and accounted for precisely (e.g. Young 1971). Based on their comparative study of Papua New Guinea peoples, Rubel and Rosman conclude that there is always prestige attached to the size of exchanges (1978: 277). In fact, this point should seem banal and/or abstract to the point of uselessness; one need only refer back to Mauss (1954) to know that largesse is very often a matter of large gifts. My eventual point shall be that the collective form of the transfer is a vital and persistent pragmatic. One way in which Eastern Highlanders have been singled out from Western Highlanders amid their common interest in exchanges was the former’s ‘aggressive undeveloped love of things’ (Feil 1987: 234–35). For instance, Salisbury found the Siane ‘ebullient materialists’ (1962: viii); Newman described the Gururumba as ‘thing-oriented’ (1965: 51); Read thought the Gahuku-Gama ‘materialists … to the point of exhaustion’ (1965: 60). Aggressive contributions and self-interested accounting were particularly

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pronounced in this area. This explains why S. Robbins found it easier to define Auyana (just north of Goroka) groups formally as ‘pooling units’ for functional expediency (1982). But he did not develop the notion of pooling as a guiding aesthetic. Amid details of sugar cane stands and exchange patterns in the literature, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the act of bringing together itself; there is much more on the formalities of what needs to be reciprocated, when and by whom. Early ethnographers, particularly those schooled in the structural-functionalist tradition, peered through the top of the kaleidoscope at the patterns produced but did not give equal attention to the way decisions were made. The Wok Meri material stands out because of the novel way that pooling was achieved and the exacting accounting, and it caught the anthropological imagination because of its refracted proximity to ‘Western’ accounting procedures (Sexton 1982: 167). I came at the problem differently because collective betting, as I will explain, seemed deliberately designed to counteract the emergence of formal rules for reciprocation. In each instance of pooling cited above, display was central and exact tallies kept. There was aesthetic pleasure in bringing together valuables for a transfer, and they were formative in self- and opposition-building. M. Strathern asserts that exchanges act to define one assemblage as against another, a proposition that I and others have taken somewhat for granted (J. Robbins and Akin 1999: 36). But in the spirit of the flippant wagers in State of Origin, I embrace naivety and ask: why was it necessary to display? Why was it preferable to draw in as many people as possible within your ‘pooling unit’? Why involve your colleagues, Pasde? Was it not overcomplicated? What were the limits of inclusiveness? How were collections brought into being for and by the situation, materials and actors involved? When was this principle of inclusive pooling not applicable and when was it imperative in a town like Goroka? I now explore these questions by drawing parallels with bets made over the State of Origin rugby league competition. Origins of Origin

Pasde’s bridewealth was sandwiched between State of Origin games – Papua New Guinea’s largest gambling events. The three-game Rugby League or ‘League’ competition is actually one of Australia’s most cherished sporting traditions, but it causes huge excitement in Papua New Guinea, the only country in the world in which League is the national sport. Rugby League emerged from the Industrial northwest of England as a working-class professional variant of amateur Rugby Union, an artefact of ruling class attempts to marginalize or otherwise devalue those who play games for stakes (Hobsbawm 1984). League remains more popular than Union in northwest England, but League

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is relatively marginal internationally compared to its older brother. Australia is the world powerhouse at League, despite being only the third most popular sport (by attendance) in Australia, behind Australian Rules football and horse racing (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2005–6). In some sports, professional players periodically return to the states from which they claim origin to play for that state in interstate competitions. Australia is divided into six states, each with a strong sense of identity and sporting preferences, and sport is an important conduit for expressing differences between, and gaining bragging rights over, other states. In Rugby League’s State of Origin, games are played between New South Wales ‘Blues’ and Queensland ‘Maroons’. The contest’s current form dates from 1982, when it was agreed that regardless of players’ team affiliation, they were only eligible to play for the state where they were raised. The relative prominence of Rugby League in Australia as compared to other Commonwealth countries, their domination of international competition and the knowledge players have of each other through their association at club level allow some pundits to argue that State of Origin boasts the highest quality rugby league in the world. In the 1930s, Australia brought a number of sports into the Highlands region with the gold rush, but the one that really caught on was Rugby League, mainly as a spectator sport; it was played predominantly by expatriates until the late 1960s. Nevertheless, League became the national sport of independent Papua New Guinea (see Foster 2006). Goroka was and is a leading centre for Rugby League, with a successful local team (the Goroka Lahanis) and a wealth of talent that continues to supply other provincial teams. Robert Foster rightly draws a link between nationalism and Rugby League in Papua New Guinea in a way that replicates the colonial relationship of subordination (2006), but the fascination Highlanders have for Rugby League and particularly the State of Origin competition warrants further ethnographic attention. Nowhere else is League held in such high regard, yet the ethnographic literature is sparse.4 Geographical proximity, a colonial history, Australian domination of League and its hosting the (arguably) apical competition contributed to the game’s popularity in Papua New Guinea. Gorokans cited both quality and the history of the game as explanations for State of Origin’s popularity, but they also emphasized that the idea of playing for one’s place of origin had captured their imaginations. Gorokans’ immigrant/local/naturalized statuses resonated strongly with those of their sporting idols, and they identified with distinctions made in Australia between urban New South Wales and rural Queensland. These categories animated Gorokans; they communicated their connection and preferences for their home villages by aligning with Maroons, or their urban life by supporting Blues. Received wisdom was that there were many more fans of Queensland Maroons than NSW Blues because Goroka

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was comparatively rural. People also chose a team because they favoured such-and-such player or style of play. In addition, State-of-Origin-themed pokie machines made up 80 per cent of all machines nationwide (National Gaming Control Board pers. comm.). The State of Origin competition was so popular Gorokans sometimes called it a ‘religion’, and it is little wonder that gambling machines depicting it were more popular than others. Yet I do not think the causality is unidirectional: analogies between the two were common among informants and had no particular direction, so I now briefly discuss shared attributes. In chapter two I said that for Gorokans most events were subject to the influence of others and forces that could never be fully comprehended. In chapter six, I introduced the pokie machine, whose ‘program’ was thought beyond local influence that might have prejudiced the game against a particular player. This helped players to relax. The story was similar for the State of Origin competition. Papua New Guinea’s own rugby league competitions were problematic as betting events because Gorokans expected corruption and local influence to determine results. A depressing legacy of the colonial discourse was that people often saw themselves as morally corrupt in opposition to the supposedly stret tok (lit. ‘straight talk’) and tok tru (lit. ‘speaking truth’) that they attributed to ol waitman (lit. ‘white people’).5 ‘Black’ players involved in State of Origin games, regardless of their geographical origin, were always thought to be more closely related to Papua New Guineans, but those players were spared the strains of the wantok sistem (lit. ‘one talk system’, sometimes referred to as ‘wantokism’, meaning preferential treatment through pre-existing ties, see Ayius (2007); Brigg (2009)), brought up as they were in Australia.6 The jovial boisterous atmosphere watching State of Origin contrasted starkly against observing the domestic Bemobile Cup Rugby League competition, where the tone was quiet, tense, without betting and subject to furious expletives and accusations from the home crowd that were easily heard above the hush. The machinations of an Australian slot machine and an Australian sporting event were comparatively disinterested in local efforts and therefore made for excellent neutral grounds for wagers. Turning back to the rugby, violence sometimes erupted during State of Origin, and this was put down to wayward Papua New Guinean morality because there was comparatively little violence in Australia. One joke (told as a true story) displayed this quite well: a sore loser from the coast destroyed their television set by throwing it out of their window and into the sea, and people laughed and said ‘if you lose what will you do? Will you get on a plane to Australia and fight them?’7 The misdirected attribution of responsibility to a broadcasting medium adds a comic layer of stupidity. With a benign competition, and with only two teams, almost the whole of Goroka and the surrounding region picked one of them, and inevitably

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their affiliations cut across all kinds of kinship, affinal, language and colleague ties. Each year, it was husbands against wives, fathers against children and even ego in league with affine against kin. The cross-cutting nature of State of Origin affiliations was not explicitly valorized, but the possibility of competing against novel others was obviously enjoyable to people when they spoke of specific instances. Conversely, when talk turned to the violence surrounding the game, stories usually revolved around inter-marital conflict and murder resulting from opposed affiliations. Such stories were told as warnings about taking novelty affiliations too seriously. State of Origin cut relations and radically reimagined ties. Hence, on the day of a game, the atmosphere was one of exuberant collective identity, divided in two. Newspapers devoted half their pages to the Blues and Maroons for days either side of the showdown. There was a carnivalesque sense that on this day friendships and alliances were created anew and generalized upon frivolous, simple grounds, allowing novel camaraderie and in more serious encounters giving vent to unvoiced antipathies. It seemed as if the whole country stopped and redrew itself, using Origin to reforge dormant ties and stage nascent oppositions with others, safe within an event that they (for the most part) recognized as arbitrary. This heady atmosphere is what surrounds punters as they decide whether to make a wager and with whom. Pooling – State of Origin Bets

Having arrived in Goroka in April, I experienced all three Origin games of 2009 in my first few months. The series was on the verge of becoming historic; the Queensland Maroons had the entire Australian national back line as their own and were chasing a record-breaking fourth successive overall victory. Blues fans maintained hope, and on the day leading up to each game, Goroka filled to bursting with excited youths and visiting relatives. Enterprising people painted patterns and logos on eager faces in acrylic paints of either blue or maroon or sold miniature flags in both colours along the roadside. The shade of your shirt, shorts, even your string bag, was taken as a statement of preference, and those who had them were sure to wear their replica shirts. I watched my second and third State of Origin game outside a man’s house in Kaunsil Kem settlement with a crowd of residents and visitors. There were five such houses, each selling access to a television, with forty to fifty eyes glued to the screen. The Blues’ experimental side did not find enough defensive strength and attacking penetration to chalk a win until the third game, by which point the series was already lost. The following year I consolidated my observations, as Queensland consolidated their domination with a whitewash.

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Queensland’s ascendancy affected betting. Maroons fans were cocksure, and Blues fans were often resigned to the impending result. Form was an important factor in betting, but many wagered on regardless. One factor that undoubtedly contributed to the fact people bet anyway was that nobody bet on the series. Games were considered stand-alone betting events. The sequence of three games represented multiple rounds with spaces in between for tactical renewal. While many sporting events occur on a regular basis and some involve the same competitors each time, only a few like the Ryder Cup in golf and the Ashes in cricket have only two teams and swap locations. Within this small class, only State of Origin was played over three annual games at short intervals. Gamblers lauded the three-game format because it gave losers a chance to win their money back. Win or lose, another opportunity to redress the balance would predictably arise. In this respect, the game’s regular reiteration in winner-takes-all competition mirrored and modelled the oppositional structure of life cycle events like the bridewealth described earlier. Like clans exchanging women for wealth in two-way transfers, people desired as many replicable instances of wealth transfers between stable adversaries as possible. It was also like Wok Meri, in which each loan of money between organizations was thought supportive and generative and the opposition of groups was stylized as a marriage (Sexton 1982: 179). The afternoon and evening leading up to kick-off brought a flurry of wagers. Commercial betting at the bookies, though in itself substantial, was paltry compared to private bets. Big-men wagered an average of around K800. According to a short 2009 survey of thirty-eight relatively well-off NSI staff and their family, 58 per cent bet on at least one State of Origin game; many bet more than once on each game. Each wager averaged K32.30, and ranged from K5 to K50. The average bet was second in magnitude only to pokies. Women bet, but men made the majority of bets. It was reasoned that men played rugby and so they were more invested. As Christopher Little vividly describes, becoming a Rugby League star was the dream of most young men, and for good reason (2016). By playing rugby at the highest level men attained peak physical condition, becoming both highly desirable and demonstrative of a male vitality that travelled far and wide with their name and their face. Young women of high education, beauty and wealth would flock to them. They would earn great windfalls through match bonuses that would be spent liberally on beer and excess. Women were excluded from this ambition by default of their gender. Men retained dominance over the forms of relevant political action and fame. Through gambling on games, some women participated in the quotidian activities that propped up that infrastructure. A wife nevertheless often supports a different team to her husband, and some bet against each other. In this respect and in the open

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expression of sexual desire for a favoured player, women expressed autonomy that would more often be hidden when the game in question happened closer to home. Many drank heavily in the days surrounding games, and fights occurred; I more than once had to step over the sprawling unconscious bodies of sunbaked young men the day after a match. Some parts of Goroka literally ran out of beer around this time, which helped. In 2009, two Gorokan deaths were attributed to State of Origin by locals (one husband murdering their wife and one vice versa). Within betting, drunken or otherwise, there was an unspoken pragmatic that, by dissection, revealed underlying similarities to other collective transfer events. Given the wide disparity in their bet sizes and the way they were organized, I have analytically separated those made: 1) collectively without a central character; and 2) between and around big-men. Collective Bets

In Kaunsil Kem settlement, twenty minutes before the kick-off of game two, ten adolescents rushed into the beer shop where I was getting supplies for the game. One of the boys, a bit taller than the others, waved a methodically fanned out K92 in my face, to a chorus of nainti-tu Maruns, yu bet! (lit. ‘ninety two [Kina on] Maroons, you bet!’ meaning they were betting on Maroons and I was to bet against them). I recall it well because at that early point in my fieldwork, having been warned about the settlement’s volatility on Origin nights, I panicked inside. But it was perfectly innocent, and the show of aggression was designed to draw me in, not scare me away. The fanned notes were carefully arranged and physically advanced, fronting those young teenagers who had proudly assembled themselves as a collective when they gathered the money together. For some of them, it must have been their first time contributing to a pot. Someone explained that they had built a pot to entice potential adversaries. Their collectivization anticipated and might elicit a competitor, anonymizing contributants for a collective identified with a sum. It was a classic strategy. Wok Meri assemblages cajoled others into forming ‘daughter’ assemblages with the abundance they displayed when they gathered their monies together at what they called ‘washing hands’ ceremonies.8 When a ‘daughter’ Wok Meri assemblage was set up, they were defined by a sum given to the assemblage as an assemblage, rather than as individual mothers to individual children (Sexton 1982: 173). Precedents also existed among Auyana (Eastern Highlands); at their life crises a ‘collection area’ was made and wealth put in it without earmarking particular contributants; failure to anonymize oneself

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made the larger ‘unit’ angry (S. Robbins 1982: 86). Just so, the multiple boys created a singular position against which another collective might exist. The boys set up their opposition in the very hurried, speedy, boisterous and aggressive way that epitomizes youth, but they still prioritized abundance in its creation. It would seem more difficult to attract people to oppose a high bet (K92). If the stakes were high, I would assume the unmatched bet marked the supreme confidence of my adversary; that would put me off. But the boys attempted to attract opponents by gathering a large amount of money and thrusting it raucously in others’ faces. The adolescents had faith in the aesthetic power of plenty upon potential opposition, and this resembles Pasde’s bridewealth payment. The plenitude (and the distributive potential that was inherent in it) created the possibility of matching. If the amount was large enough, it would draw another collective into existence to oppose it. In the bridewealth situation, the bride-giving clan existed in relation to the bride-taking one inasmuch as the former received a transfer in wealth, while the payment was only acceptable if it was large enough to satisfy the assemblage of people who designated themselves as the clan to receive it. Likewise, Wok Meri assemblages fretted over the size of their ‘washing hands’ ceremonies; the more impressive they were, the more resolute ‘daughter’ assemblages would become. Wok Meri organizations, like bridewealth and collective bet contributants, used the desire to create large transfers as a mode of increasing their individual abilities to put together a large sum (Sexton 1982). The assumption on both the giver’s and receiver’s side, and both the bettor’s sides, was that more is better because larger imbalances invite stronger responses. It made people consider engaging in its other side, sucking people into the transaction with centripetal force; imbalance tempting completion and opportunity inciting fulfilment. In both cases, a breakdown threatened if a suitably large amount of wealth did not come forward to solidify the transaction, even though a large transaction would inevitably increase the responsibilities both parties had toward each other in the future. Like Wok Meri assemblages before them, and pig enterprises before that, Eastern Highlanders tended to see events like State of Origin as ‘corporate enterprises held in opposition to other, similar units’ (Feil 1987: 253).9 Why the collection was collectivized still troubled me. Was it just that, as Feil notes, when people had a little they preferred to pool to make their wealth seem a lot (1987: 253)? What happened next can be used to clarify this point. After buying beer, I walked down a sloping path, paid the entrance fee for my companions and myself to enter the makeshift TV haus and sat on a tarpaulin with forty or so others. Five minutes before kick-off, a middle-aged man, Alfred, announced that he had K10 he wanted to wager on the Maroons. Esther, a mother accompanied by two young children, answered with K15 for

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Blues (thus far M10:B15). Another mother, Francis, proclaimed K5 to bet on Blues (M10:B20), while a young man named Ben shouted excitedly he had K5 to wager on Maroons (M15:B20). My companion Percy decided to act as third party; he collected the wagers together and looked after them; this was known as narapela bodi holim (lit. ‘another body holds [it]’). Participants called out in vain for someone to bet the difference, so eventually the pot was broken up and Percy handed the money back. The K5 bettors for each side might have gone on to bet individually (they were on potentially betting terms because I saw them gamble together regularly), but they did not. At the time, I thought that was incredible. I almost suggested it. I later realized that they did not want to wager against each other if they were in direct competition like a pair of chalinj players. Not only was it polite to be as inclusive as possible in places like settlements with their cross-cutting ties, but bets that were not communalized when people were watching had no place. In a game that did not limit participant numbers, it was necessary to include anyone who wished to join in (chalinj was another such game, and it had no place in the settlement). In other words, to bet with a lone other was not equivalent even if the material result for you was ostensibly the same. The group might just as easily have refused Francis, and the match would have become even (M15:B15). The need to include those who wanted to be included took precedence over the exchange itself and the opportunity to win money. Nevertheless, pooling was reason enough to act in and of itself; prior to betting. An historical parallel lies in Salisbury’s claim that for Siane pig festivals (north of Goroka), their scale and timing came second to the need to initiate a cohort of new boys (1962: 93). Most memorably, Philip Newman’s description of Gururumba (upper Asaro) revealed an almost baffling frequency of exchanges in which participants divided themselves into host and guest, giver and receiver, at any opportunity, even when it seemed superfluous (1965: 52–53). Recall that at Pasde’s bridewealth payment, the cost of the bride was reduced by the husband’s pressing need to marry again. Equally, the need to invite NSI staff members and for them to come and contribute was above the need to demarcate bride-giver and bride-taker precisely. The requirement to include was primary. In the TV haus, it made sense to formalize that assemblage of people into a collective transaction of oppositional sides. This was particularly important because watching State of Origin was often a tense event, and heavy drinkers sometimes vented their frustration with physical violence. Bettors would not refuse to pay up or pressurize Percy to give them their money back if they were part of a group. Based on my experience of other such instances, I will imagine that instead of breaking up, new bettors joined and established an equivalent total, and the wager went ahead. As long as the communal bets were even and the bet finalized (by Percy putting it away in his pocket), the

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money was transformed into a single amount belonging to either one assemblage or another as a one-way transfer, ready for distribution according to contributions and taking the same aesthetic form as Wok Meri savings, bridewealth payments, mortuary payments or any pooled transfer. When it was consolidated, it became an as-yet-undirected pot. This was its novelty: the pot’s direction was not predetermined by any existing debt or any categorical intent to create debt; as a one-way transfer, it hung upon a contingent and uninfluenceable event beyond the national imagination. Once the direction was willingly taken out of the competitors’ hands, its destination could serve as instigator for ‘spontaneous’ compensation, drinking and smoking and chewing together, or vengeful violence compounded by the sense of loss that came from sporting humiliation. Percy would surely have been bought consumables too, and others expected at least a rolled cigarette. The need to give away a nominal amount on these occasions was extended to onlookers, and drunkenness would have compounded their sense of entitlement (cf. Mosko 1999). Some winners in these situations refused to disaggregate the pot; instead they bought something like a bottle of fruit wine to consume together.10 This was commonly done to avoid the need to distribute more widely. Drunken young men could be very intimidating, and I was not the only one to avoid them. The value of the money wagered was increased by being part of a greater whole in each of these examples. The greater the number of contributors giving meaningful amounts of money, the greater the potential to attract money in opposition. An equation representing the decision process of a person confronted with an imbalanced bet and the opportunity to join in would look something like this: —(Ai × m) = X + —(Bi × m) Where ‘A’ and ‘B’ are bettors, ‘i’ is their importance to the person choosing whether to wager or not (following local ideas in assuming that this type of thing is quantifiable), and ‘m’ is the amount bet. ‘X’ then becomes the attraction of the imbalance remaining in the bet. If ‘X’ was higher, then the desire to bet would have been higher. I do not suggest that such decisions were formalized in Gorokan minds in such a way; I am merely illustrating how the attractive potential, or value of an amount of money, could vary according to the number of persons involved in the wager and that people did like to make distinctions into numbers. As an experiment, I constructed this equation by working backwards from the ethnographic fact that relationships were quantified and attempted to carry that quantification back as far as I could conceive it for illustrative effect. At the same time, people felt they had to use wagered money, which usually meant redistributing it. A high number of participants increased the need

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to consume the money openly by buying comestibles. Collective consumption was an acknowledged way of bringing people closer (see Sykes 1999). As in Wok Meri, money was most valuable when it was invested through donation and the donor relinquished their control over it (Sexton 1982), but unlike Wok Meri, value was realized in the process of consuming the money (Reed 2007).11 In terms of the equation, X was bigger in a larger communal bet relative to the amount of money needed to participate, and this wager became comparable to other sharing-based consumptive uses for the money because it would also be consumed when distributed. Therefore, in this analysis I see money’s value when it emerged from a wager as having been pragmatically affected by the incorporation of others’ capacities into the money as it entered the wager. That the direction of the one-way transfer was not controlled by the participants because it was bet on an external competition made the incorporation of others into a collective amount of money safe; it defused worries about people’s coercive capabilities over the money’s direction. Like other forms of gambling in Goroka, State of Origin betting radically and provocatively cross-cut kinship, language and affinal relations as well as those based on colleague status, friendship and residential proximity. To create such an assemblage was to transgress existing ties and reconfigure the social order on a temporary basis in terms of a transfer. As such, money was subject to the aesthetic of pooling, which modified its movements, restricting its flow in a large marketplace for bets because of the need always to make contributions with it. The movement of money was subject to the forces of distribution even before it was put into circulation, and in an assemblage, the pressure to distribute winnings directly was partially diluted by others’ involvement. Similarly to the ‘free game’ given to players who lost at cards, the possibility of a repeat performance and the willingness to bet again with an opponent was a key feature of State of Origin betting, and this came out in a more pronounced way during wagers against specific individuals, often year after year. If the wagers were substantial, the fame of their betting partnership spread far and wide. This renown in turn attracted smaller bets, and so even one-on-one wagers took on a communal character. Satellites

On the big day, the streets were packed with jaunty amblers revelling in the town’s atmosphere. People used random encounters to talk playfully about the game and to challenge or be challenged to a wager. Among the thirty-eight family and staff I spoke to at NSI, six people wagered with kin; five bet with colleagues; three with language mates from their village; three participated

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in a pooled bet; two bet against their neighbours; two with acquaintances known as supporters of opposing teams and big bettors; one with an affine; and three with perfect strangers they talked to about the game. Wagers cut across all kinds of relationship and even created new ones, reworking them into the same uniform opposition between NSW and Queensland; a kind of national identity existed in the capacity to turn any two people into Blue or Maroon sides of a one-way transfer (cf. Foster 1995a, 2006). Betting partnerships were rare and tended to be ad hoc alliances based on proximity, with betting partnerships more a matter of etiquette in letting the loser have a rematch than a formalized relationship.12 For some people, one wager was not enough, and when a number of bets began to coagulate around individuals then interesting social forms took shape. Of these wagers, I have chosen to concentrate on those around big-men; during the festival atmosphere leading up to a game, their outlandish betting was a favourite topic. Some big-men claimed that people sought them out and challenged them to bet. Your fame was inflated if you said you were coerced into betting. Therefore, as an outsider witnessing a ‘challenge’, it was in practice quite difficult to work out who was challenging who, and often both parties claimed to have been challenged. The ambivalence over whether an event was elicited by oneself or another (see M. Strathern 1992) allowed bets to appear just like other transactions that had a history of back and forth because they caused wealth to travel in one or the other direction without the troublesome problem of agreeing on who initiated it.13 Big-men often made a substantial wager (K800 or so) with someone of roughly equal standing. It was repeatedly said that the year before my arrival two betting partners and arch fans of opposing teams gave K25,000 each to the local car dealership, telling the dealer to give the keys of a brand new Toyota Land Cruiser to the winner. Big-men were reputed to stake their wives (though I never met any who claimed to have done so); such were expectations that big-men be confident in their resources. Nothing symbolizes the ideology of female subordination better than their rendering as property, despite no evidence of these bets ever having taken place, and in the face of the reality that women were also gambling with men on the game. Yet more far-fetched stories were floated about Port Moresby big-men betting ships and aeroplanes. Magnified, even grotesquely outlandish wagers tripped off the tongues of many. Big-men with big wallets were careful not to impede the rumours, sometimes actively publicizing their involvement. When in 2010 I made a point of accompanying big-men to watch the games, I was quite disappointed. Many chose to watch quietly at home, away from the drinkers and from any pressure to make big wagers. On the opening day of Origin 2010, the upmarket Bird of Paradise bar contained a very few, blasé spectators. I switched between hotel bar and pokie lounge bar by ducking

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under a hatch behind the bar itself; the latter hosted a broader (but still primarily male) and larger crowd, more boisterous, more drunk and exuberant, like I had come to expect. They shadowed every play, jolted forward in glee or recoiled in empathy with each big hit. Even here, among a familiar throng of punters and sports fans, there was no one-on-one betting to be seen. It became clear to me only in retrospect (as always) that the betting, to whatever extent it went on, was part of a battlefield of information that engulfed the town, while visible acts of giving, taking and betting were usually concealed. Tactical modesty shrouded such activities when they happened and flamboyant exaggeration gilded deeds done. Hiding the extent of one’s transactions only served to magnify their size in the eyes of ordinary people, and the effect was clear in joyful retellings of big-men having wagered their fortunes and even their wives on a game of rugby played across the sea. Aside from this one large wager, big-men were challenged to many smaller, satellite bets. Their affiliation to Blues or Maroons was well known, so some ‘lesser men’ with the opposite affiliation made their main wager (usually K10–K100) against them; for the big-man, this was a sait-bet (‘side bet’). This practice was exclusively male, demonstrating that the overt political machinations involved in gambling were still the domain of men. ‘Lesser men’ knew big-men had to accept the wager or lose face. They perceived the bikpela bet (lit. ‘big bet’) as feeding their reputation and the ‘side bets’ as a kind of duty. To accept ‘small’ challenges encouraged those people to come to you when they were in crisis. In practice, this meant asking big-men for financial support for a ceremonial event. The number and size of bets they drew quantified their status and concretized a field of reciprocal support that big-men could use to their advantage. The initial direction of the transfer was less important than the tie itself. Even so, it would have been unwise to wager too much, so I think big-men preferred to retire from public view when they felt they had bet enough, for I often had a hard time tracking them down in the hours preceding the game. Big-men said large single bets were more beneficial to their ‘name’ because news of such a wager would travel more widely. Like the flute-playing of a sub-clan whose member had given a large pig to a festival, news of a big-man’s exploits allowed kin members to bask in the collective glory (Read 1952: 19). In this sense, the single large bet was also a collective bet, even if big-men were at pains to assert their singular control over it. When their team lost, the financial muscle of their clan is most evident in their ability to absorb its loss. Just like communal bets, win or lose, the destiny of one’s winnings were compromised, becoming subject to all kinds of requests, which was why it made sense to wager something like a car: it could be loaned out or used to ferry people about without being taken from the owner. Money committed to a wager represented a public sum by definition because knowledge of it

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required distribution. The large bet, being public, was of the same order as a bridewealth payment because it was by Gorokan definition already a collective sum in potentia. Still, the oppositional character was different from that seen in a Wok Meri group, a Chalinj game, at a pokie joint or at life-cycle events like Pasde’s bridewealth. The two big-men who were engaged in a big bet may have been friendly competitors in leadership, and the smaller bettors were supporters of their big-man. So far, so similar; however, supporters were actually in direct competition with their patrons. A great deal of wealth may have arrived or departed, but the onus fell directly upon the leader and not the leader as collective individual (contra Feil 1987). Unlike pokies, or Wok Meri, or a bridewealth, there was no financial support, only a willingness to support them in future. Instead, the aesthetic of accumulation took on an extreme potlatch dimension. It expressed the capacity of a big-man to already have wealth, to have access to wealth outside his kin base and/or to already have control of the wealth of his kin; he had to be able to absorb both the actions of other bigmen competitively transacting with him and his supporters simultaneously. State of Origin betting was therefore risky for big-men, so no wonder talk of big bets outstripped observed cases. Across State of Origin collective wagers, it seems higher value was placed on wealth that was composed of multiple contributions; that they were the proper form that transfers should have taken in assemblage situations. Bigmen, brides and assemblages of young boys alike, all seemed to want to bring people together in transactions and create Gorokan-style collective ties. Thus the collective wager was an aspirational analogue of the large bet made by a single big-man, itself an iteration of the oppositional ‘pooling unit’-making actions of bride-prices and Wok Meri assemblages. Yet the ambiguity of a bet-as-contribution’s destination can lead to some unusual social forms, most notably the big-man as lone potlatcher. In the Light of the Great Plains

The Pawnee of the Great Plains – like a great many Native American tribes – have their own tradition of gambling described lovingly by Alexander Lesser (1969 [1933]: 124–54). Their hand games placed a similar emphasis on collective contest to the pooled bets I saw in Goroka but were inflected in another direction that reflects light back on the pragmatic underpinnings of Gorokan pooled contests. Before 1890, their hand game consisted of two opposing sides consisting entirely of men representing each of two residentially separated bands (or sometimes tribes) with friendly relations. One band or tribe set out to visit the other for the purpose of gambling, jocularly calling their excursion

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a ‘warpath’ against their hosts. Visiting men asked female kin to supply them with their own blankets and other forms of wealth to supplement their stakes before they left. When they arrived at their hosts, the visitors were inevitably outnumbered. While the men played, their chiefs watched on benevolently but did not play themselves. Those with ties to the opposing party sometimes chose to play for them against their own band; if they won, these players risked a scolding from their own. Each round involved two guessers, each chosen for their ability by the leader of the respective sides. This was done by giving them a single counter. The two guessers faced off, each trying to guess which of their opponent’s two hands contained the counter. When one guesser successfully guessed the correct hand and their opponent failed, both counters were given to the winner’s side. Then two players from the winning side of this preliminary contest tried to deceive the losing guesser from the initial contest in another round of guessing. If he failed to guess correctly twice more, the side that held the counters gained two points. If he got one wrong, they gained one point and played again for the remaining counter. If either he won this last round or got both right at the first time of trying, then he returned to his own team with both counters, having either given away one or no points respectively. At that point, the concealers became the guessers, and the erstwhile guessers got a chance to earn points themselves. A guesser was goaded and taunted mercilessly by the concealers’ team while in ‘enemy territory’, and the whole team moved rhythmically together to lull and disorientate him. Meanwhile, the concealer himself attempted to trick his opponent with subtle gestures, animal imitations and, if he saw an opportunity, a lightning switch of counters between his hands. Between rounds there were songs, dances and tales in which the protagonists bragged of bravery shown in war and then their plundering of the enemy’s possessions. A complicated tally was kept of the score using tally sticks, but the reality was that games ended once a band had lost everything they could bet. The games were thus directly confrontational in a manner resembling chalinj contests and big-men’s State-of-Origin bets in Goroka. Another instructive distinction was that among Pawnee, although the number of players on either side was uneven, bets were made individually, man against man, and so the pot was even. There was little attempt to seek out a fitting man to bet against, but after an item was lost, losers sought out the winner for the opportunity to reclaim their lost item in the following round. Cloth was wagered against meat, leggings against blankets. The two items were then tied together, and all heaped together in a single pile before the leaders. After each round, the winners took their individual prizes back to their piles of valuables. One’s winnings provided the stake for the next round, plus or minus what the losers were able to put up.

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The differences are as intriguing as the similarities in a comparison that spans 120 years and the world’s largest ocean. The Pawnee did not gamble through their leaders, who usually refrained from playing. Winning and losing was down to the players, not some distant event. There was no ambiguity about who was challenging who. Women did not participate in any way and were not even present despite contributing. There was no bookkeeper; accounting was done by tying individual bets together. Bettors did not amalgamate their bets into a single total, despite heaping them together. Each side avoided the problem of matching their total bets because they bet individually and then pooled the bets. The converse was also true, that the imbalance did not generate its own attractive potential. Any imbalance could simply be put aside for the next round of betting. This practice in particular would have appeared ridiculous for my Gorokan interlocutors. If we assume that it must have taken different amounts of effort to obtain a slab of beef compared to a blanket, the practice of staking them as if they were even seems especially jarring. And yet they made equivalent units of them anyway. On the other hand, the betting was organized in rounds and was conducted in collective opposition among those with whom one married. The etiquette allowing a loser the chance to bet against the winner of the last round was also very apparent. I suggest the differences lie in the fact Pawnee gambling was mock warfare in which individual exploits led to individual gains. To the killer go the spoils. In warfare, men raised their standing within their band through the personal acquisition of scalps that were often worn as ornaments (Van de Logt 2008). These were direct challenges. Even if the stakes were materially unequal, the challenge was equal between two individuals doing battle in the context of the collective war. The possibility for generating value comparisons through the consolidation of components within this one-way transfer was curtailed by the maxim that contest was primarily about comparing individual combatants. In Goroka, war was modelled in gambling by chalinj, reflecting local styles of warfare involving pitched battles that were also called ‘challenge’ (Downs 1978: 235), rather than the life-cycle events that centre on pooling. Pooled gambling in Goroka instead takes its shape from collectivizing forms of transaction in which the organizing principle is the collective individual as wealth. In this, we need look no further for an archetype than the collaboratively nurtured but practically indivisible bride (see also Maclean 1984: 50). Gorokan male fantasies about big-men betting their wives, or Wok Meri groups giving money stylized as a bride, reveal a gendered understanding of wealth as ideally collected and rendered impressive through analogy to female (re)productive potential. The reproductive capacity of the bride augments their value, turning the wealth that is given at the bridewealth payment into more than the sum of its value. As was the case for my previous gambling examples, the process enhances the capacity of money to attract yet more

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money, adding the pragmatic effects of symbolism to utility-centred models of value. As a point of contrast to the Gorokan material, the Pawnee case opens our eyes to the intricate mesh of social values inherent to collective economic practice and their effects. Conclusion

Goroka divided itself for a day into Blues and Maroons, radically reimagining relationships upon deliberately frivolous, cross-cutting lines and in the process concocting a carnival atmosphere. The event was truly national, splitting much of Papua New Guinea into a simple opposition that united strangers against existing kin, something rarely seen in Melanesian ethnography (but see Reed 2003; cf. Foster 2002). The opposition played out at many levels, not just wagering, but bets took novel forms as unpredestined one-way transfers restricted to two dyadic directions. The destination was deliberately given over to an impervious outside force. Free to put cause down to another, a bet became a one-way transfer to be consumed and enjoyed in good-natured opposition. What I called ‘pooling’ was a far-reaching Gorokan pragmatic; its variants recurred again and again on different occasions. Gorokans made such transactions with both consummate familiarity and tense anticipation. Collectivizing and then making one-way transfers made those transactions worthwhile, adding to the tropes of monetary engagement. Understanding the local value of money and the social connections that create it therefore required yet another conceptual ‘distortion’ away from my assumptions about the way money worked. Collective bets and big-men’s bets (just like bridewealth and Wok Meri) encouraged people to make specific monies part of a larger whole and in so doing manipulated the properties of that money. One final incongruity should lead the book into its conclusion. It is telling that Wok Meri participants were scathing about gambling, calling it unproductive of new wealth (Sexton 1987: 41–42). At that time, in the 1970s and 1980s, local gambling activity only took the form of individual bettors of the kwin or bom type and did not involve the pooling activity seen at State of Origin time. I suspect that just as those who normally deplore gambling often have a flutter on State of Origin, Wok Meri participants would have found pooled bets much more palatable because the desire to consume money in betting turned money into a vehicle for inclusion, instead of excluding others through denominational difference (you have K10, I have K5). Theirs is a commentary on the types of pragmatics made available by gambling, and that is also my object in the conclusion. Their stance also reminds us that these forms, including opinions of them, are in flux; they have yet to settle and are likely to remain at the forefront of changes in the future.

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Notes  1. Gorokan ideas of what authentic ‘culture’ was fits broadly into existing ethnographic descriptions (see Foster 1992; Otto 1992).  2. Not so in the case of food items (K586 against K1,100).  3. S. Robbins (1982: 89–93). For other Highland examples, see Brown and Brookfield (1959); Feil (1987).  4. For the few exceptions, see Wilde (2004); Foster (2006); Little (2016), and short references in Imbun (1995); Skeldon (1980); Standish and Standish (1974).  5. See Bashkow (2006).  6. Sub-Saharan Africans and other dark-skinned people were considered to share ancestry with New Guineans (as opposed to ‘white people’, who were ‘more distantly related’).  7. Jokes portraying idiocy were often regionally framed, in this case directed against ‘Coastal’ people by ‘Highlanders’.  8. Sexton (1982: 189); see also M. Strathern (1988).  9. See also Sexton (1982); Read (1952); Watson (1983: 55). 10. See Sykes (1999) for a discussion of how over-consumption alienated young people, who were unable to participate in exchanges in their home villages because of their obligation to reciprocate with fellow townsmen. 11. Sykes (1999) focuses on the personal realization of alienation during consumption. My stance among (primarily) permanent town dwellers is that people found value in these consumptive acts when they were their primary mode of transaction. 12. See Feil (1987: 260) for a characterization of Eastern Highland exchange events that matches this description perfectly. 13. This was another reason that gambling was play, and antithetical to work, because nobody claimed to have worked in setting up the ‘exchange’. Wok Meri groups also described their savings as a mode of work (Sexton 1982: 176), presumably because savings were wealth that had purposefully been kept antecedent to exchange.



 Conclusion

A. Strathern’s The Rope of Moka (1971) marked a paradigm shift in the economic anthropology of Melanesia, after which the literature began to move from describing production to illuminating how people created their social world through ‘exchange’ (transactions) (see Carrier 1992). Robert Foster’s book (1995b) could be seen as another watershed. It shifted the focus from exchange to consumption and the making of people at various scales through the consumption of (primarily) imported goods (see Gewertz and Errington 2010; Sykes 1999). Gambling was a feature of life in Papua New Guinea across this span of time, but it is not conventionally exchange-like, nor straightforwardly consumptive (even at pokies), and it is very seldom productive. Gambling seems concerned with churning production into exchange, exchange into consumption and consumption into exchange. It agitates these anthropological paradigms and I would hope moves them forward because it can be seen as instituting formal structures out of the transfers that make up production, consumption and particularly what has become known as ‘exchange’. This book has examined how economic practices take forms that echo their predecessors but are not defined by them and how spheres and the linkages between them are made and remade. Gambling games were a vehicle for a number of ever-shifting transactional repertoires that connected the town internally amongst residents and externally to anyone who knew the games. I therefore unpacked the way objects of value were gathered and then distributed in gambling, asking what kinds of transactional idioms (what I called pragmatics) were on display and how they were conveyed through gameplay. The material culture and rules of gambling were re-envisioned as a kind of imposed uniformity – a formalization – that allowed for interactions between members of a diverse and fluid populace. Gambling became a motif for relating, with attributes that were very comparable to those contained in other, better known Melanesian activities like kula, moka, bridewealth and trade practices as well as physically and/ or temporally distant pragmatics in Nigerian cassava markets, the London Stock Exchange and the Great Plains. To recap the main pragmatics I found, there was denominating (using large denominations to draw in smaller ones); unitizing (creating and

Conclusion 173

offering for transfer singular units made from composite products in favourable combinations); financing (circulating monetary obligations beyond kinship networks in one’s own name) and pooling (encouraging the formation of an other by gathering monies together and designating an event upon which you and the other should take opposing sides).1 These do not constitute a total repertoire, and each involved variations that (if they were described by someone else) might demand a change in description and nomenclature. In this way, they follow the open-ended transformative potential that I tried to bring out in my characterization of the history and continual transformation of Goroka and its popular gambling games. One way these pragmatics can be juxtaposed is through the notion of pooling (bungim mani, lit. ‘meeting money’) discussed in chapter seven. The major card games kwin and bom pooled money in every round, and people manipulated the pot with their contribution to attract it towards them. One set of pooled wealth was not opposed to another. The pooled money returned to a single member of the original ‘pooling unit’ after each round as a one-way transfer, to be used as they pleased. Chalinj and State also pooled money, and this time the pooling was oppositional: one bet contributed to by multiple parties against another of the same order. Yet chalinj was not winner-takes-all (like State of Origin), because the incumbent could decide how much they wanted to wager from their overall winnings. This served to increase the pooled wealth during the course of the day, keeping a residual sum that offered the prospect of a multidirectional redistribution. State of Origin meanwhile was winner-takes-all, and it placed greater responsibility on wealthy people, who could absorb big losses from many people at the same time. Kwin, bom, chalinj and State were all variants upon the theme of pooling and distributing. Interestingly, while the mediums each used (playing cards and rugby league) were undoubtedly exogenous, they were all perceived to be indigenous-style games. The way they were played was thought to be PNGspecific, even if, as in the case of bom and chalinj, the kind of attitude that it promoted was not a valued form of ‘Melanesianness’. The exception was pokies, which was considered alien and did not involve pooling. It is striking that all the gambling events that involved pooling were thought to be indigenous-style games even when using exogenous materials and events; meanwhile, pokies were considered manifestly exogenous, and people did not consider pooling their wealth in opposition to it, perhaps because its agency interacted with them in an exogenous, non-pooling style. Instead, pokies retained the status of exogenous transactant that had to be coaxed individually. Rather than paying attention to an external and thus fair medium for intra-Gorokan wagers (cards and rugby league), pokie players bet head on against an outside agent that did not care about their relationships. This was (not coincidentally) also how most Gorokans believed that ‘white

174  Money Games

people’ thought about their interactions. An agent (the machine or white person) acted individually and required a person to interact with it in a way that ignored one’s relations (Bashkow 2006).2 This also happens to be the kind of gambling that has a house edge, or as Gorokans put it, a ‘profit’, something that Europeans were thought better at generating. The exogenous agent was also tellingly a machine that did not care about you; i.e. a stereotypical image of ‘white people’s’ motivations and desires. The logic of distribution that the machines adhered to was (again not coincidentally) considered opaque and was associated with urban elites. This was not a fair representation of ethnic Europeans, but it was a fair representation of the kinds of transaction pragmatics that are often forefronted by ethnic Europeans during their interactions with ethnic Papua New Guineans. I will return to these matters shortly. Gambling offers a reflective vantage point on money as a measure of value, and in Goroka this manifests itself through the idiom of bungim moni (lit. ‘meeting money’, pooling money). This reflection is possible because gambling prioritizes subjective forms of valuation rather than comparative forms. Gambling therefore appears to formalize actions into rules in a very particular way. When valuables are consolidated for a bet, there is no requirement that a participant’s subjective valuation of the wealth they bet aligns with their competitors. We do not have to agree that both your £10 and my £10 mean the same to us in the same way that a shopkeeper and a customer in a market economy agree that the customer’s £10 is worth the same to the shopkeeper as their willingness to sell their customer a particular book. Concentrating on gambling distilled everyday, messy transactions into ideal-type pragmatics because games replicate situations over and over again, creating a frame for playful action with limited variations. Formal, playful competitions like gambling are ‘relentless generators of new scales of value [that function] by drawing participants and audience into a scalar logic, a monetary logic, and a mode of binding the two’ (Guyer 2004: 52). The act of formalization in Gorokan gambling was reiterative, performative and anti-definitive. The kinds of gambling that occurred relentlessly stressed the importance of collectivizing wealth in order to increase its potency, either together with others or exclusively with machines. Once they had made their bet, they had the opportunity to influence that collectivized wealth and try to bring it home. This is a feature of all gambling, but in Goroka this aspect is particularly stressed, allowing for unusual kinds of money manipulation. The rules and mathematics of Gorokan gambling (like many other important Melanesian activities) were consciously geared towards making subtle expressions by manipulating transfers and with them the value of money. Value – in Goroka but one could make the argument anywhere – has never been inherent, not in notes, coins, betel nut, cigarettes, gold or anything for that matter. It takes power to institute and maintain value. In Goroka, the

Conclusion 175

slipperiness of value comes close to economists’ received notion of money’s value fluctuating with exchange rates and inflation (see Gregory 1997). But Gorokan value play is more ingrained, more daily, more fluctuating, more personal (see Munn 1986). It was possible for a particular piece of money to hold many values at once – not between markets but between husband and wife – depending on what someone decides to do with it, where they put it, how they attempt to get more of it, who they know and who knows they have it. Without consensus on the measuring system for the value of transactables, the intention of small-scale actors to manipulate value became visible. In Goroka intentional value was generalized (see Sahlins 1981: 69). Monetary quantity became a negotiable quality that could be manipulated for the needs of those who recognized it as flexible (see also Guyer 2004: 12). This occurred within constraints set by conventions both material and conceptual. Those efforts included strategically hiding, revealing, pooling, investing and juxtaposing money, other wealth objects and even people. Money, objects and people all had their own constraints on the way they could become units. Some of the kinds of units that people could create were considered traditional and inherently valuable, such as creating parties to a bridewealth payment; others were negative, like the individual who plays chalinj and becomes violent. They could also change the kind of unitization they used based on the expectancy of a repeat transaction, making for a difference between short-termist, fast unitizations and slow, long-termist unitizations. The worst people, i.e. the ‘rubbish people’ or the ‘money-men’, failed to participate in strategic unitization at all, either because they had too little or too much. Unitization was clearly likewise in play during Yoruba market transactions in Nigeria in the support or otherwise of the Kongo cup; by the tying together of stakes during Pawnee gambling; by the aggregation of market activity into the numbers on the screens of London’s futures traders; between Montezuma and Cortés as gambling opponents and their attendants and soldiers as supplicants. Each had their own subtle inflections that I used to highlight the particularity of Gorokan unit-play. When value is up for grabs in this way, the materiality of gameplay also becomes crucially important: the hue of the banknotes, the glossiness of the deck of cards, the dust kicked up by passing 4x4s, the freshness of the stimulants on sale: all are vital. All permit some possibilities and preclude others, and so the creativity is enveloped within budding pragmatics that emerge at the interface of evolving local ideas and material constraints. This is not the same ‘creativity’ that exists within the bounds set by capitalism. PNG has an official market economy in which the value of K2 qua K20 is set, but in the informal economy, making up the huge bulk of transactions, that K2 can be stretched or squashed into having more or less value at the moment of transfer. This is because of expectations, relationships, the ability to hide, to reveal

176  Money Games

and to limit the conditions of exchange. In those conditions, the materiality of gameplay gains a greater importance than it would otherwise. People innovate at the borders between the different transactive orders, and this can ‘distort’ the ‘rationality’ of the market in PNG. Or, as I argue, we should search for a new conceptual repertoire that can deal with ubiquitous ‘distortion’. This was why I argued in the introduction for an approach to economy that operates centripetally and centrifugally from an individual transaction comprised of one or more transfers. If games involved idealized models of human relations, like the ‘corner’ in a game of kwin, then the pragmatics that emerge from them are idealized strategies for apprehending the world of human relations. There was conceptual scalability of pragmatics from cards to monies to people and to the largescale traditional ‘exchange’ events that have defined the regional literature. This complicated web of pragmatics allowed people to innovate continually, and one reason why this was so was the piecemeal nature of the distinctions and commonalities between pragmatics. To articulate all this in the way I think Gorokans saw it, the contours of relationships that were thought to be internal to gambling instruments like cards were analysed as idealized abstractions of a Gorokan lifeworld. This in turn begged the question: what is the local analogue to ‘abstraction’, and can it be appropriated as an analytical tool? I posited that the answer was paten (‘pattern’) and that it could. Instead of distantiated and dehumanized abstraction, ‘pattern’ was a drawing together of signs one cannot fully understand but which can be mobilized in a manner that will prove one’s approach correct or incorrect then and there and yet never yield either a knowable essence or reproducibility. Gambling was a motif for relating, but the ideas and realities in play during games changed the pattern, and as they did so, more patterns appeared fleetingly, offering a record of ideas in motion; each record changed the ideas once again. And so the pattern changed as people played with money. I nevertheless attempted to develop pragmatics that accounted both for novel phenomena and long-standing Melanesian interests. I therefore saw my approach to temporal change as crucial, and it was driven by the idea of change that seemed built into gambling. In chapter two, I used the Tok Pisin phrase paten senis (lit. ‘the pattern changes changes’) to illustrate the way in which games model change in their own transformations. Change was not progressive or uniform; it was psychic, uneven and led by the sociological make-up of the population: in one mature psychic domain change was gradual; in another youthful domain it was drastic, and both those currents had their own momentum that could impact the other like a weather front. In turn, each innovation elaborates and creates new boundaries for future formalisms, and so a pattern comes forward in a new guise to interact with all

Conclusion 177

the other patterns. Dealing with time and money in the local style was to stare into the pattern and look for an opening. This was my ethnographic answer to the supposed problem of change and continuity in Melanesia. One problem remained no matter how much the pattern changed: the exogenously imposed common scale of wealth meant that parts of the pattern were rigged. Rigging

I began this book asserting that local ways of transacting are not irrational mistakes distorting the formal economy. They are instead important areas of innovation at the frontier between different ways of seeing the world. To instead pay attention to them, I said, requires theorization that is also locally inflected. We would be better served in this aim if we began by understanding economies through local pragmatics conceived at the micro-level of economic ‘transfers’, and in order to see the frontiers between economic registers in the clearest possible form, I said we should begin with playful economic activities. Gambling, in particular, repetitively reinforced certain types of transaction and offered players a way to think imaginatively about those transactions and their relationship to the wider world. Before closing the document, I want to underline that this is not the same thing as suggesting that value was completely plastic and democratic. The play of value that occurred in Goroka did not generate enough value or disturb prevailing valuations enough to have a noticeable impact on the accepted rules of money much beyond its own region within Papua New Guinea, itself a minnow on the global stage. Gorokans did not and do not stand in a leadership position where they could dictate which kinds of pragmatic (and which strategy within a pragmatic) held prescience over others in their transactions with powerful external actors, and that means that they were and are vulnerable to exploitation, whether that exploitation is well-intentioned or repellent. The reach of state and financial institutions was visible at places like the three banks, in the taxation and spending power of branches of government, in the fluctuating buyers’ price of coffee, and in the administration of pokie joints. By legislative fiat (and the mathematics that underwrites it), it was decreed that a sum of money is a unit made up of its composite denominations that are tied to each other in fixed ratios: K10 is always ten times K1. Institutions mandated the assumption of mathematical perfection. Through the continued efforts of these institutions and interests, the constituent units of currency are rendered theoretically interchangeable. But the capacity to regulate this is piecemeal in a country where most of the population depends on the informal sector as well as on subsistence farming. At all times, monies were subject to significant situational efforts to restrict that interchangeability

178  Money Games

for the purpose of magnifying value. This was imperfection assumed. The situation was perpetuated and innovated upon by everyone, taking idiosyncratic local forms, of which the topography of gambling was representative. And yet, the impersistence of a ‘correct’ numerical ratio between scales did not make anyone seasick except the occasional anthropologist. Taking this position meant adjusting the assumptions of certain money theories, particularly that money is by definition abstract because the calculations made with it are number-based; and that mathematical abstraction always means distantiation from the human realm. Money became marked plasticated paper and metal shapes whose numerical value is set as commensurable and fungible but whose value in use is momentarily distilled by the situations in which monies are separated from or brought into conjunction with each other and with other agents. Monies had their values manipulated to elicit distinctions between people. Within that fluidity laid the formal relationships of numerical amounts of money to each other, to other currencies, to commodities and to rules of ownership, all of which were sustained to some degree by the global fiscal hegemony. The importance of these anchoring or tropic points was occasionally invoked and other times ignored, together with the other pragmatics everyone used and that I have described at length. Together, they shaped the economy and were reshaped by canny individuals whose concern was turning value to their advantage. Pragmatics analogous to the ones that I observed in Goroka around gambling are diminished or sidelined in heavily regulated post-industrial economies. They often fall into the realm of informal economic activity among those in poverty, becoming survival techniques. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, analogous kinds of play are cordoned off to global elites. Using large sums to draw in smaller ones, using informal networks to bolster one’s business dealings, creating one’s own business partners by tender, selective secrecy and revelation are all business practices. The very rich can play with money, use capital gains to offset income tax, take up residence in a tax haven and manipulate bankruptcy laws to shed debts. Meanwhile, the project of tracking the tit-for-tat that links transfers up into accumulated capital only seems to get harder by the year. These lucrative avenues for accumulation are not available to your average middle class UK mortgage holder, let alone a low-wage immigrant worker. The exploration of money (and the forms of wealth it can be sedimented in) by the very rich sets the conditions for the standard of value that is denoted to the poverty stricken and marginalized through, among many other things, the currency system. How that system works through flexibility is hidden from average people like the inner workings of a slot machine. While Gorokans undoubtedly innovated, Gorokan understandings of the workings of global hegemony were no more complete than anybody else’s,

Conclusion 179

and their critiques are often jarringly off point. A common opinion heard in the street goes like this: white people’s business dealings are effective because they appear not to be corrupt. White people are disinterested and are unaffected by family feeling, they listen only to the truth, will tolerate nothing less, and only speak plainly. This together with their education and connection to global centres makes them successful and virtuous business people. Some even see skin colour as a sign of being among those chosen by their creator for an eternity of plenty. To some extent, this is how white people have presented themselves and to some extent this form of self-representation has been accepted. The experiences of indigenous resource-rich landowners and politicians would no doubt tell a different story, but the stereotype persists in any case. That white people and white people’s commercial practices ignored or deliberately effaced relationships and the kinds of pragmatics and value manipulation that were enabled by their recognition is not all that much of a surprise. Indeed, this is best understood as a common Melanesian inflection of the anti-capitalist/anti-colonialist cultural critique. It has merit. What is sometimes (but by no means always) lacking in places like PNG is a critique of crony capitalism because cronyism is racially associated with failed Papua New Guinean attempts to build businesses. Papua New Guineans self-describe as ‘black’, and many lament the moral failure of ‘black’ people as evidenced in their lack of ‘development’. Some Papua New Guineans see themselves as the sons of Cain, murderers of the ‘white’ Abel, carrying with them all the sin and the weight of bad fortune that attends it until the time of resurrection. These are people who feel, to paraphrase J. Robbins, pinned down by the weight of relations (2004). Effective Papua New Guinean critiques of economic pragmatics at the heart of capitalism are disarmed by this self-immolating racial discourse. White business people and development agencies appear to want transparent dealings in the face of a perceived problem of corruption, but their use of exclusionary pragmatics occurs beyond local view. Recognition of universal value manipulation is a step towards addressing this imbalance. In Goroka, local ways of reckoning rub against the fixity that marks out the state, global commodities prices and international trade and demand for resources, but the friction is not really felt by these external forces, and Goroka remains geopolitically inconsequential as an economic frontier. Gorokans are not able to exert much influence over those external factors by, for instance, choking the supply of precious metals or fossil fuels to the market. Nevertheless, economic conditions as they present themselves are still subject to circuits of influence that shape local politics and value. In Goroka, gambling connected people through circuits of transaction that bridged Melanesian pragmatics and wider economic tropes and conditions. While Gorokans’ individual efforts to affect value may not affect the reader directly, the pragmatics I uncovered in Goroka resonate beyond Melanesia

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and more broadly than gambling. That which is notionally rendered equivalent can and does take flights of fancy while ostensibly remaining the same within the global money system. From this tension, new forms of value will undoubtedly emerge, so Papua New Guinea will be worth watching. Notes   1. See also Pickles (2013a; 2017).  2. This was part of the secret to white people’s ability to follow time rather than becoming side tracked by people.

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Index 

abbia game, 50–51 abstraction, 61, 67–68, 85–89, 139, 176, 178 accounting procedures, 94, 117, 123, 132, 151–55 ‘action’, 69 addiction, 17n1, 90n4, 122, 147n2 agency of cards, 51 conception of one’s own, 48–49, 61–62 pivot relationships and, 45–46 aidia (‘ideas’, tactics), 44–45, 56, 61, 138–39 Akin, D., 102, 113–14 ant/grasshopper fable, 12 Asian Development Bank, 72 assemblages big-men’s followers as, 130–31, 143 higher value of wealth from, 167 new patterns of, 23 in produce marketing, 107–8 State of Origin viewers/bettors as, 162– 63, 164 use of term, 20, 155 Wok Meri finance groups as, 148, 151, 160–61 Australia, 24, 91n8, 94, 123, 156 autotelic vs. instrumental structure of games, 13 axes, 28, 45 Aztecs, 83, 91n18, 175 Baikuru, I., 53 Banking, 68, 71–72 barter model of value, 109–10 Bateson, G., 13, 14 ‘befriending’ (prenim), 102 Belasco, B., 109 Bemobile Cup Rugby League, 157 betel nut markets commuting to, 80

gambling, communion with, 94, 95–96, 104–6, 115–16 popularity of gambling in, 4, 5 role of, 94–97, 111–12 selling tactics in, 112–14, 114tab big-men descriptions of, 125–29, 132–33 distributions by, 128, 130–33, 134 followers of, 128, 130–34, 140, 145–46, 166 pokies mates (fellow big-men), 140–45 State of Origin betting by, 165–67 bisnis (‘business’), 103, 178–179 blok card game, 43 blood, dirty/clean, 49–50, 105–06 bluffing, 43, 71 bom (‘bomb’) card game, 41, 42fig, 43, 53–58, 60–63, 173 bounding play, 11 Brandewie, E., 25, 51 brands of cards, 36–37 bridewealth, 66, 135, 148, 150–55, 161, 162 bungim moni (‘meeting money’), 174 business ownership, 103, 132–33 Caillois, R., 11–12, 13, 18n11 Cameroon, 50 Campbell, J., 52 card brands, 36–37 card games causality and, 47–53 diversification in types of, 33, 41–43 gender roles and, 32–36 historic spread of, 24–26, 32 surveyed percent playing, 4 See also bom; chalinj; kwin; ‘lucky’ cash, Gorokan concepts and terms, 71–73. See also denominations casino capitalism, 3 causality, 47–53

198  Index

centrality, 96 chalinj (‘challenge’) card game, 42fig, 94, 96, 97–100, 114–17, 169, 173 chance, perceptions of games as, 70, 75, 82 change (in patterns). See paten/paten senis senis charms, 49–50 Chinese card brands, 36–37 Chuave betel nut market, 5, 95–96, 98, 111–14 closed games, 12–13 coercion, 48–49 coffee growing, 21–22, 28–29, 33, 35, 108–9 cognatic, use of term, 20 collective betting. See pooling of wealth collective consumption, 163–64 collective individual, as wealth, 169–70 Colombia, 92n19 commodification, 28–29 commodities, 96–97 condensed reality, 13–14 ‘corner’ (kona), 43–46, 104–5, 106 ‘corner man’ (kona man), 43–44, 46, 61, 105 Cortés, Hernán, 83, 91n18, 175 Cox, J., 3 credit, 72 Damon, F.H., 46, 47, 59, 65n27 denominations disability/indivisibility of, 66–67, 73–81, 82, 91n15, 177–78 large drawing in smaller, 74–75, 79, 89–90 at pokies, 129, 134, 136, 142–43 diplomacy, 83 dokta bom card game. See bom domestic violence, 35 economic theory, 86–89 economy, use of term, 6–7 edge, 1–2, 43, 68, 174 Eiss, P.K., 84 employment business income vs., 132 marketing vs., 103, 117 Enga speaking peoples, 125–27

Epstein, T.S., 108, 110 exchange consumption, production and, 172 gambling vs., 6, 8, 28–29 use of term, 7 See also gift exchange; reciprocation; transfers exogenous vs. indigenous games, 173 ‘face’, 75–76 faiv lip (‘five leaves’) card game, 42fig, 64n26 Feil, D.K., 30–31 fetishization, 86–87, 92n19 fifti-fifti (50:50, muddled feeling), 48 Fiji, 3 finance/financing big-men and, 125–29, 131–34, 140–45 bridewealth, 66, 135, 148, 150–55, 161, 162 Wok Meri groups, 148, 151, 153, 154, 155, 160–61, 164, 170, 171n13 financial inclusion, 72 Foster, R., 172 frontiers, 7, 9 functionalism, 69, 70 futures traders, 121, 134, 136, 139–40, 144, 146, 175 Gahuku-Gama people, 24–25 gambling anthropological understandings of, 68–71, 75–76, 80–81, 122 formalization of, 174 introduction and spread of, 2, 23–26, 31–32 legal prohibition of, 23–24, 25–26 as motif for relating, 172 role of, 28–30 surveyed incidence of in Goroka, 4 use of term, 7–8 gambling industry, 90n4, 91n8, 121–23, 146, 147n2 games as modelling life, 41, 62, 176 play and, 9–14, 39n16 typology of, 11–12

Index 199

Gaming Control Act (2007), 122–23 gardening, 103 Geertz, Clifford, 97 Gende people, 3 gender coffee growing and, 33, 35, 108–9 gambling and, 35–36, 59 marketing and, 108–9 traditional roles, 30–33, 34 generosity, 49 gift exchange, 26–29, 78. See also kula exchange; moka exchange Goffman, Erving, 69 golf, 32, 145 Goroka as PNG gambling capital, 4, 19–20 profile in history of, 20–23 Graeber, D., 92n21 grasshopper/ant fable, 12 Gururumba people, 26, 162 Guyer, J., 81, 88–89, 108 Hadza gambling game, 70 Hagen area/people, 59, 78 haia (‘higher’) card game, 42fig hap (‘half ’), 91n13 Highlanders Eastern vs. Western, 154–55 in politics, 120 stereotypes of, 19–20 hi-lo games, 4 horse racing, 3, 4 house edge, 1–2, 43, 68, 174 Huizinga, J., 10–12, 13, 14, 17n10, 18n11 ideas (aidia), 43–44, 56, 61, 138–39 igba-ita game, 116–17 Igbo people, 116–17 inclusion, 72, 162, 170 indigenous vs. exogenous games, 173 inequality development and, 21–22 gambling as result of, 2–3 in post-industrial global economy, 178 slot machines/pokies and, 122, 124, 125, 135–36, 146

inflation in gift economies, 28–29, 78 relational, 78 of valuables, 32–33 insurance, proxies for, 143 jelas pasin (‘jealous passion’), 49 Kakaruk betel nut market, 5, 95–96, 111–14 kik (‘kick’), 43–44 knowledge, 61–62 kona (‘corner’), 43–46, 104–5, 106 kona man (‘corner man’), 43–44, 46, 61, 105 ‘kongo cup’, 107, 175 Korfena people, 25–26 kula exchange delayed reciprocity of, 27 description of, 40 kwin, analogy with, 46–47, 51–53 life stage and, 57–58 kwin (‘queen’) card game, 41, 42fig, 43–47, 56–58, 60–63, 173 labour theory of value, 84–85 laki. See ‘lucky’ laki kat (‘lucky card’), 51 las kat (‘last card’), 42fig, 43 Laycock, D., 25 Lederman, R., 125–26, 128–29, 145 legal prohibitions, 23–24, 25–26 leisure, 10 Lesser, A., 167 ‘lesser men’, 128, 130–34, 140, 145–46, 166 Little, C., 76, 159 loans, 72 lok (‘lock’), 73–77 ‘lucky’ (laki) card game diversification into new games, 33, 41–43, 97 as early gambling game, 24, 25, 26 speed of, 33, 56, 98 ludus, 11–12 luk (‘look’, a free turn), 81–82, 86, 104

200  Index

machines pokies, role of at, 121, 123–24, 139–40, 143–44, 174 State of Origin slot machines, 123, 138, 157 MacKenzie, D.A., 94 magic, 3, 37, 49–53, 92n19, 105–6 maketim (street selling), 15–16 Malaby, T.M., 39n16 Malinowski, B., 52 mancala, 41, 43, 64n10 ‘maniman’ (money-man), 131–32, 175 marginal/marginality, use of term, 7 market pragmatics, 94, 100–104, 115–16 Marx, K., 84–85 mathematics, 67–71, 73–74, 85–89 Maurer, B., 87, 88 Mauss, M., 27–28 ‘meeting money’ (bungim moni), 174 ‘Melanesian Way’, 47, 55, 57–58, 63 Melpa people, 28, 58–59, 125–27 Mendi people, 125–26 Mermaid High Quality brand cards, 36–37 metacommunication, 13–14 microfinance, 72 migration, 21, 23 Mimica, J., 47–48 misogyny, 30–31, 35, 135 Mitchell, W.E., 70 moka exchange, 40, 58–59, 61, 126 money abstracted, 85–89 bom, as focus of in, 55–56, 57–58 devaluation of in pokies, 142 divisibility/indivisibility of, 66–67, 73–81, 91n11 gender roles and, 32–35 Gorokan concepts and terminology, 71–73 increased value of in pooling, 163, 167 introduction of, 25–26, 33 manipulation of value of, 174–80 as quality indicator, 112–13 money-man (‘maniman’), 131–32, 175 Montezuma, 83, 91n18, 175 moralities, 85–89 Mosko, M.S., 3, 47–48, 51

Munn, N., 88–89 Murray, H., 23–24 Muyuw Island, 46 National Alliance Party, 120 National Gaming Control Board, 122–23, 129 Native Americans, 167–70 Nelson, D., 87 Newman, P., 26, 162 Nigeria. See Igbo; Yoruba ol waitman (‘white people’), 144, 157, 173–74, 179 ‘one-man one-man’ (wan-man wan-man), 143–44 ‘one talk system’ (wantok sistem), 157 one-way transfers from big-men, 128, 130–33, 134 gambling as, 28 State of Origin betting and, 163, 164, 170 use of term, 7–8 Ongka’s Big Moka, 21, 26 open games, 12–13 paidia, 11–12 pasin (‘passion’), 49, 96, 118n3 paten/paten senis senis (pattern/pattern changes), 54–58, 61–63, 176–77 Pawnee tribe, 167–70, 175 paydays, 66 Pedersen, D., 84 perfumes, 51 pigs continued value of, 33 exchanges of, 21, 40, 58–59, 126–27, 150, 151 gender roles and, 30, 31 pilai laki (‘play luck’), 136–37 pivot relationships, 45–46 play, 9–14, 39n16 poker, 43 pokies (slot machine joints) big-men distributions and, 128, 130–33, 134 denominations at, 129, 134, 136, 142–43 destruction of value of money and, 16

Index 201

futures trading, comparisons to, 121, 134, 136, 139–40, 144, 146, 175 inequality/equality and, 122, 124, 125, 135–36, 146 machines, role of, 121, 123–24, 139–40, 143–44, 174 number of, 121 pokies mates (fellow big-men), 140–45 pragmatics of, 121, 124, 136–40 surveyed percent using, 4 Polanyi, K., 86 pooling, 16–17, 33, 173 bridewealth, 66, 135, 148, 150–55, 161, 162 pooling units, 153–54 for State of Origin betting, 4, 16–17, 148–49, 158–67, 173 Wok Meri groups, 148, 151, 153, 154, 155, 160–61, 164, 170, 171n13 pragmatics amity/antagonism and, 88 analogies between gambling and economic activity, 178–80 of bridewealth, 66, 135, 148, 150–55, 161, 162 of chalinj, 115–16 change and, 62 constraints on, 71–72 of markets, 94, 100–104, 107–11, 114tab, 115–16 of pokies, 121, 124, 136–40 scalability of, 176 of State of Origin betting, 158–67 use of term, 8, 9 valuations of people and, 89 of value, 81–85 See also denominations; finance; pooling; unitization prenim (‘befriending’), 102 Presterudstuen, G.H., 3 price strategies, in markets, 107–11 prime symbols, 88 probability, 67–71, 75–76 produce marketing, 106–11, 114tab ‘queen’ card game. See kwin

rational choice, 67–71 Read, K.E., 21, 24–25, 127 reciprocation, 26–27, 28, 59, 102, 140–43, 151–52 redistribution by big-men, 128, 130–33, 134 claims by gaming industry, 91n8 gambling as, 28, 82–83 State of Origin betting as, 163–64 Zimmer on, 29, 70 See also one-way transfers; transfers reduplication of verbs, 61, 65n27 Reefe, T.Q., 50 regionalism, 120 risk, 67–71, 121 Rizzo, J., 68 Robbins, J., 102, 113–14 Robbins, S., 153, 155 rugby. See Bemobile Cup Rugby League; State of Origin rugby league games Sabarl Island, 45 Sahlins, Marshall, 125 sait-bet (‘side bet’), 166 Salisbury, R.F., 24, 25, 125–26, 162 savings groups. See Wok Meri women’s financing groups Schüll, N.D., 121, 122, 147n2 senior men, 127 seven lip card game, 42fig, 43 Sexton, L., 148 shells, 28, 33, 40, 51–52, 57, 126–27. See also kula exchange Siane people, 25, 28, 162 Simbu Province, 32 Simmel, Georg, 85, 86, 87, 88, 118 skelim (‘scale’), 102 slot machine joints. See pokies speed of betel nut markets, 96, 111 bom as fast, 53, 54–55, 56–58 chalinj as fast, 94, 98, 116 as inventive, 63 kwin as slow, 44, 56–58 Spengler, O., 88 stail (‘style’), 138–39

202  Index

stakes in big-men State of Origin bets, 165–67 in chalinj, 100 denominations of money and, 66–67, 73–81, 82 imbalances and, 161–62 State of Origin rugby league games background to, 155–58 pooled betting on, 4, 16–17, 148–49, 158–67, 173 State of Origin slot machines, 123, 138, 157 Stewart, P.J., 59 Strathern, A., 51, 58–59, 126, 127, 145, 172 Strathern, M., 48–49, 78, 109, 110, 130 ‘style’ (stail), 138–39 subjective valuation, 8, 175 Suits, B., 12–13, 14 Taussig, M., 92n19 taxes, 123 thought, vs. speed, 57–58 ‘three leaves’ (tri-lip) card game, 24, 41, 42fig, 43, 97 Titanic (film), 53 transactional forms, 90 transactions, use of term, 6 transfers in betel nut marketing, 97, 101–3 between big-men, 140–43 by big-men to followers, 128, 130–33, 134 bridewealth, 66, 135, 148, 150–55, 161, 162 cash denomination and, 73–82 gambling as one-way, 28 informal networks of, 72 to losers, 104 profits vs., 124 State of Origin betting and, 163, 164, 170 use of term, 7–8, 40 See also redistribution tri-lip (‘three leaves’) card game, 24, 41, 42fig, 43, 97 Trobriand Islands, 3, 52, 59 tu bel (two stomachs, muddled feeling), 48

unemployment, 22 unitization, 107–11, 172–73, 175 valuables changing types and worth of, 32–33 use of term, 6 value conceptions of, 7, 71, 84–85, 117–18 manipulation of, 5–6, 8, 81–85, 90, 118, 174–80 shifts in, 72–73 Veblen, Thorstein, 10, 11 Verran, H., 88–89 Wagner, R., 62 waitman (‘white people’), 144, 157, 173–74, 179 wan, 12 wan-man wan-man (‘one-man one-man’), 143–44 wantok sistem (‘one talk system’), 157 warfare, 169 ‘washers’, 74 waste, 10, 11, 18n11 Weiner, A., 46, 51–52 white people (waitman), 144, 157, 173–74, 179 winman (win men), 32 witchcraft, 49 Wok Meri women’s financing groups accounting procedures of, 151, 153, 154, 155 ceremonies of, 160, 161 description of, 148 gambling, attitudes to, 171n13 value in consumption, 164 women coffee growing and, 33, 35, 108–9 gambling by, 35–36, 59, 159–60 misogyny, 30–31, 35, 135 produce marketing by, 108–9 as property, 165, 169–70 traditional roles of, 30–33, 34 work, concepts of, 103–4, 115, 117, 171n13

Index 203

Yoruba people, 107, 108–9, 110, 116, 175 young people bom, association with, 54, 55–66, 57–58 exporting of as labour, 21, 24–25 in Fiji, 3 gambling and rebellion among, 29 in Hagen, 59 initiation of, 30–31, 135 mixed gambling and, 33

as professional gamblers, 26 speed and, 57–58 State of Origin betting by, 160 Zaloom, C., 136, 139 Zelizer, V.A., 86, 87 Žižek, S., 87 Zimmer, L.J., 29, 70 Zimmer-Tamakoshi, L., 3