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They Make Themselves: Work and Play among the Baining of Papua New Guinea

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The Baining, who live not too far from Rabaul on New Britain, are a society without priests, gods, kings, philosophers, doctors, teachers, warriors, police or judges. Nor do they have any institutions, aside from the nuclear family. They do not divide in moieties or clans, nor do they have elaborate genealogies.

Gregory Bateson, a famous anthropologist, considered them "unstudiable."

Fifty years later, Bateson told Jane Fajans, who lived among the Baining in the 1970s, "They broke my heart; have they broken yours?"

"No," says Fajans, who was associate professor of anthropology at Cornell University when this book was published in 1997. But it had taken her close to two decades to work out how to explain this strange society.

The answers she arrives at are a standing challenged to just about every generalization about human society than anyone ever made. "Despite the absence of social sanctions, political hierarchy or sacred authority," writes Fajans, "the Baining have managed to maintain a distinctive social and cultural identity for over a century in the face of varied and often violent pressure for assimilation and change."

Most observers, including Fajans, describe the Baining as boring. Their goals in life are few and simple: They work in their gardens, they exchange food, they nurture children and support the aged who can no longer work. They have hardly any traditional stories, though they have narrative songs. They perform no rites and they do not gossip.

On the surface, there is not much for an ethnologist to analyze.

But in "They Make Themselves," Fajans offers a radical interpretation of the "Baining problem."

This is too complicated to summarize in a review, but the underlying notion is between "natural" and "social."

While it might be thought that a people without priests or police was as close to "natural" as one could get, in the Rousseauian sense, the Baining confound us by deploring the natural. They like the social, so much that they prefer adopted children, because they are the products of a socialization process, over their natural children, who are somewhat embarrassing. (Yet, only about a third of children are adopted out, not out of line with rates in other, highly ramified oceanic communities.)

Underlying most Baining activities is "the production of society through the transformation of natural ties into social ones." Thus, the Baining prefer cooked food to raw food.

Almost untouched by western ideas just a century ago, when they were cannibals, the Baining have been missionized and bureaucratized. Children now go to school. But Baining rarely abandon the old ways.

A very simple society -- Fajans calls it "radical egalitarian" or "egalitarian anarchy" -- it has great resilience.

But -- there is always a "but" with the Baining --resilience as a result of simplicity was not always a blessing. They were surrounded by slave-raiding neighbors, but with no organization larger than the family, they could not mount an effective defense. (When the Baining could grab slaves, they grabbed them, too.)

Despite the lack of color in their daily lives, the Baining are famous among their neighbors for extraordinary dance costumes, especially for their Fire Dance. But, again the "but," these have no ritual or cosmological meaning.

Fajans detects a symbolism in them, but the Baining themselves are unaware of it. They say they are merely "playing."

The play symbolically reinforces the various natural v. social opposites in Baining society. It is in that sense that "they make themselves," says Fajans. No god does it for them.

Except for one theoretical chapter, "They Make Themselves" is not difficult reading, and though it is aimed at anthropologists, it is likely to raise some uncomfortable questions for anyone trying to assess the state of indigenous cultures in the modern world.