Recapturing 'Behavior' An Ethnographic Analysis of Pala Soue Ritual in the Kurti Society, Papua New Guinea

• Published in: The Sociology of Law Vol. 2006; no. 65; pp. 34 - 53,252
• Main Author: Baba, Jun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; Japanese
• Published: The Japanese Association of Sociology of Law 30.09.2006
• ISSN: 0437-6161; 2424-1423
• DOI: 10.11387/jsl1951.2006.65_34

This paper aims to examine Pala Soue ritual in the Kurti society of Papua New Guinea from the viewpoint of sanction. The ritual, concomitant with bride-price payment, is a customary practice where the husband's family rewards his wife and her family for their good behaviors with money. I intend to show how this transactional event reproduces local personhood and normative order in a positive way. Since A. R. Radcliff-Brown classified social sanction as positive and negative, ethnographic analyses about positive sanction seem to have hardly ever been reported. This case study seems to be firmly significant in this term, even if Pala Soue ritual has an empirical phase beyond sanction dualism. The data for this paper is based on an anthropological research I conducted in the area. The methodological focus is on the systematic relevance of punou, Pala Soue and the normative order in the Kurti society. At first, I elucidate the local concept of punou. It means that normative behavior is complexly defined by relationships; kinship, gender and social status. Most personal descriptions among the Kurti people reflect judgments on whether he/she could perform properly in response to expected behavioral patterns. Thus, learning punou is a presumption of personhood in this society. Secondly, the structure and process of Pala Soue ritual is ethnographically described and analyzed, referring to genealogy and statistics. In this ritual, participants recapture punou that is done in interpersonal encounters, and make it respectively known to the public. Consequently I conclude that Pala Soue ritual is a practice of public display through which (as Bourdieu says) normative order is objectified, represented and reproduced. As for personhood, I consider this event as a salient moment of normative communication that transmits the normative message motivating the audience to learn and do punou huyen (lit. good behavior). Finally, I will propose a new direction of sanction studies, referring to contemporary arguments about cultural identity and personhood where the customary way of behavior becomes an increasingly important subject.