Mandak

ETHNONYM: Madak

Orientation

Identification. Mandak is a linguistic-cultural designation for people living in central New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. "Mandak" means "boy" or "male" and is used by New Irelanders to refer to those speaking the various dialects of Mandak. Further sociocultural distinctions are made by reference to particular Mandak villages.

Location. The Mandak live in central New Ireland on the east and west coasts and in the interior on Lelet Plateau, Between 3°6′ and 3°20′ S and 151°47′ and 152°8′ E. This tropical area has a wet season dominated by the northwest monsoon winds from December to May and a dry season with prevailing southeast trade winds from May to October, Divided by transitional calmer, more humid weather. Rainfall varies considerably according to local topographic conditions, with periodic drought a potential problem in some coastal areas. Mean monthly temperatures range from the high 20s to about 32° C.

Demography. The Mandak numbered about 3,324 in the 1960s, of which some 500 resided in the interior Lelet region. From about 1920 to 1950, New Ireland experienced depopulation due to Western contact. By the late 1950s, the population had stabilized and began to increase in some areas. Because of the loss of all census data for New Ireland during World War II, government records are available only from 1949 to present. A census of east coast villages made by E. W. P. Chinnery in 1929 shows larger village populations than the 1949 government census.

Linguistic Affiliation. Mandak, with five dialects, is an Austronesian language, classified with Lavatbura-Lamusong in the Madak Family. Linguistic variation is also found at the subdialect level from village to village.

History and Cultural Relations

Little is known about the Mandak before Western contact. Present coastal populations include, either by village or intermingled within a village, people who claim to have originated in their present locations and those who relocated from inland settlements at the urging of German and Australian Colonial governments in the early twentieth century. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, New Ireland was visited by Dutch, English, and French explorers and blackbirders. Germany claimed New Ireland as a colony, renamed Neu Mecklenburg, between 1884 and 1914. In the early 1900s, German and English colonists planted coconut plantations on land taken from the local people for minimal recompense. During this period, the German administration used local labor to build a road along the east coast for almost 200 miles from Kavieng in the north to Namatanai in south central New Ireland. At the outbreak of World War I, Australia took over New Ireland, administering it as part of a mandate from the League of Nations from 1921 to 1942, when the Japanese invaded and occupied New Ireland. Australia again resumed control in 1945, with New Ireland becoming apart of the Territory of Papua New Guinea in 1949, administered by Australia under the United Nations. In the 1950s, the Mandak began planting their own coconut plantations for the copra market, adding cacao trees a decade or so later as a second cash crop. The Mandak have been part of independent Papua New Guinea since 1975. Christian missions have exerted a strong influence among the Mandak. Methodist missionary work in New Ireland began in the late nineteenth century, followed by Roman Catholics in the Second decade of the twentieth century.

Settlements

At first contact, the Mandak were living in interrelated Hamlets grouped together into villages. Today, villages range in size from about 50 to 230 people. Some retain the older settlement pattern of discrete, dispersed hamlets, while others, particularly the smaller resettled inland settlements, display a more centralized appearance. Hamlets range in size from 1 to 40 people living in one to ten nuclear family houses. A men's house, surrounded by a low stone wall, is found in most hamlets.

Economy

Subsistence and Commercial Activities. The Mandak combine subsistence agriculture with raising and selling coconuts and cacao beans. Main subsistence crops include taro, sweet potatoes, and yams, varying in significance regionally. Gardens are located from 1 to 3 miles inland from coastal settlements. Also grown are bananas, papayas, beans, leafy green vegetables, melons, breadfruit, pineapples, and a variety of nut and fruit trees. In earlier times, sago served as a famine food and is still occasionally processed today. In coastal areas, fishing provides varying amounts of fish seasonally, along with shellfish and occasional sea turtles. The Mandak raise pigs and chickens, the former for ceremonial exchanges, the latter for small-scale special occasions. Men occasionally hunt feral pigs for less-important social events. Marketing Coconuts and cacao beans provides the Mandak with a reliable, though fluctuating, income. A few individuals in each village operate small trade stores, selling canned meat, coffee, tea, sugar, kerosene, and other items.

Industrial Arts. Items produced locally from coconut and pandanus leaves and other plant fibers include: large food-carrying baskets for women, smaller baskets for men and women, lime pouches, sitting mats, and rain covers. Also crafted are small bamboo and large hollow-log slit gongs, fishing nets, single-outrigger canoes, and log rafts. Canoes and fishing nets are no longer made in some areas. Polished-shell bead strands used in ceremonial exchanges, shell pendants, and arm bracelets are produced in some areas. Production of white-shell bead strands ceased after World War II, after a local leader forbade their use in exchanges in preference to red-shell strands produced elsewhere.

Trade. Before island settlements moved to the coast in the first decades of the twentieth century, coastal women traded fish for vegetable foods with inland women. Items traded Between individuals in different villages, within or beyond Language areas, include: shell valuables (red-shell bead strands), shell bracelets, pigs, rituals and ritual paraphernalia, song-dances, and magic spells.

Division of Labor. Labor cooperation varies contextually from small networks of individuals sharing an enclosed Garden, to larger groups cultivating gardens for a special mortuary feast, to an entire village cooperating in fishing and Ceremonial feast preparations. Gender demarcates the division of labor: men clear secondary-growth areas for gardens and fence them against pigs, while women plant, tend, and harvest the root crops; men fish, while women gather shellfish. In building houses, men perform the heavier work while women prepare the palm-frond roofs. Women do the daily cooking, generally in individual household earth ovens, while for feasts they cut and peel root crops to be cooked in large earth ovens constructed by men. Both sexes cooperate in harvesting coconuts and preparing them for market and in collecting cacao beans. Men take the copra to market in trucks, usually rented, with male drivers.

Land Tenure. Land is generally owned by lineages, but it is used for subsistence gardens in flexible arrangements with affines and offspring of male lineage or clan members. Off-spring may gain permanent rights to portions of their father's land at his death by making certain exchanges to members of his lineage or clan at his mortuary feast. In situations where a lineage or clan has few members and no heirs (clan or paternal offspring), someone with other ties to the clan may establish claims to clan land by making contributions to mortuary feasts of the last remaining clan members. In some areas, a man or woman may claim land rights from his or her mother's or father's paternal kin at the latter's death, by making an Exchange at a mortuary feast to the deceased's lineage. Land transfers were complicated by colonial laws that required cash payments for land leaving the clan.

Kinship

Kin Groups and Descent. Mandak individuals belong at birth to the lineage, clan, and moiety of their mother. There are no known relationships between clans of the same moiety, nor generally between lineages of a clan. Moieties are exogamous. Kinship relations are expressed in varying references to shared or exchanged nurturance, between individuals and Between groups. The relationship of a man and his lineage, clan, or moiety to his offspring is expressed as one of nurturance. At an individual's death—if a man, his offspring and spouse; if a woman, her spouse—give wealth to the deceased's clan for nurturance received from the deceased and his or her clan.

Kinship Terminology. Kinship terminology is a variant of the Iroquois type.

Marriage and Family

Marriage. Before extensive mission influence, both Polygyny and polyandry were accepted forms of marriage among the Mandak, although it is said that only a few men had more than one wife and that polyandry also was not common. Moiety and clan exogamy are stressed. Villages are not exogamous and there is some preference for marrying within the Village. A bride-price is given by the husband's lineage to the wife's lineage. No single option is stated as a preferred form of postmarital residence. Usually, a couple moves several times during their married life. For the oldest male of a sibling group, preferred residence is in his lineage hamlet. Divorce is allowed, with young children usually staying with their mother.

Domestic Unit. Basic domestic units include separate households for single adult women (divorced, widowed, unmarried) , for nuclear families, and sometimes for single men, who usually, however, live in a men's house.

Inheritance. Inheritance is ideally matrilineal for land and certain forms of magic, although an individual, male or female, may inherit some land and receive magic spells from his or her father.

Socialization. Both parents discipline their children, generally verbally, with an occasional switching. Older siblings also exert some control over their younger siblings. Adoption of children is common, usually between closely related kin. Male youths, from about age 12 into their early 20s, have considerable freedom of movement, with little social responsibility. Most children go to local schools up to about age 12, with some going on to secondary (usually boarding) schools and then college or technical school.

Sociopolitical Organization

Social Organization. The dynamics of the social system are characterized by oppositions elicited in different contexts. At the broadest level, the matrilineal, exogamous moieties are contrasted as complementary units, giving or receiving nurturance from one another through men's work in the procreation and nurturance of their offspring. The same contrast may be evoked in relating clans, lineages, or individuals. Same-unit membership (of moiety, clan, lineage) entails a focus on shared nurturance. The hamlet is owned and identified with a lineage, ideally with the social unit's oldest male in control of its men's house. Hamlets may include members of different clans, through affinal, paternal, and other ties to the owning lineage. Social units are not localized, and thus they may be spread over a number of villages, while the social unit's identity is localized in one hamlet and its men's house in whose adjacent yard lineage members are buried.

Political Organization. Political power adheres in the activities of big-men. All middle-aged and older men are recognized as having the capacity for political influence. The oldest man of the lineage is regarded as the representative of that Social unit, for purposes of land arbitrations, feast sponsorship, and in certain formal feast exchanges. One or more men of each village may be recognized as having particular "strength" and "power." Such men are more active than others in sponsoring social events and in gaining village consensus in largescale village cooperative action. Such men's reputations extend beyond their own community to other villages. A variety of appointed (during early colonial decades) and then elected (since the 1960s) officials at the village, regional, and (since 1975) national level are involved in Mandak political activities. At times the big-man system works partly within these institutionalized authority positions, while at other times it coexists separately.

Social Control. In precontact times, there was no formalized social control at the village level. Usually, conflicts were handled either by fighting or clandestine sorcery. Fear of Sorcery attack or retaliation continues to serve as a powerful means of social control. Today, minor social disputes are handled at the village level in weekly meetings, established by German and Australian colonial governments, with various fines allotted by discussions led by big-men. Major problems are handled by formal courts at the regional level.

Conflict. Up to the 1920s, before pacification by colonial forces, sporadic warfare occurred both within and between villages.

Religion and Expressive Culture

Religious Beliefs. Christian missions were established in the Mandak area in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, most of the Mandak are nominally Members of a Christian sect, Methodists and Roman Catholics predominating. In addition, many people adhere in varying degrees to views of a world inhabited by a variety of nonhuman spirits, most of which are dangerous to humans who come into contact with them. Each clan has one or more powerful spirits or power embodied in an animal form, in sea life, or in a landscape feature on clan land. Spirits of the dead, particularly those of individuals who died a violent death, can be a source of danger to humans who encounter them. Unseen power or energy is thought to be a source of varied forms of control by humans who know how to direct it through magic spells. The use of magic, for both positive and negative purposes, is a common subject of concern in Mandak lives.

Religious Practitioners. Most adult men and women are thought to possess some magic spells, although only some men are capable of performing stronger forms of sorcery, Ritual empowerment, and such specialized forms of magic as used in shark catching, sea becalming, and weather control. Village church leaders are usually from among the local male population.

Ceremonies. Ceremonial life focuses on mortuary feasts, of which there are various forms, including: the burial of a deceased individual; later mortuary feasts relevant to a single deceased individual; and large-scale clan-sponsored mortuary ceremonies involving dances and distribution of pigs, taro, and sweet potatoes. Malagan ceremonies occur in this area, although unevenly since the 1950s. Malagan refers to both a material object—carved wood or woven; mask, figure, or frieze—and its attendant rituals, usually as part of a largescale mortuary ceremony.

Arts. The major artistic focus here involves malagan Productions. Men's or women's songs and accompanying dances are important features of final mortuary ceremonies.

Death and Afterlife. The Mandak subscribe to a variety of beliefs concerning death and afterlife, from Christian doctrines to pre-Christian beliefs. In regard to the latter, an Individual's spirit becomes either a restless, roaming spirit if the individual died a violent death (as from sorcery, accident, murder) or a more peaceful spirit, believed formerly to go to small nearby islands. Either type of spirit can serve as an aid to the living in various forms of magic and ritual or as a source of new ritual or song-dance.

See alsoLesu

Bibliography

Brouwer, Elizabeth (1980). "A Malagan to Cover the Grave: Funerary Ceremonies in Mandak." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Queensland.

Chinnery, E. W. Pearson (1929). Studies of the Native Population of the East Coast of New Ireland. Territory of New Guinea Anthropological Report no. 6. Canberra: H. J. Green, Government Printer.

Clay, Brenda J. (1977). Pinikindu: Maternal Nurture, Paternal Substance. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.

Clay, Brenda J. ( 1986). Mandak Realities: Person and Power in Central New Ireland. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Kramer, Augustin (1925). Die Malanggane von Tombara. Munich: Georg Muller.

BRENDA JOHNSON CLAY