PROSPECTS OF VILLAGE DEATH IN ILAHITA

Abstract

The history of settlement in Ilahita village, an Arapesh community in the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, is pronounced by incessant, behaviourally mediated adjustments between changing internal and external social environments. Having grown to immense size and structural complexity partly in response to Abelam encroachment and cultural exportation, Ilahita began to come apart once warfare was suppressed in the 1950s. The twin processes of social denucleation and physical disintegration have greatly accelerated during the post‐independence period, as new religious, economic, and legal institutions, along with galloping population growth, combine to promote a shift from collectivist to individualist modes of social agency and identity. Despite the novelty of these circumstances, village death in Ilahita signals a reversion toward the kind of settlement which existed before the village was ever born. The case of Ilahita is presented for its ethnographic interest and as an illustration of settlement dynamics which perhaps occur more generally under Melanesian social, cultural and historical conditions.

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