Melpa Songs and Ballads: Junctures of Sympathy and Desire in Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

This chapter explores the contexts in which the complex of feelings is rhetorically conveyed and discusses some of its possible correlates in the wider historical spheres of Melpa cultural life. A certain emotional tenor pervades many of the song genres historically practiced among the Melpa speaking people of the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The Melpa political system in the pre-colonial past, was based on exogamous clan units, recruited patrifilially and in other ways, forming parts of tribal federations which could notionally unite in major warfare against one another. In Melpa songs mist and rain stand for separation and loss, and in ritual contexts they may stand for ancestral disfavor. The economy and elegance of expression in many Melpa songs are achieved to a considerable degree through the medium of structural form, which consists of a pervasive balance between parts of lines and between lines as a whole, all based on arrangements of two.

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