Love, Violence, and Foreign Wealth

Kinship and History in Biak, Irian Jaya

Bibliographic Data

ID2579171
AuthorsDanilyn Rutherford (0000-0001-9209-3336, corresponding author)
Year1998
Volume4
Issue2
Pages255
Publication date1998-06-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1359-0987 • E-ISSN: 1467-9655
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3034502
OpenAlexW2325214781
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited15

This article addresses a central problem in the anthropology and history of Southeast Asia, in an unexpected place: Biak, an island off New Guinea's north coast which was long a distant frontier of Southeast Asia's colonial and pre-colonial polities. The article suggests how the islanders' ability to 'localize' foreign influences rests on the character of kinship on the island. Oriented by the 'love' of brothers for their out-married sisters, transactions between affines reproduce an inflationary dynamic that makes the 'Land of the Foreigners' into a source of violence and value. In their pursuit of recognition, Biaks recreate a boundary between their society and the outside world, recreating continuity in the face of historical change. At the turn of this century, in a settlement on the eastern edge of the Netherland Indies, the Johannes van Hasselt Society for Bible Study and Prayer lost a founding member. From the island group of Biak, in the north of what is now the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya, Petrus Kafiar's mother came to New Guinea's first mission post to take her son home. Like other Dutch-speaking Papuans who belonged to the Society, the young Kafiar clansman was a 'freebought' (vrijgekocht) slave, as the Dutch evangelists called the women and children whose freedom they purchased in an effort to expand their tiny native flock. Much to the consternation of Protestant leaders in Holland, former captives made up the vast majority of the small number of 'heathens' who converted to Christianity in northwestern New Guinea during the nineteenth century (see Bergsma et al. 1889; Kamma 1976). Dating from the founding of the post on the Bird's Head peninsula in 1855, the missionaries' practice of buying and manumitting enslaved women and children arguably added to the unrest in this long 'unpacified' region. Warfare was common among the coastal Papuans, who launched surprise raids in their enormous canoes, taking heads, booty and, increasingly, captives to sell in distant ports. Petrus Kafiar was a typical victim. Raiders from a neighbouring village abducted the young Biak when he was seven years old and delivered him to the mission post, where a Moluccan carpenter paid fifty florins for the boy. A Christian convert who was himself married to a 'free-bought' slave, the Moluccan 'foster father' raised young Petrus according to the strictures set by the Dutch pastor and his wife. Baptized, given a new name and educated in the mission school, Petrus and the other 'foster children' enjoyed an odd sort of freedom. Although in theory they were at liberty to leave the compound, in

Genealogy · Kinship · Sociology · Anthropology · Asian Studies and History · History · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies

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