Fighting With Food On Goodenough
by Nancy Sullivan

The d'Entrecasteaux islands of Milne Bay offer some of the most breathtaking scenery and warm hospitality as can be found anywhere in PNG. They are comprised of the tiny Amphlett islands; mountainous large Fergusson Island, it's smaller neighbour, Dobu; Normanby to the south; and to the northwest, Goodenough island. Goodenough itself has a little off-island called Waigifa, just around the bend from Mud Bay and the picturesque spacious and sunny village of Bwaidoga. On Waigifa, from the hilltop setting of both Awanane and Ageaina villages, you can see across the blue bay to the imposing mountains of Fergusson. The men wear very small betelnut palm leaf groin covering, and the women are dressed in simple undyed grass skirts. Much has changed in the last few decades, but a lot more has stayed the same. The beauty and simplicity of life on Goodenough and Waigifa has certainly survived. No doubt there is little in modern city life that could compare to the good fortune, good gardens and goodwill that flourish in this island paradise.

The kids of Bwaidoga in Mud Bay perform a funny game for visitors. It involves sitting in circles and throwing yams at each other until they fall over with laughter. They call it Vemunumunuya au'a aiya'aine, Fighting with Food.

Silly, it seems, to be playing a game of bad table manners. Throwing yams, giggling over a meal, generally behaving as kids do anyway. What a strange way to represent this idyllic coastal village to visitors.

But this is what Goodenough is renowned for: fighting with food. It's actually the title of Michael Goodenough's 1971 ethnography of the island (Fighting With Food, Michael W. Young, 1971, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), and the cause of no little confusion about the islanders' eating habits-as can be seen by the public game made of it.

But it is not eating habits that make Goodenough Islanders different; it is their attitude toward food. When the anthropologist Michael Young first arrived in Goodenough in 1966, he soon found that they used it as a form of social control.

"It was first brought home to me," he writes in Fighting With Food (p.xix), "when Wakasilele's friend from another village presented him with a large pig. Wakasilele is a 'big-man', a tough, stony-faced leader with a ferocious temper and a haughty pride….His friend was not a 'big-man', but he left Wakasilele speechless with emotion when he gave him the pig. 'Why is he being given the pig?' I asked. 'Because his friend is angry with him,' I was told. I learned that the friend had earlier brought Wakasilele some shell-fish from the coast, but the latter had churlishly spurned the gift. The giver was shamed, insulted and indignant. To point out to Wakasilele in the most humiliating way possible that he had committed a breach of good manner, his friend presented him with the most valuable asset he possessed-a pig."

Clans in Goodenough are paired together in traditional food exchange relationships. One's food-giving partners are your fofofo, and the connection is firmly entrenched in local myth. Nibai, on the other hand, are traditional enemies. The antagonism between clans or even individuals is grounded in history, in the time when your relations may have killed and eaten his or vice versa, or in the recent past, when he may have performed an injustice or insulted you or your kin. At public feasts, one clan may hand over the food it has been presented to its fofofo. The hope is that one's fofofo will reciprocate at another time. But if another clan unexpectedly bestows yams or a pig upon you-it's a direct threat rather than a gift. Shamed, humiliated, you must now perform a counter-gift of greater selflessness to clear your name. The less you have, in other words, the more you gain respect.

These exchanges are called abutu. Since the abolition of warfare almost 100 years ago, free time, fertile soil and the elaboration of garden magic has allowed villagers to produce great surpluses of garden food. Exchange ceremonies have become more important, and more political than economic. They invoke shame and self-denial to an extent unknown elsewhere in PNG. Even though many cultures in mainland and island PNG share the concept of shaming another through generosity, in some cases, and masochism in others (where victims cut off their fingers, burn down their house or destroy their garden after a loss), nowhere is it as complex or prevalent as in Goodenough.

The ironies of abutu are self-evident. Young makes this clear by titling two of his book's chapter on the subject, "Full gardens and small bellies" and "Empty gardens and big bellies." It would seem that the most socially successful, most well-liked and 'wealthy' of Goodenough islanders are people with big gardens and slim figures. They are rarely embarrassed by bountiful gifts of food. Fat people, on the other hand, would have a lot to be ashamed of.

The colonial government sent a boatload of yams to Bwaidoga during a famine in 1958. Rather than rejoice, the Bwaidoga villagers were suddenly anxious. Their reaction gave rise to a long-popular local joke, as Young reports (p 261): 'We thought the Government had come to make abutu against us!'

To reach Goodenough, fly to Tufi in Oro Province or Alotau in Milne Bay. From there, take a boat across to Goodenough or its out-island, Waigifa. As with so many places in the islands, finding a place to stay will depend upon your own sociability and willingness to match kindness with the islanders' own cusomary generosity. The effort is certainly worth it.