Living our Melanesian values
By PATRICK KAIKU
A SPOKESPERSON of the Melanesian Liberal Party (MLP) recently urged Papua New Guineans to observe Melanesian values, emphasising the respect for women and young girls.
This comment comes, firstly, amidst reports of locally-produced pornographic materials in circulation, allegedly featuring young schoolgirls and, secondly, with suggestions for the banning of nightclubs – sites where behaviours that fuel the spread of the HIV epidemic is allegedly rampant.
However, other inter-related issues pose a challenge to the noble intentions of even the most ardent Melanesianist.
It is interesting to note that with any recurring debate on issues of morality, resorting to an inexistent “national value system” continues to be the rhetoric of our elites.
From public outcries over prostitution, to horse-race machines, “wet T-shirt” competitions and “mud wrestling” and the likes, one is bound to hear the occasional reference to cultural values of the Melanesian variety, however vague it might sound at times.
Who is the appropriate custodian of these values in Papua New Guinea at present?
Where have these well-intentioned Melanesian values gone, if there is a call for their re-discovery?
Is it mere “textbook” learning, in how Melanesian values are inculcated?
What we are looking at is a moral problem that has its roots in the multi-dimensional changes that contemporary Papua New Guinea society is undergoing.
It does not help for us to romanticise a supposed national value system, that is presumed to have satisfactorily “regulated” society in previous generations.
Try telling the participants involved in a local pornographic production and nightclub strip show artistes or incestuous family members or violent spouses to live the so-called Melanesian values!
Chances are that the porno participants are detached from any social control mechanism of shame/guilt of gossip that is found in close-knit communities.
The willing participants would have been induced into these activities by offers of large sums of money by some “foreigner” or wealthy local perverts, “windfall” gains for some who may not have any sustainable source of income.
Chances are that the incestuous relation by blood relatives was initially triggered off during some drunken bout by a mentally sick male relative and sustained by the domineering perpetrator through sheer fear and psychological blackmail.
Any activity of this nature may be known to one or two family members, however, to report matters to the appropriate authorities may compromise one’s material security if the dominant perpetrator is the sole bread-winner.
The average male who frequents the pokies or resorts to paying for sex, with the grim prospect of contracting HIV, could well be in the implementation stage of “paying back” his wife for her persistently irritating nagging.
The chronic nightclub-goers, understandably, would reject outright any political rhetoric of conforming to any “ancient” and vague cultural values justifying their inherent right to choosing the modern-day form of entertainment they would wish to pursue.
The reality is humans living in contexts where their behaviour is progressively “individualised” may find it irrelevant or even a norm to conform to any communally-accepted or prescribed standards, much less if this be the beseeching of political elites.
For instance, perpetrators of lawlessness in our major urban centres continue to show that they have no respect for anyone.
Do we understand the socio-cultural background of this anti-social section of our communities?
Some could be fourth-generation urban dwellers, having little connection to a cultural socialisation process that is affordable in closed-knit settings and where people-oriented ties are crucial in one’s personal development.
They would have been raised in broken down homes, abused during their childhood years and without any avenue to divert their energy and frustrations.
The varying perceptions of cultural values and, hence, appreciation of any nationally-binding, “unwritten” code governing the actions of individuals is not realistic upon close contextual analysis.
Likewise, elites who urge cultural revisionism, yet live lives quite opposite to what they want the masses to practice are kidding themselves, worse still hypocritical.
Political leaders or senior bureaucrats who would rather send their children to learning institutions with curriculum tailored on the life experiences of settings that has no semblance to the Melanesian context cannot possibly be wholehearted in their urgings.
It could well be conveniently symbolic of their intellectual undervaluation of Melanesian socialisation institutions and the values and identity they urge others to conform to.
Senior people in the arenas of leadership, who go around “paying” for sex, acquire countless mistresses or who are notable patrons of nightclubs cannot possibly be the “cultured” moral compasses worthy of setting the benchmark for society to follow.
Another aspect of PNG society is the confusion that confronts this generation.
Contrasting perceptions on the goodness and badness of Melanesian culture is evident.
Elites would urge us to live our cultures, yet, as one scholar noted, New Religious Groups, of which a significant number of Papua New Guineans are members of, “have a markedly more hostile attitude” towards indigenous culture, which they identify as “paganism”.
Anyone from the innocuous herbalist or a custodian of communally beneficial indigenous knowledge is deemed a “witchcraft practitioner”.
Traditional protocols or norms such as strict observance of spatial separation between in-laws or first cousins, though having contextual relevance to the eliciting of respectful behaviour in households are considered “unscriptural” and therefore discarded in this wave of evangelical, revivalism or fundamentalist Christianity.
In 1989, the Pacific conference of churches and Pacific Theological College engaged a German sociologist to investigate established notions about these “new groups”.
His findings entitled Winds of Change, found that these “new groups” espoused the avoidance of a wide range of customary behaviours for themselves and their families, as well as a “complete break with indigenous identities and cultural traditions”.
It concludes that these “new religious groups” is a form of Christianity particular to the US ... with their focus on “individualism”.
These sects are condemning of “a variety of customary practices, which, from their perspective, entail the worship of ancestors, local spirits and gods and thus lead people away form the worship of the Christian god”.
It is akin to saying that any of the multitude of Melanesian moral and cosmological institutions tasked with the broader functions of socialising individuals and regulative of human behaviour to be respectful citizens is inadequate and must be discarded.
In the broader process of modernisation, “living the humiliating life” necessitates shedding everything that is linked to the “sinful past”.
One anthropologist observed, in the quest to “modernise”, either morally or materially, people “must first learn to hate what they already have, what they have always considered their well-being ... they have to despise what they are, to hold their own existence in contempt – and want, then, to be someone else”.
In this confusion, we are reminded that the future is not improvised.
Things could not get any better if political rhetoric and agents of spirituality/morality cannot reconcile on the utility of the much-talked-about Melanesian heritage.
Getting a consensus on where we stand in relation to matters dealing with role model leadership and the traditional institutions that support the socialisation of accepted values must be undertaken for the sake of reaching the hearts and minds of a disillusioned generation that is already under great duress.

Note: The writer is a project research officer in the social and environment studies division of the National Research Institute.
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