Kula and Clay Pots in Kapukapuna
by Nancy Sullivan

The Amphlett Islands are mere specks on a good map of Milne Bay Province.

Yet their historic importance to the region is enormous. Small but significant, like precious pearls embedded in big kina shells, the Amphletts have always been valuable links on the wide chains of the regional Kula trade. Their beaches are important ceremonial and resting spots for fleets of kula canoes traveling from Sinaketa in the Trobriands south to Dobu island, and for Dobuans making their first stop on their long journey to the Trobriands. The Sinaketans still bring their decorated mwali armbands down to the Amphletts and then to Dobu; and the Dobuans bring their precious spondyllus shell soulava necklaces here, where they sometimes perform a food distribution (a sagali or nabare) before pushing off across the long stretch of water to the Trobriands.

The first time I sailed to the Amplett island of Nabwageta, I struggled to recognize it from Bronislow Malinowski's descriptions in his in his 1922 ethnography, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, E.P Dutton and Co., New York: There were the twin mountain peaks of neighboring Fergusson, the narrow beach beneath a steep mountain wall, a line of stilt homes--all the ambient features he'd described. This is where Malinowski himself travelled with a fleet of Trobroand Kula canoes in 1918, on an expedition from Sinaketa to Dobu. The Trobrianders had perfomed a series of magical rites passing through the straits to reach Nabwageta, and would conduct even more elaborate ones farther south, in anticipation of their Kula transactions on Dobu Island. I could see all this now. And yet, visiting Nabwageta was different for me from visiting Kiriwina, in the Trobriands, or other places I'd read about before I'd seen. It was so humble and perilous looking--like one bad storm might wipe it away. Or one bad flu. There couldn't be more than two extended families, it seemed to me, on the whole island. It was as if I'd stumbled upon Shakespeare's birthplace and found it abandoned; or discovered Buddha's home had become overgrown with weeds.

Well, not exactly: Nabwageta is a lovely little place, charming in its details; it's certainly the most isolated place I've ever been to, and at the same time one of the most inviting. A single row of stilted houses, a handful of kula canoes at the end of the beach, and a single school room--and that's about it. But this is where they make the pots which are traded along the Kula ring and which comprises, along with stone ax blades and yams, a big part of the wealth that Trobriands men give in brideprice.

Some Trobriands legends maintain that Nabwageta, with little more than narrow windswept beaches and a few fragile stilt homes on either side of the island, is actually the birthplace of Kula. Nothing could be more important to the D'Entrecasteaux and Trobriand Islands than Kula, the system of ceremonial shell exchanges that defines a man's living and immortal stature; the sailing endeavour that knits together so many remote islands and unrelated languages; the very means by which magical, technical and social information is transmitted from men to boys; the vocation that allows players to transcend local marriage and death networks, transcend their own ancestry even, and enter a wider and deeper path.

In all these perilous and centuries-old expeditions, chiefs and Kula leaders from far-flung points would stop and pay head to their Amphletts partners on the main island of Gumasila, or on the smaller island of Nabwageta. They might park their canoes, rest a while, sometimes for weeks, and practice the important magic they will need for a safe journey and an effective seduction of their kula partners at their final destination. Magic matters because the game of Kula is that of persuasion and influence-of getting close and distant partners to relinquish certain valuables to the Ring.

Players along the Ring partners may never meet face to face and yet become locked in competition for better and bigger shells throughout their lives. Only subtle forms of persuasion, through magic, diplomacy and gift giving, can pull a favoured shell away from one's partner and into one's own hand-only to be sent away again by the power of another Kula partner. It is a system that allows its best players to join a pantheon of legendary players, whose names and deeds are inscribed in these shells, and whose reputations therefore continuously circulate in this form of communication that rivals any kind of oral history, anywhere.

But what sets the Amphletts apart from all the other islands in the Kula ring, is their pottery. They remain the only source of bride price bowls for islands both north and south of them. These are handsome flash-fired and especially strong red and balck pots. Not so much coiled as built from the lip to the base-top to bottom, and then smoothed to very thin and even walls, these simple vessels of all sizes are finely incised with decorations around their necks. Everyone in the Trobriands, in the D'Entrecasteaux, and even in the Marshall Bennetts, has one or more of these cook pots in their home. Much like the Wombum Villagers in the Chambri Lakes, who are exclusive purveyors of cook pots throughout the Middle Sepik, the Amphlett potters enjoy a monopoly on the trade throughout the region. Even south of Normanby and toward the Engineer Group Islands, where other local pots form the staple household goods, people still trade for Amphlett pots as well.

Oddly enough, however, neither Nabwageta nor Gumasila has particularly good play. Potters must sail roughly a day away (without engine) to Yayawana, the site of the Wapolu mine on Fergusson Island's Mt. Kilkerran, to quarry the durable clay they need for their pots.

"There is a legend, explaining why the good clay cannot be obtained nowadays in the Amphletts," wrote Malinowski (p282):

"In olden days, two brothers, Torosipupu and Tolikilaki, lived on one of the summits of Gumasila called Tomonumonu. There was plenty of fine clay up there at that time. One day Torosipupu went to fish with a trap. He caught a very fine giant clam-shell. When he came back, Tolikilaki said: "Oh my shell! I shall eat it!" Torosipupu refused it and answered with a very obscene allusion to the bivalvular mollusc and to the uses he was going to make of it. Tolikilaki asked again; Torsipupu refused. They quarreled. Tolikilaki then took part of the clay with him, and went to Yayawana on the main island. Torosipupu afterwards took the rest and followed him. What were their further destinies, the legend does not say. But on Gumasila there remained only very poor clay, which is all that can be found there ever since." (p.283)

Malinowski himself made the Kula journey in the company of a fleet of canoes from Sinaketa to Dobu in 1918. His fleet made a customarily long stopover on Gumasila, in the Amphletts. But even though the Austrian anthropologist had become a fixture on the beach at Kiriwina, in the Trobriands, his likes had rarely been seen in the Amphletts, where villagers barely knew what to make of him. In fact, as he reported, his presence cause a mild uproar.

"My arrival was a very untoward event to the natives, and complicated matters, causing great annoyance to Tovasana, the main headman. I had landed in his own little village, Nu'agasi, on the main island of Gumasila….To leave me alone with the women and one or two old men was impossible, according to their ideas and fears" (p379).

But it wasn't just crazy white anthropologists that the Amphlett islanders feared; they were at least as wary of the Trobrianders during their sojourn on their shores. The Trobrianders, it seems, were much more-(ahem)-promiscuous than their Amphlett counterparts. Amphlett men feared for their women's chastity.

For their part, the Trobriand men who often remained a long time in the Amphletts during Kula, found their stay frustrating. As Malinowski noted (p.272), the Trobriand man "would be entirely debarred from any intercourse with women. Accustomed in his country to easy intrigues, here he has completely to abstain, not only from sexual relations with women married or unmarried, but even from moving with them socially….One of my main informants, Layseta, a Sinaketa man, who spent several years in the Amphletts, confessed to me, not without shame and regret, that he never succeeded in having any intrigues with the women there. To save his face, he claimed that he had had several Amphlett belles declaring their love to him, and offering their favours, but he always refused them: 'I feared; I feared the bowo'u of Gumasila; they are very bad.'

"The bowo'u are the local sorcerers of the Amphletts. Whatever we might think of Layseta's temptations-and his personal appearance and charm do not make his boastings very credible-and whether he was afraid of sorcery or of a sound thrashing, the fact remains that a Trobriander would have to change his usual mode of behaviour when in the Amphletts, and keep away from women entirely. When big parties arrive in Gumasila, or Nabwageta, the women run away, and camp in the bush till the beach is clear.

"The Amphlettans, on the contrary, were used to receive favours from unmarried women in Sinaketa. Nowadays, the male inhabitants of that village, always disapproving of the custom, though not to the extent of taking any action, tell the Amphlettans that the white man's Government has prohibited the men from Gumasila and Nabwageta to have sexual relations in Sinaketa. One of the very few occasions, when the men from the Amphletts showed any interest in talking to me was when they asked me whether this was true.

"'The Sinaketa men tell us that we will go to jail if we sleep with girls in Sinaketa. Would the Government put us into jail, in truth?'

"As usual, I simply disclaimed all knowledge of the white man's arcana in such matters." (p.272-3)

On my second visit to Nabwageta, there was a thirty foot sailboat moored the cove. Four German adventurers up from Australia, all from different parts if the globe, were enjoying a week in the nestling harbour. Just hanging out. It struck them as the last unknown place on a map of the world. Nabwagetans speak little English, and the visitors weren't native English speakers themselves, which allowed this weeklong illusion and convinced the intrepid sailors that (despite the schoolroom) they may have 'discovered' their own private idyll. Our party enjoyed their company, delighted in the Stanley and Livingston coincidence of meeting, but most of all relished the pleasure of dispelling this illusion. No, this is really a famous island, we told them. 'You must be joking,' one of them said.

Just recently I was able to visit the out-island from Nabwageta, called Bituma or Bogeta Island. There is a beautiful little village there called Kapukapuna, comprised of little more than its SDA church and a handful of houses. It's a hamlet perhaps even more remote and precarious than the village at Nabwageta. But there's a vitality to Kapukapuna that's unmistakable, and it seems to come from two divergent sources: from this church, which was humming with Sunday worshippers when we arrived; and from the evidence of a living Kula and pottery tradition.

Standing at the shore as we approached was a handsome young man leaning against a brilliant Kula canoe. He brought us to meet his Uncle, Ninila, who had stayed back from church to look after his son, and who was busy finishing a lovely clay pot. When we looked in through his doorway, we found tens of such big freshly fired pots in a back room. Under his nearby family house were bundles of the special clay he'd brought back from Fergusson. And inside his residence was a collection of rattan chairs he'd also made. For whom? I wondered-as there must have been more chairs in one room than there were houses in all of Kapukapuna.

"You?" he asked, and of course I agreed. Me. We settled on thirty kina, and I picked up my new wicker chair.

Much has certainly changed in the D'Entrecasteaux and Amphlett islands since Malinowski's day, what with outboard motors, radio, generators and even TV. But the last twenty years has also seen an erosion of certain critical forms of development. Small airlines have fallen away; and private shipping vessels have jumped in scale to container size, therefore bypassing many smaller client islands. Cash has become the only currency for fuel and electric power, while the local markets sustain growing competition from imported goods and local fishermen compete for fish with foreign fishing vessels. All of this has made the islands of Milne Bay more remote than ever before. They may have radio links to the mainland and feel ever more part of a global economy (or, in the church, a worldwide religious community), but they Kula less frequently and sojourn at each other's shore with less ritual and regularity. In effect, they are more cut off from one another now than they are from the mainland and world at large.

Will any new form of communication ever really replace the integrity of the Kula expeditions? Probably not. That's why it's heartening to see, in the nethermost corner of the nethermost islands, freshly painted Kula canoes parked on the shore of Kapukapuna, and baskets of fresh clay under Ninila's house, waited to be sculpted into pots. These signs of the past make modern radio and shipping networks look somehow ephemeral by comparison.