Person, place or pig: animal attachments and human transactions in New Guinea

Abstract

This chapter focuses on differences across societies of New Guinea in the ways in which people manage young pigs and to the implications this has for the kinds of attachments established by pigs. It then shows that the strategies of management are themselves correlated with other aspects of human ecology — with mobility, settlement pattern and subsistence — and argues that they have consequences for social life in either limiting or facilitating, on the one hand, relations between men and women and, on the other, the possibility that large pigs may be exchanged as live animals. The chapter draws on our own understandings of the Kubo people of the interior lowlands of western Papua New Guinea..