Yangoru Boiken - Sociopolitical Organization

Social Organization. The basic social divisions in Yangoru society are by sex and age. Men command the formal political arena, and middle-aged men are the major political players. By the time a man reaches his sixties, he usually has retired from active political life, but his counsel still may be very influential.

Political Organization. The basic political unit is the hring. The modern village, which comprises between ten and forty hring—Sima had about twenty-seven—constitutes the basic political unit of the nation-state as it impinges on Yangoru. Nowadays, village boundaries are territorial; in precontact days, however, they were more socially and situationally defined. Depending on their location, precontact villages also belonged to one or other of Yangoru's two great war confederacies, "Samawung," or "Dark Pig" and "Lebuging," or "Light Pig." The members of most villages are divided between two moieties, also called Samawung and Lebuging. Adult males inherit an exchange partner ( urli or gurli ) from the opposite moiety with whom they exchange pigs and yams on a competitive basis into their late middle age. In north-central Yangoru, a phratry organization crosscuts village and moiety lines, organized under the totems "Homung," or "Hawk," and "Sengi," or "Parrot." Groups of hring descended from a common ancestor recognize a hwapomia, an elder ideally descended by primogeniture who is their ceremonial leader in pig exchanges and, in earlier days, was the ceremonial master of their military actions. In other respects, however, the Yangoru Boiken represent a typical Melanesian big-man political system: men achieve renown principally by the number and size of the pigs they give to their exchange partners and by the promptness and generosity with which they meet financial obligations to maternal and affinal kin. These capabilities, in turn, stem from the skillful manipulation of social relationships aided by oratorical, histrionic, and affective ability. Although women are disenfranchised from formal political life, there exist big-women who build influence and reputation among other women by their eminence in small-scale wealth exchanges and their energy and ability in women's tasks—in particular, food production, cooking, and child rearing. Through other women and through their male relatives, such women also exert some influence over the community's formal politics.

Social Control. The formal means of social control is the moot, in which parties to a dispute meet to talk out their differences. Frequently, issues remain unsettled through several moots, and a significant number of disputes peter out unresolved. Informal means of conflict resolution include gossip, sorcery threats, and even flight.

Conflict. Until the mid-1930s, warfare was endemic, common causes being land, the abduction of women, and revenge. War was waged primarily against villages in the opposite confederacy, as either ambushes or confrontations across traditional battlefields located on confederacy frontiers. Neither men, women, nor children were spared. Although fights often broke out within a confederacy, murder was proscribed. By clandestine subterfuge, nonetheless, a rival within a person's confederacy frequently could be delivered into the hands of enemies beyond. In north-central Yangoru, the Homung/Sengi phratry organization complicated matters, and frequently hring from the same village would face one another across the battleground; in these confrontations, however, weapons were used in a manner that would inflict injury but avoid death.