marketplaces and morality in papua new guinea: place

Marketplaces and Morality in Papua NewGuinea: Place, Personhood and Exchange

Mark Busse Timothy L. M. SharpThe University of Auckland Curtin University

ABSTRACT

In Papua New Guinea (PNG) more rural people, and especially rural women, earn cash from sell-ing in marketplaces than from any other source. PNG’s marketplaces are critical for food security,and for the redistribution of wealth. They are also important meeting places where people gather tosee friends, hear the latest news, attend court cases, play cards and be entertained. This introduc-tion to this special issue on ‘Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea’ reviews the historyof PNG marketplaces and their contemporary forms. It charts their transformation from introducedcolonial spaces into dynamic Melanesian places, which, as places to buy, sell and socialise, havebecome pervasive institutions in the lives of both urban and rural Papua New Guineans, and placeswhere people interact with both known and unknown others. From this, marketplaces emerge asimportant spaces of moral evaluation and contestation in relation to what constitutes morallyacceptable exchange and what practices are acceptable in these places. The paper demonstratesthat exchange in the marketplace should not be reduced to commodity transactions, and questionsassumptions about the types of people marketplaces create. It argues that the country’s market-places are productive sites to consider ideas of exchange, social relations and social personhood,and that there is a critical need to understand the concrete details of what takes place incontemporary marketplaces.

Keywords: marketplace, market, exchange, morality, moral economy, livelihoods, social development,culture, social personhood, relational personhood, gender, place, Papua New Guinea.

INTRODUCTION

The papers in this collection focus on morality and marketplaces in Papua New Guinea(PNG). Taken together, they further our understanding of social relations, personhood andgender in marketplaces, which are one of the most vibrant features of contemporary PNG.The papers explore moral evaluations of marketplace transactions, but our focus is also onmarketplaces as places, and many of the moral issues explored in the papers do not relate toexchange.

The focus on market places—gatherings at particular places focused on trade—is crit-ical.1 Such places were the original referents of the word market, which over time cameto refer to abstract ideas about a mode of exchange involving money and organised inaccordance with supply, demand and price.2 At its most dangerous, some people imaginethis as a universal principle of rationality and a mechanism by which society is organisedand social relationships evaluated. The separation of market as a principle from market asa place reflects processes through which the social and the economic are imagined and

© 2019 Oceania Publications

Oceania, Vol. 89, Issue 2 (2019): 126–153DOI:10.1002/ocea.5218

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investigated as separate domains. This view is countered by a growing body of work, towhich the papers in this issue contribute, which demonstrates the inextricable entangle-ment of the social and the economic, to the extent ‘the two cannot be clearly separated,either conceptually or empirically’ (Carrier 2018:28, also see Bestor 2004; Callon 1998;Carrier 1997, 2018; Curry 2003; Dilley 1992; Granovetter and Swedberg 2011; Gudeman2001, 2008; Lee 2006; McCormack and Barclay 2013). The marketplaces in this volumeare not spatial manifestations of market models promulgated by economists. Instead, theyremind us of the dangers of thinking that the abstract gives rise to the concrete rather thanthe other way around (Gregory 2019), or that just because one sees a marketplace doesnot mean that it is a market in the abstract sense that economists use that term (Busse2019).3 While marketplaces are places of trade, trade is only part of what goes on inmarketplaces.

In PNG, marketplaces are vital to livelihoods. More rural people earn cash from sellingin marketplaces than from any other source (Allen et al. 2009). A growing number of urbanhouseholds also earn money by reselling in marketplaces. For many rural and urban people,this is their most regular, and often primary, source of income. Money from marketplaces isespecially important for women, who comprise the great majority of sellers. Through theflow of people, goods and money, marketplaces connect urban and rural places, and redis-tribute wealth within the country.4

Marketplace incomes contribute to rural food security, through improved nutritionfrom the purchase of energy dense foods, and by enabling people to purchase food whenfood crops fail (Bourke 2001). Marketplaces also offer income earning opportunitiesduring periods of depressed export cash crop earnings including from slumps in globalmarkets, seasonal fluctuations, and pest-induced declines in production (Curry et al.2012; Curry et al. 2015). They are the main sources of fresh food for townspeople, andare therefore critical to urban food security (Bourke et al. 2009:132; Busse 2014;FPDA 2009).

Marketplaces in PNG are also significant social meeting places—as they are else-where, and have been historically.5,6 This is equally true of the large urban marketplaceswhere vendors and other market-goers socialise, and the small roadside stalls whereneighbours congregate and converse in the late afternoon. As places to buy, sell, andsocialise, marketplaces are part of the lives of virtually all Papua New Guineans, and, formany, part of their daily routines. Urban spaces in PNG, and everywhere, are placeswhere people of different cultural backgrounds interact. In PNG, marketplaces are aprominent site of this encounter. This is a source of new social connections, but also attimes a source of anxiety, as people with different moral understandings interact. Byfocusing on marketplaces as places, the papers in this special issue contribute to ourunderstanding of the urban economy and the moral encounters that are part of urban lifein PNG.

The morality of exchange has been a central thread in anthropological research, partic-ularly in Melanesia. Gift exchange and commodity exchange are features of all societies(Gregory 1982, 1997), but in Melanesia the elaborate ceremonial gift exchange systems, aswell as everyday practices of gifting, have most attracted ethnographers’ attention (Gell1992; Gregory 2009; Healey 1990). Carrier (1998:102) argues, however, that when Melane-sian societies as a whole are represented as ‘gift societies’ this ‘comes to define what isauthentically Melanesian, what is worthy of anthropological attention, and so indirectlywhat is inauthentic and not worth consideration’. This has meant that the trading systems ofthe pre-colonial era have received far less attention (Healey 1990:3), and much the samecould be said of colonial and contemporary marketplaces.


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Research on the morality of exchange has frequently explored the place of money inexchange (Bloch and Parry 1989; Gregory 1982, 1997; Robbins and Akin 1999). Market-places are where Papua New Guineans most frequently transact with money. And the turn-over in some marketplaces is considerable. The papers in this issue examine the moralevaluation and negotiation of different forms of transactions involving money. They alsocontribute to ideas of moral economy, an area of study receiving renewed interest in recentyears (see Carrier 2018). Marketplaces also provide opportunities to explore how pre-existing moralities of exchange, social relationships, gender and production are transformedin introduced institutions.

In describing and discussing marketplaces, the authors in this special issue focus onmoral dilemmas, moments of tension, conflict, transgression and debate, which, as Barker(2007:1) argues, highlight moral assumptions about social relations and behaviour ‘that areotherwise secreted in daily routines and commonsense notions of right and wrong’ (see alsoCresswell 1996). In other words, the papers make explicit and visible those aspects of cul-ture that are more often implicit and invisible (Wagner 1975).

This special issue comes at a time when there is a need for research on PNG’s market-places. Research on marketplaces in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, led to a solid understand-ing of the social, cultural, geographic and economic dimensions of the country’smarketplaces in that period. But marketplaces have changed significantly over the past30 years, and they have grown in economic importance. They have also emerged as a focusof the development sector in PNG and the Pacific. But only limited research (post-1980s)exists on the present state of marketplaces in PNG. There has been renewed research interestin the past decade, but little ethnographic detail. Only in the past few years have market-places again started to receive ethnographic attention, and much of this has come from con-tributors to this special issue.7

This special issue goes a considerable way to addressing the dearth of detailed researchon marketplaces, but also highlights existing gaps in knowledge. It draws together recentethnographic research on marketplaces by anthropologists and geographers. In doing so wecontribute to a more detailed understanding of marketplaces in contemporary PNG, the par-ticular economic and non-economic activities that occur in marketplaces, and the distinctivemoralities to which those activities give rise.

Such detailed understanding of market moralities is critical for development interven-tions in PNG’s marketplaces, which are designed both to improve management and to rede-velop physical infrastructure and facilities. Craig and Porter (2017:2), for example, arguethat it is vital to ask how social variables such as differences in gender, ethnicity and socio-economic class, can be taken into account in the redevelopment of PNG’s marketplaces.Recently, both Craig and Porter (2017:2) and Underhill-Sem et al. (2014:306–7) have notedthat a technical focus on infrastructure and facilities has sometimes come at the expense ofattention to social and political aspects of marketplace redevelopment, as well as the exclu-sion of market women from decisions about marketplace redevelopment. Among otherthings, such input is critical if marketplaces are to be safe places for women, which theymust be if they are to provide women with much-needed economic opportunities (cf. Cox2015). The papers in this special issue contribute to development practitioners’ recent dis-cussions of PNG’s marketplaces by providing detailed accounts of the moralities and socialrelationships that are enacted there.

In this collection of papers, we adopt a broad definition of the places we take to bemarketplaces, which reflects the diverse geographically located sites of trade that PapuaNew Guineans categorise under the term maket in Tok Pisin. We include large urban mar-ketplaces (the largest of which may have over 1,500 vendors on a busy day) (Figure 4) aswell as small clusters of sellers on roadsides and street corners (kona maket) (Figures 8 and 10),


128 Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea: Place, Personhood and Exchange

and single vendors selling from the front of their houses (haus maket) (Figures 9 and 12)(Rooney 2019). We also include wholesale transactions at a rural trading hub and occur-ring at producers’ haus dua (‘house door’ or ‘farm gate’) (Sharp 2019). Urban market-places are more heavily represented amongst the papers, but these urban marketplaces,both historically and today, connect urban and rural locales, and reshape rural places (seeCurry et al. 2019). None of the papers examines small rural marketplaces8 (but see Figure11) nor do any of the papers examine the practices of mobile hawkers. (Figures 1–12 givean idea of the variety of types of marketplaces in PNG.)

The papers also describe marketplaces in several different parts of PNG. Busse andBarnett-Naghshineh further our understanding of continuity and change in the Goroka mar-ketplace (Eastern Highlands), which (along with marketplaces on the Gazelle Peninsula) isone of the best studied marketplaces in PNG (see Barnett-Naghshineh 2015, 2016;Benediktsson 1998, 2002; Busse 2014; Epstein 1982; Jackson 1976; Jackson and Kolta1974; Pickles 2013). The papers by Hukula and Rooney describe marketplaces in PortMoresby, with Hukula describing the large urban marketplace in Tokarara, and Rooneydescribing haus maket in an urban settlement. Sharp discusses several lowland marketplacesencompassed within the wholesale betel nut trade, and discusses in detail one rural whole-sale marketplace in Madang Province. And Curry, Koczberski and Inu draw on work withrural smallholders in the Eastern Highlands, West New Britain, and East New Britain to dis-cuss interactions between marketplace selling and export cash cropping (coffee, cocoa andoil palm), which is the other main source of income for rural people. In doing this, they ana-lyse the moral frameworks that shape men’s and women’s participation in these differentspheres.

The papers are PNG focused, but are relevant to marketplaces elsewhere in Melanesiaand the broader Pacific. While marketplaces in Melanesia and the wider Pacific have his-torically been quite distinct from their counterparts elsewhere (see Brookfield 1969b), andwhile today’s marketplaces remain distinctly Melanesian, changes in the prominence oftrade intermediaries (or middlemen),9 the significance of marketplace incomes for house-holds, and the range of goods for sale, mean that the region’s marketplaces have increas-ing relevance beyond the Pacific. While the papers are marketplace focused, the moralquestions and tensions explored—how to exchange with other people (known andunknown), and how to behave in particular places—are not. These questions extendbeyond Melanesia and are central to human experience. They are also at the heart ofanthropology and geography.

In this introduction, we contextualise marketplaces in relation to other forms ofexchange in Melanesia, and recount the emergence of marketplaces in PNG. We describethe diversity of contemporary marketplaces, their forms and features, and the main changesthey have undergone since their colonial introduction. We then explore the morality oftransactions in PNG both in and out of marketplaces, and the importance of place in evalua-tions of morality. Lastly, we introduce the marketplace as a means to explore ideas of per-sonhood in contemporary PNG.

PRECOLONIAL TRADE AND EXCHANGE

A complex web of exchange existed in the pre-contact and the early colonial periods inwhat is now PNG.10 While a variety of types of exchange existed—ceremonial prestations,non-ceremonial gift giving, barter, commodity transactions, and trade—these were ofteninterconnected and interdependent (Gell 1992; Gregory 1982; Healey 1990:5–7,227, 304).11


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There were some clear regional differences in trading practices (Gell 1992). In coastal,coastal hinterland, and riverine areas, trade was often based on ecological diversity. Thelevel of dependency on inter-group trade for subsistence differed between groups (Barlow1985; Gewertz 1983; Harding 1967:118–153). Inland communities, for example, wouldtrade with coastal communities, exchanging sago and garden food for fish and other marineproducts. In a few places, trade in staples superficially resembled contemporary market-places.12 But unlike contemporary marketplaces, where people of many dfferent groupstransact, these trade gatherings were typically restricted to persons belonging to only twogroups (Keil 1977). Another characteristic of these pre-contact forms of trade, which isreproduced in many contemporary marketplaces in PNG, is that men tended to be moreinvolved in the exchange of prestige goods and women with subsistence items (Gewertz1983; Salisbury 1970:177; see Barnett-Naghshineh 2019).

By contrast, pre-contact trade in the Highlands tended to be episodic, small in volume,and concentrated on valuables exchanged between established male trade partners. Staplefoods were not traded (Keil 1974:195; Healey 1990:3; Hughes 1977:203, 208–9). Therewere no marketplaces, ‘no professional traders, no merchants’ (Hughes 1977:203).

THE EMERGENCE OF MARKETPLACES

In most parts of the country marketplaces emerged during the colonial period and grewalongside the post-World War II growth of urban areas (Brookfield 1969b; Connell 1997).The expansion of export cash cropping, which placed cash in the hands of the general popu-lation and created people who were at least partially dependent on purchased food(MacWilliam 2013:217–8), as well as the appearance of trade stores where people couldspend their money, also contributed to the growth in marketplaces (Jackson 1976).

While some marketplaces evolved informally and were later brought under governmentregulation, other marketplaces emerged, in the 1950s and 1960s, through direct encourage-ment and action by colonial administrators. Urban demand for fresh food led some pro-ducers to walk around the streets of towns selling produce; so, one aim of marketplaces wasto ‘regularise and formalise an emerging reality’ (Jackson 1976:175). Marketplaces also pro-vided a means for colonial administrators to pursue political and development agendas(Benediktsson 2002:138–140; Jackson 1976; Maclean 1989; Ward et al. 1974).13 Theseearly urban marketplaces were held on 1 or 2 days each week. Marketplaces were initiallyslow to develop (Brookfield 1969b:12), but once established their popularity amongst PapuaNew Guineans grew, and they soon became seemingly ubiquitous features of the urban andrural landscape. By the early 1970s marketplaces had ‘sprung up … beside council cham-bers, near schools, by missions, by plantations, next to airports, along road sides, and bysmall wayside shops (or trade stores)’ (Jackson 1976:176). Marketplaces have, mostly inde-pendent of government, continued to increase in number, size, diversity and regularity.Despite their colonial origins, marketplaces have now become a largely indigenous phenom-enon, spaces created by grassroots Papua New Guineans rather than outsiders (Benediktsson2002:140). A key contribution of the papers in this issue is to document what PNG market-places are like today.14

CONTEMPORARY MARKETPLACES

Today’s marketplaces take a variety of forms. The largest marketplaces are in urbanareas, and each urban centre has its marketplace, and frequently more than one. In



general, urban marketplaces are open from dawn until dusk, 6 or 7 days a week. Someare, at least ostensibly, administered by local authorities, or a mandated marketplaceauthority. These large government marketplaces are often fenced and include concreteand corrugated iron structures, many in states of disrepair and an increasing number builtover the last decade with funds from foreign donors and local governments. The papersby Barnett-Naghshineh, Busse and Hukula in this issue focus on large urban market-places (Figures 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6).

There are also many marketplaces, some very large in size, which the authorities haveno hand in managing. Betel nut, the selling of which is banned from many government mar-ketplaces, is a prominent commodity in these marketplaces (Hukula 2019; Sharp 2019)(Figure 7). Smaller urban marketplaces, often called kona maket (literally, ‘corner market’) inTok Pisin, are often no more than a patch of grass or bare earth dotted with colourfulumbrellas along the edges of streets near intersections, urban bus stops or neighbourhoodshops (Figure 8). Small house-front stalls (haus maket) are also common throughout urbanareas (Figure 9). Smaller marketplaces have little or no infrastructure and operate for shorterperiods of time than central urban marketplaces. In many of these marketplaces, vendorsgather in the late afternoon to sell to people heading home from work. They display theirgoods or produce on small home-made tables or pieces of plastic or produce bags directly onthe ground. Some haus maket consist of small corrugated or bush material huts in front of thevendor’s house. Rooney’s paper in this issue describes the sociality and morality of hausmaket in Port Moresby.

Rural marketplaces in village clearings, along main roads, and at government and mis-sion stations, generally operate for shorter periods of time than urban marketplaces. It iscommon for larger gatherings to be held only 1 or 2 days a week. Many smaller roadsidemarketplaces run mainly in the afternoon, although some, especially those along busy roads,are open from dawn to dusk, and even throughout the night, to sell to travellers. Here too,there is often little infrastructure, although some marketplaces along main roads, such as theHighlands Highway, consist of bush material shelters and may be located near more sub-stantial tradestores.

In addition to differences in appearance, infrastructure, and opening hours, there is alsospecialisation among marketplaces. Some are venues for transactions between ruralproducer-sellers and urban consumers (Barnett-Naghshineh 2019; Busse 2019), but there arealso wholesale marketplaces where intermediaries operate. Sharp (2019) describes, amongother things, the intermediaries in the Highlands betel nut trade, and how such wholesalebetel nut marketplaces work. Increasingly, there are also marketplaces dominated by res-ellers, who are often referred to as blak maket people (‘black market’) in Tok Pisin, a labelthat reflects tension surrounding the moral and legal legitimacy of these spaces and ofreselling more generally (see Busse 2019).

Most of what is sold in PNG’s marketplaces is fresh produce, betel nut, fish,chickens, firewood and local crafts. Many marketplaces now have vendors selling cookedfood (with imported ingredients) and reselling a limited range of ‘store goods’ such asrice, oil, instant noodles, stock cubes, soap, cigarettes, lighters, batteries and mobile phonetop-up cards (Figure 3). The house front stalls discussed by Rooney (2019) mainly resellthese kinds of items and occupy a middle space between marketplace vending and thesmall tradestore.

Marketplaces in PNG have changed considerably over the last 70 years, and likesocial change more broadly, these changes have been subjects of contestation and moraldebate.


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Today, for example, the overwhelming majority of vendors are women, but this wasnot always the case particularly in the Highlands. Men were more involved as vendors inthe early years of PNG marketplaces in the Highlands, but as they became increasinglyinvolved in export cash cropping, they withdrew from these spaces, and marketplacesbecame increasingly dominated by women. Recently, men have again come to seemarketplaces as good sources of income (Figure 1), most likely due to a combination offactors including a prolonged period of low prices for export cash crops (see Curry et al.2019), considerable urban growth and macro-economic changes leading to increasingurban demand and higher fresh food prices, the emergence of wholesaling and reselling(see Busse 2019; Sharp and Busse 2019), and changing gender roles (see Barnett-Naghshineh 2019).

Similarly, producer-sellers dominated early marketplaces, with wholesalers and inter-mediaries nearly absent. Producer-sellers are still the majority of sellers in most market-places, but the number of resellers has grown significantly in large urban centres over thelast 10 to 20 years. In some large marketplaces, and many kona maket, resellers now domi-nate. Intermediaries are prominent in the betel nut trade; indeed, almost all betel nut sellersin the Highlands are intermediaries of one kind or another (Sharp 2013a; Sharp 2013b;Sharp 2019).

The contribution of marketplace sales to household income has also changed. Whereasin the past, income generated from sales in marketplaces was usually a small part of house-holds’ total income, the recent rise of intermediaries and declines in cash crop prices hasmeant a growing number of households are increasingly dependent on marketplaceincome. While more money is made in PNG from export cash crops, more householdsmake money from selling fresh produce (Allen et al. 2009; Sharp and Busse 2019). Pro-ducers are also increasingly focused on producing for sale rather than selling accidental orplanned surpluses from gardens primarily intended for household consumption (see Curryet al. 2019).

Overt price competition among vendors is also uncommon (see Busse 2019),although betel nut marketplaces, where competitive practices are commonplace, are anexception to this (see Craig and Porter 2017:6; Sharp 2019). Price competition is alsomore common in food marketplaces where resellers are more prominent, and it is an openquestion whether the growth in intermediaries will lead to increasingly competitive prac-tices in marketplaces, both in terms of price competition and in terms of more active sell-ing methods. In sum, marketplaces in PNG began during the colonial period, but in someareas, they built on trading practices that pre-dated the arrival of Europeans (see Brook-field 1969b). From a limited number of urban marketplaces administered by colonial offi-cials, marketplaces have proliferated and become one of the most dynamic features ofcontemporary PNG.15 Trading defines these spaces, but they are also places where peoplego to socialise, tell stories, catch up on news, proselytise, resolve problems, and gamble.The ways in which marketplaces have changed over the last 70 years—the changing gen-der of marketplace sellers, the increasing prominence of intermediaries, the significance ofmarket income for households and the emergence of more competitive selling practices—are all subjects of moral contestation for Papua New Guineans, as are many of the non-economic activities that happen in marketplaces. In addition to documenting contemporarymarketplaces in PNG, the papers in this special issue demonstrate how marketplaces pro-vide vital opportunities to examine morality and moral economy in contemporary PNG, inpart because they are places where exchanges (of various types) intersect with ideas aboutsocial and moral personhood.



TRANSACTIONS, MORALITY AND MARKETPLACES

In a recent paper, Carrier (2018:18, 23–4) reminds us that moral economy, as that phrasewas used by Thompson (1971) and Scott (1976), is not about the moral values that are thecontext of economic activity, but rather the moral values that arise from the activity itself,and, in particular, the obligations that arise from repeated transactions. An act is moral if wecan point to the obligation that it expresses and the social relationship of which the obliga-tion is a part. Moral economic activity helps reproduce social relationships in which transac-tors have become obligated to one another because of their past transactions, whatGudeman (2016) calls ‘mutuality’ (Carrier 2018:30–2). By focusing on detailed ethno-graphic descriptions of day-to-day economic practices and other non-economic activities inPNG’s marketplaces, the papers in this special issue contribute to our understanding ofsocial obligations and moral economic activities in PNG’s marketplaces and the moralvalues to which those practices and activities give rise.

As Barker (2007:3) has noted, most, if not all, anthropological studies of Melanesiansocieties include information about morality, including moral decision making, moral narra-tives and semantic analyses of vernacular words for moral values. At the same time, fewstudies have focused primarily on morality or what is meant by morality in Melanesia. Thecomparative analysis of moral systems in Melanesia is often contained in discussions ofsocial organisation, exchange, sexuality and religion, with which morality is often conflated.

The exception to the lack of comparison of moral systems across Melanesia isLangness’s comparison of indigenous Melanesian ethical systems by which he meant

Figure 1: Male vendor selling carrots and spring onions in Goroka’s main market, EasternHighlands Province. The vast majority of marketplace vendors in PNG are women, however itis becoming more common to see men selling fresh produce. At the time of this photo theGoroka marketplace was temporarily located in the park opposite the usual main market

while the market was being renovated. Photograph by Tim Sharp, 2019. [Color figure can beviewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]


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http://wileyonlinelibrary.com

‘current ideals of right and wrong’, as well as the sanctions that push people to conform tothose ideals (Langness 1972:375). In his survey, Langness noted both the widespreadimportance of shame as a key component of Melanesian moral systems (also explored byBarnett-Naghshineh 2019) and that morality is not abstract but is instead part of day-to-daysocial life and is group specific. As Read (1955) argued, however, this group specificity isnot simply an opposition between people within one’s own group and people outside one’sown group (see Busse 2019). It is instead about shifting social relationships and is a form ofsocial pragmatism. This is a particularly important point in contemporary urban PNG wherefriendships, and social relationships stemming from school, church, work and, indeed, mar-ketplaces, can, in some contexts, be as important as relationships based on kinship andmarriage.

Burridge (1969), one of the few anthropologists who explicitly addressed the issue ofmorality in Melanesia, emphasised subjectivity, the developing awareness of moral actorsrather than pragmatic schemes of abstract moral rules. He therefore focused on types ofsocial persons—e.g. big men, sorcerers, rubbish men—who matter because of what theyexemplify for others rather than for what they do (Barker 2007:8). In contemporary PNG,these moral actors include marketplace vendors, intermediaries and customers.

Burridge’s focus on moral actors and social persons is relevant to thinking about themoralities of PNG marketplaces. Theorists of modernity, capitalism and market exchange inPNG (e.g. Foster 1995; LiPuma 2000; Sykes 2007) have argued that social persons in capi-talist economies must, of necessity, be independent and self-contained, what Sykes (2007),following Macpherson (1978), terms ‘possessive individuals’. Put another way, the spreadof market exchange (such as one expects to find in marketplaces) is understood as the

Figure 2: Near the main gate of the Goroka Market, Eastern Highlands Province. Note thetable with store goods in the left foreground just inside the gate and next to the fresh

produce (beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, capsicums, zucchinis and lemons). Photograph byMark Busse, 2013. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]




spread of such possessive individuals. And yet, several papers in this special issue describeand discuss attributions of immorality to (and hence disapproval of) precisely such posses-sive individuals—resellers (Busse) and haggling traders (Sharp)—as well as contestationsabout what makes someone a good neighbour (Rooney), a good woman or man (Barnett-Naghshineh), or a good person (Hukula) in contemporary urban PNG. In this sense, market-places present critical opportunities for understanding contemporary manifestations of rela-tional personhood (Foster 1995; Martin 2013; Mosko 2013; LiPuma 2000; M. Strathern1988) in PNG, even as they present critical opportunities for examining contemporarymanifestations of gift and commodity exchange (Busse 2019; Carrier 1991, 1998; Carrier andCarrier 1989; Gregory 1982).

A critical feature of marketplaces, in PNG or elsewhere, is the use of money, and auseful framework for understanding the morality of money in Melanesian exchange is pro-vided by Robbins and Akin (1999). They argue that, ‘Melanesians regularly work to differ-entiate kinds of exchanges, kinds of relationships, and kinds of objects’, and that they areanxious about the collapse of distinctions in those three categories (Robbins and Akin1999:8).16 They argue that in Melanesia morally neutral exchanges take the following form:‘not only must people in the right kind of relationship … be transacting with the right kindof objects, [but] they must also be doing so in the right way’ (Robbins and Akin 1999:9).

The objects exchanged matter, in part because they often stand for social relationships,and this is particularly true in the case of fresh produce (Sahlins 1972:215–9; Busse 2019),a point to which we return below. But it is incongruence between the mode of exchangeand the relationship between the people who are exchanging which gives rise to the greatestmoral unease (Robbins and Akin 1999:14). This is because modes of exchange and

Figure 3: ‘Store goods’ (oil, salt, candles, soap, instant noodles, tinned fish and plastic bags)being sold alongside fresh food (aibika, coconuts and taro) in the Goroka market (temporary

loaction), Eastern Highlands Province. The sale of store goods in fresh food markets is a relativelynew but growing practice. The women vendor in the mid-ground is preparing coconuts for sale.

Photograph by Tim Sharp, 2019. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]


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Figure 4: Women vendors at Kokopo Market, East New Britain Province. Note the clusteringof mango vendors both on the ground and at the benches in the same location. Photograph

by Tim Sharp, 2015. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

Figure 5: Wara Market, a betel nut and fresh food market in Kundiawa Town, Simbu Province.Photograph by Tim Sharp, 2007. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]





relationships between transactors are mutually constituting and reinforcing. Close kin areexpected to share food. At the same time, however, the act of sharing and eating togetherreinforces and creates bonds of kinship (Robbins and Akin 1999:14). In this way, modes ofexchange delineate social boundaries. A critical distinction is often, for example, betweenthose with whom one shares and those with whom one does not share but instead exchangesin other, non-sharing, ways. The extension of sharing to non-kin can create relationshipsapproximating kinship. Conversely, exchanging with kin in a way that is more typical ofexchanges with non-kin—such as immediate, monetised trade—may undermine kin rela-tions. The quality of a social relationship, then, suggests the morally appropriate form oftransaction, and vice versa. Morally appropriate transactions reaffirm relationships, and peo-ple who fail to exchange in morally prescribed ways risk jeopardising relationships. In thisspecial issue, Rooney discusses the moral dilemma faced by people in urban settlements:when to share with their neighbours and when to think primarily of their own family’sneeds.

For many Papua New Guineans, the disconcerting thing about money is that it so easilyflits in and out of different types of exchange. Money can be used to buy things in atradestore or a marketplace, or it can be part of a bridewealth or compensation payment, orit can be part of smaller, less formal and less public gifts. Marketplace exchanges andmonetised trade are important contexts within which Papua New Guineans have to considerhow they transact with both known and unknown others. In marketplaces, as sites wheremoney circulates and people of varying social distance (kin, friends, non-kin but knownothers, and strangers) meet, people face the dilemma of how to exchange with, and relate to,

Figure 6: Women vendors selling fresh food in the Madang Market, Madang Province. Notethe diversity of crops being sold which includes taro, cooking bananas, pumpkin, corn,yams, pawpaw, green coconuts, pitpit, peanuts, leafy greens, cassava and sweet potato.

Note the bundling of produce. Photograph by Madeleine Fletcher, 2007. [Color figure can beviewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]


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such a diversity of others. This is a dilemma of urban life in general (Goddard 2005; Numb-asa and Koczberski 2012; Repi�c 2011; M. Strathern 1975), but one that is particularly visi-ble in a marketplace. Detailed studies of marketplaces, such as those in this special issue,provide opportunities to explore and understand the moral dilemmas that people face andhow they work to avoid contentious transactions.

Robbins and Akin’s relationship/object/exchange nexus provides a useful frameworkfor thinking about the moral dilemmas and contestation (Barker 2007) that Papua NewGuineans must negotiate when they transact in marketplaces. It is also useful for under-standing how morality has shaped some of the key characteristics of marketplaces inPNG—the relative absence of price competition, reluctance to drop prices, the absence ofhard sell tactics, the absence of bargaining, the clustering of vendors of the same culturalgroup, and the preponderance of producer-sellers and women amongst vendors. These issuesare central in the papers in this special issue, as they have been in several of the earlier mar-ketplace studies in PNG.

One of the key moral dilemmas that marketplaces present is how to transact with, andin the presence of, kin and other known people. This can be particularly contentious whenpeople who are expected to share begin to buy and sell with one another. In societies inwhich sharing makes kinship, trading with kin risks undermining that relationship. Smith(1994, 2002), for example, has described the unease felt by some people on Kairiru Islandin East Sepik Province about villagers buying and selling with one another, and about the

Figure 7: A customer buying betel nut in Mt. Hagen’s Kaiwei market, Western HighlandsProvince. Bundles of bean-like betel pepper in the foreground. Large heaps of betel nut inthe centre. The betel nut has not been arranged into physical bundles, rather the number of

betel nut given for K2 is relayed verbally. Cardboard price tags not displayed as, byconvention, most bundles are K2. Vendors are seated on cut open plastic produce bags andcardboard. Young boy carrying basin (background) is selling fried fish. Photograph by Tim

Sharp, 2010. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]




emergence of individualised enterprise and accumulation, where social relations had previ-ously been based on reciprocal exchange.

Such moral dilemmas have sometimes led people in PNG to reimagine and reframetheir marketplace transactions. For example, among Maring in what is now Jiwaka Province,groups are defined through, among other things, shared substance which results from con-suming food produced within a clan territory. Writing about a small rural marketplace in the1980s, Maclean (1989) described how the broader distribution of food through the market-place was seen by Maring as a way of expressing solidarity within a cluster of clans whoconsumed one another’s food.

In PNG, marketplace vendors have also altered market exchange by including gifts of‘extra’ betel nut or food as a distinct part of their transactions with customers. ‘Extra’ isboth a comment on the quality of the relationship between vendor and customer, and a con-tribution to an ongoing relationship. In this sense, giving ‘extra’ is a socially reproductiveaddition to a transaction that might otherwise be a simple commodity transaction (Busse2019; Sharp 2016). The sharing practices of haus maket vendors provide a similar example(Rooney 2019), and, like ‘giving extra’, demonstrate the nuances and complications of giftand commodity exchange (Gregory 1982, 1997). These examples show how marketplacetransactions are understood and, in some instances, are modified or reinterpreted to makethem less morally contentious.

But, as noted earlier, the objects that are exchanged also matter. The objects boughtand sold in marketplaces include both indigenous items, such as sweet potato or yam, aswell as new objects, such as betel nut in the Highlands, introduced European vegetables and

Figure 8: Seigu “corner market”, a large roadside market in Goroka town on the roadheading toward Bena Bena, Eastern Highlands Province. Urban corner markets are busiest in

the late afternoon when people are leaving for home. Vendors selling cassava and sweetpotato in the foreground. Photograph by Tim Sharp, 2019. [Color figure can be viewed at

wileyonlinelibrary.com]


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Figure 9: A small table market next to the vendor’s house in central Mt. Hagen, WesternHighlands Province. The vendor is selling betel nut and cigarettes through the fence to customers.


Figure 10: Women selling fresh food at a roadside market near Kimbe, West New BritainProvince. Note the diversity of items being sold by each vendor. Photograph by Tim Sharp,

2015. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]





trade store items. In the case of indigenous items, transactions in marketplaces represent asignificant change in how they are exchanged. Whereas previously (or away from market-places) one should share betel nut and sweet potatoes, in the marketplace these becomeobjects for which a direct, mediated (in the sense of being bought and sold for money)exchange is required between people who stand in a new kind of relationship vis-à-vis oneanother—the relationship of customer and vendor.17

Competitive marketing is still uncommon in PNG’s marketplaces. Bargaining andhaggling is unusual, and most sellers sit quietly next to their produce rather than activelyaddressing potential customers (see Busse 2019; Schram 2016:522–4). This passive,seemingly disinterested, demeanour was typical of marketplace vendors historically(Brookfield 1969b; Epstein 1982), and is a striking feature of many contemporarymarketplaces. More active selling, such as calling out to customers, and bargaining overprice, has emerged recently and is now commonplace in betel nut trading, and isincreasingly evident in fresh food marketplaces, though mainly in transactions involvingintermediaries (Barnett-Naghshineh 2019; Sharp 2019). The appearance of these practiceshas nevertheless attracted mutterings of disapproval and at times overt vocal criticism(Sharp 2019).

Reselling has been viewed with particular moral concern in PNG’s marketplaces (seeBusse 2019; Lowe 2006) where historically the vast majority of people selling have beenproducer-sellers. Reselling is well established in the betel nut trade, but has only recentlyemerged as a significant practice with fresh food, and only then in marketplaces in the larg-est urban centres. People’s discomfort with the rise of reselling stems from several sourcesincluding ideas about the relationship between people and the food that they have grown,and ideas about what kinds of activities are considered work (see Busse 2019). The

Figure 11: Women with their children selling at a small afternoon rural market on KarkarIsland, Madang Province. Photograph by Madeleine Fletcher, 2007. [Color figure can be

viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]


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appearance of intermediaries and reselling represents the growth of more commercialisedmarketplace practices in which the purpose of marketing is increasingly to expand profits.At the marketplace in Kokopo, in East New Britain Province, resellers buy many smallbundles of greens, each of which they divide to create two smaller bundles, each of whichthey sell for the same price as the larger bundle they initially purchased, thus doubling themoney that they originally spent. In doing this, they demonstrate their understanding of howmoney makes money (see Busse 2019). But one woman interviewed by Timothy Sharp in2017 explained the moral problem with reselling in terms of the immorality of interfering inthe relationship between the seller and what was being sold:

[Reselling] is stealing. You think about the blessing. Father God gave somethingto another person, and when this person comes to the marketplace, and we buy it,we are stealing her blessing. Father God gave a blessing to her. And we are steal-ing the money. Think, when we buy it, untie and retie [the bundles into smallerbundles], sell them, and a customer buys these, we have sinned. We are sinning.

While producers in some areas like being able to quickly dispose of their produce, withoutthe need to spend the whole day sitting in the marketplace, making money by re-bundlingand reselling greens goes against ideas of what constitutes a fair price (see Gregory 2019),which in turn is often linked to what types of activity are considered to be work, as Busse’spaper in this special issue illustrates.

Figure 12: A small table market selling ‘store’ goods (biscuits, rice, instant noodles, stockcubes and soap) adjacent to the owner’s house (left of picture) on the roadside in a smallvillage in rural Bena Bena, Eastern Highlands Province. The table market, which is set up inthe afternoons, is being looked after by the owner’s young son. Coffee trees in background.





At the Kokopo marketplace, the marketplace authority has also sought to regulate trad-ing practices. One announcement over the marketplace public address system, in May 2017,instructed resellers not to climb onto arriving vehicles in their attempts to buy, but to waitfor producers to carry their produce into the marketplace. People were also told that it is notpermitted for resellers to take food from producers without first paying for it:

Lots of you are doing this… it is prohibited to take produce from others, to firstsell it and only pay for it afterwards. This is not proper… The Market Authorityhas banned this practice… Because the producers that come here need money, justlike you need money. [Sharp, field notes]

Marketplaces challenge both analysts’ and Papua New Guineans’ ideas about exchange,social relations and social personhood. They do this by challenging assumptions about whatconstitutes ‘the right kinds of relationships’, ‘the right kinds of objects’ and ‘the right kindsof transactions’ and hence what constitutes a morally acceptable exchange. As Busse (2019)argues, in some instances Papua New Guineans have transformed marketplaces, ostensiblythe locus par excellence of commodity exchange, by their continued emphasis on food asnot completely alienable and not an object that could belong to anyone. In emphasising theorigins of food in land and labour (what Polanyi 1944 called ‘fictitious commodities’; seealso Gregory 2019), they also emphasise the importance of social relationships of produc-tion and forms of relational personhood that are rooted in relationships to land and work.For analysts, PNG marketplaces confound our analytic categories. Gifts and commoditiesare less clear-cut because food is transacted as both gift and commodity, often in the sameplace and at the same time. Similarly, ideas about what constitutes personhood are chal-lenged by the ways people in PNG’s marketplaces negotiate the individualism that manyanalysts assume accompanies the spread of capitalism and the relational personhood pro-duced by, and producing of, Papua New Guinean forms of sociality. PNG marketplaces aresocial places in which contemporary ideas about social personhood are formed and enactedthrough the objects that people transact, the ways in which they transact, and the peoplewith whom they transact. But ideas about what makes someone a good person, a bad per-son, a friendly person, or a difficult person are only partly about buying and selling, onlypartly about transacting in socially appropriate and socially meaningful ways. Ideas aboutpersonhood reflect the range of other things that occur in marketplaces—friendships that areformed, obligations created, court cases that are heard, public announcements that are made,and ideas about what, in Tok Pisin, is called pasin, which Hukula (2019) perceptively trans-lates as ‘ways of being’. And ideas about personhood stem from how ‘ways of being’(or pasin) in the marketplace are related to ‘ways of being’ (or pasin) in people’s wider lives.

MORALITY AND THE MARKET-‘PLACE’

The papers in this volume all draw attention to the significance of marketplaces as places.Marketplaces, like all places, are in a geographic position—Goroka or Port Moresby, say(location). They have a material form or layout—of corrugated iron, concrete, bare earthand umbrellas which overflow onto public roads or are overlooked by neighbouring houses(locale). And they are vested with social meaning, including particular moral expectationsof behaviour, reinforced by practice, which contribute to identity and feelings of belongingand exclusion (sense of place) (Agnew 1987; Cresswell 1996). Relations of power are cen-tral to the construction of place, and the ideas of morality that cling to it. The papers in thisspecial issue, among other treatments of transaction, also make clear the bearing of place on


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the moral evaluation of transactions. That is, taken together they make the point that a mor-ally neutral transaction not only involves people in the right kind of relationship transactingthe right kind of objects in the right way, but they must be doing this in the right kind ofplace (cf. Robbins and Akin 1999:9). Place nonetheless remains backgrounded in muchanthropological discussion of exchange, and in Melanesia, where social groups are closelyassociated with particular territories, and social networks are often spatially concentrated,place is readily reduced to a proxy for village-rooted sociality.

The location of a transaction often signifies the quality of the relationship, and the formof transaction. Carrier and Carrier (1989:160), for instance, describe how a man visitingPonam in Manus Province to sell sago ‘landed his canoe on a public beach, while a kawas[a kinship related trade partner] would land close to his trade partner’s house’. Landing on apublic beach signalled the more commercial purpose of the man’s visit. Similarly, Curry(2005:238–9) notes that tradestores oriented more towards generating financial profits(rather than ‘social’ returns) are often located on the roadside at a distance from the villageand from the demands of kin. A tradestore’s location thus reflects the relationship the storeowner wants with his customers.

The influence of space and place on the morality of transactions and marketplaces isparticularly evident in Michelle Rooney’s discussion in this special issue of women sellingfrom small house-front stalls (haus maket) in one of Port Moresby’s informal settlements.Rooney situates haus maket at the centre of neighbourhood moral economies—particularlydue to the vantage point these stalls offer into the home lives of stall vendors’ neighbours.To be good neighbours, stall operators should recognise neighbours in need through acts ofsharing. There is also moral pressure to do so. This means that stall owners are compelledto act in ways that would not be expected of vendors in the larger urban marketplaces.Pickles (2013:118–23) notes a similar dynamic to street marketing in Goroka.

The interaction between place and morality is also evident in the mobility of betel nuttraders. Social relationships among traders, that would be distant relationships at home, becomeimportant bases of cooperation, protection, and moral obligation when they are away fromhome. But back at home, relationships and obligations formed during trading trips become lessimportant (Sharp 2013a:248–9). Place and morality are also reflected in the different nature oftransactions between traders and producers when they occur in the communities of lowlandproducers—where producers and traders socialise and have the opportunity to develop relation-ships beyond trade—compared to the more anonymised urban marketplaces (Sharp 2019). Ideasabout place (and its underpinning social relationships) and land are also central to the differentmoral evaluations of selling by producers compared to selling by intermediaries (Busse 2019).

Because marketplaces bring together people from diverse social groups, who do notalways share the same moral assumptions, marketplaces are often places where underlyingtensions, not necessarily related to trade, become visible. Large urban marketplaces areoccasionally the public places where tensions boil over, minor scuffles occur and the oddfight erupts (Craig and Porter 2017). Less dramatically, the cultural diversity within PNG’smarketplaces contributes to moral transgressions, dilemmas, tensions and conflicts whichare crucial for understanding PNG’s marketplaces as places.

Cresswell (1996:16) has argued that ‘[p]lace is produced by practice that adheres to(ideological) beliefs about what is the appropriate thing to do. But place reproduces thebeliefs that produce it in a way that makes them appear natural, self-evident, and common-sense’. It is often, then, actions judged as immoral or inappropriate in a particular place—that is, ‘out of place’—that are most telling because they highlight what is taken for grantedas moral and acceptable (Cresswell 1996:10).

The quiet, passive selling that occurs in Goroka’s main fresh food marketplace, forexample, is thrown into relief by the way vendors in nearby betel nut marketplaces, call out



to attract customers. The dynamics of betel nut marketplaces stand out because they are soincongruous with the expected character of so many other of the country’s marketplaces,and indeed would be considered out of place there.

Similarly, in 2017 an Asian woman’s attempt to negotiate down the price of some foodin the Kokopo marketplace was mocked by one vendor, with much laughter from surroundingvendors: ‘you try and reduce our prices, but we can’t reduce the prices in your [Asian-owned]stores’. The Asian women reportedly did not own a store, but the vendor’s comments reflectdifferent cultural expectations about the appropriate ways to transact in different places (cf.Epstein 1982:200).

The gendered construction of marketplaces also makes clear the moral beliefs that pro-duce place, and which place reproduces. Marketplace selling is widely considered as some-thing that women do, an extension of women’s work in the production and distribution offood (Sexton 1986; A. Strathern 1984); and men have by and large not taken to marketplaceselling, in part due to concerns about how they will be perceived. It is, as a result, commonto hear vendors collectively referred to as mamas (mothers), and these ‘mamas’ are fre-quently mentioned as the recipients of new marketplace infrastructure and projects. Maleideology rendered men out of place sitting in the marketplace. But as marketplace vendingis increasingly recognised as a good source of money, and men have sought to re-enter themarketplace as vendors, they have also felt the need to present alternative moral justifica-tions for belonging there (Barnett-Naghshineh 2019; Curry et al. 2019).18

The papers in this special issue explore the morality of transactions that occur inmarketplaces as sites of trade, but they also explore the moral contestation around otheractivities that take place in the country’s marketplaces. PNG’s marketplaces have becomeimportant places to see friends and relatives, catch up on news and exchange gossip, butmany have also become entertainment venues. Visitors to Mount Hagen’s main betel nutmarketplace, Kaiwei, can play bingo, cards, ‘Highlands’ darts, or snooker, or they can drinkbeer or watch a film in the haus piksa. People say that prostitution also occurs in the market-place (Sharp 2012). There is moral contestation over all of these activities as people argueabout whether they are appropriate activities for a marketplace. Betel nut marketplaces inparticular are frequently represented as places of moral decay (see Pickles 2013:131). It isalso common to hear vendors either accused of harbouring criminals, or imagined as nascentpetty criminals themselves.

What makes something either appropriate and ‘in place’, or inappropriate and ‘out ofplace’ is shaped by unequal power relations (Cresswell 1996). Vendors and other market-goers make their own evaluations, but local governments and marketplace authorities inPNG have also sought to shape the morality of the kinds of transactions and activities thatcan take place in marketplaces, and the broader urban space. This is particularly evident inrelation to the moral panic about the spaces in which it is acceptable to sell and consumebetel nut. The recent crackdown on the sale of betel nut in Port Moresby (Hukula 2019;Sharp 2013b) stemmed in part from perceptions by the elite that the public sale and con-sumption of betel nut is incompatible with their aspirations for Port Moresby to become amodern world city. It also arose from a popular discourse (part real, part imagined) whichassociated betel nut selling with Port Moresby’s much maligned informal settlements whoseresidents the city’s elite and middleclass have frequently sought to depict as out of place inthe city (Connell 2003; Goddard 2005).

The moral critique of reselling is, in some locations, entangled with widespread criti-cism of migrants in PNG, who are often seen as morally suspect and out of place. Thatreselling has emerged as an important livelihood practice for migrants, who often struggleto access land on which to grow produce for sale, reinforces criticisms of both (cf. Beer2008:109). Local authorities and the urban elite make moral evaluations of marketplaces


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and seek to shape who and what belongs. Dominant local groups do the same. It is commonfor particular cultural groups to dominate certain marketplaces. But just as some people feelsafe in these places, others feel insecure as customers and vendors in the same places (Craigand Porter 2017; Sharp 2013a). The dynamics of some large urban marketplaces have ledmany women, in particular, to feel insecure in these spaces (Cox 2015; UN WOMEN 2012;Underhill-Sem et al. 2014). For many Papua New Guineans, marketplaces with which theyare unfamiliar, and full of people who they do not know, can be spaces of anxiety. It iscommon for people to offer warnings about these unknown places, this kona maket or thatbetel nut marketplace, as places where bad things happen—places imagined as without themore diverse forms of sociality they know to exist in their own familiar marketplace.Equally, the presence of a familiar betel nut or cigarette seller, casting his eye along thestreet, is a source of comfort in place.

The papers in this special issue, draw attention to the spatial dimensions of morality,and to the way morality, and the contestation which surrounds it, is critical to the making ofmarketplaces as places. At the same time, to buy and sell, that is to treat a non-marketplaceas a marketplace, introduces ideas and anxieties about morality.

CONCLUSION

Morality is part of the public discourse of marketplaces in PNG, where vendors are expectedand pressured to transact and otherwise behave in ways that are understood as moral. AtKokopo Market in 2017, a male marketplace officer made the following heavily Christian-inflected announcement over the public address system, exhorting vendors in the cookedfood building to transact at a fair price:

All those in building number 3, you know you often trick your customers. Whenyou price [your food] at K4 or K3, you must prepare a large meal—lots ofbananas, a large amount of greens and soup, and lots of meat must go on top—soit exceeds K3 in value … so when someone eats it they can enjoy it, they will befull and they will be happy and say thank you. Because God has sent them withmoney to bless you women vendors. Don’t be confused, the customers have notcome to buy your food for no reason. God sent them because you are in need andyou are here… God is the provider of life. So when you sell whatever you have,you must be thankful, you must do good so the customer is happy, and has nocomplaint, because God sent him with the money he gave to you.19

This announcement combines ideas about the morality of buying and selling food, ideasabout God as the source of money and the provider of life, and a moral critique of Tolaiwomen as too acquisitive in their marketing practices (cf. Salisbury 1970:183).

Marketplaces in PNG are critical for understanding contemporary ideas of morality—and hence contemporary ideas about social relationships, personhood, gender, and place—inPNG. They are immensely important to livelihoods, wealth redistribution, rural and urbanfood security, and nutrition. But they are also examples of how Papua New Guineans havetransformed and continue to transform an exogenous institution, introduced to a large extentby colonial officials into Melanesian spaces which are about trade, but also about otherimportant aspects of peoples’ social lives.

In describing and analysing marketplaces, the papers in this special issue contribute toour understanding of one of the most vibrant features of contemporary PNG. And they dothis at a time when there is a need for critical research on PNG’s marketplaces and on



PNG’s domestic economy more generally. They do this by beginning with the concretedetails of contemporary marketplaces rather than with abstract economic models of howmarketplaces ought to work. Similarly, they remind us of the importance of understandingmorality, and moral economy, as emerging from concrete practices (such as forms ofexchange) rather than as abstract values that provide context for such practices. The paperscall into question simplistic equations between capitalism and possessive individualism byshowing how forms of relational personhood continue in the context of seemingly capitalistexchange. But most of all, the papers do what anthropologists and geographers do best: theyemphasise the importance of local cultural understandings tied to, and enacted in, particularsocial spaces.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The papers in this special issue are the result of a panel at the 2015 Australian Anthropolog-ical Society conference in Melbourne. We thank the speakers and audience participants forthe stimulating conversation which contributed to the development of these papers. Wethank our partners, Claudia Gross and Madeleine Fletcher, for their support and encourage-ment, as well as the many people in Papua New Guinea who have encouraged and facili-tated our research. These include, but are not limited to, staff at the National ResearchInstitute, the University of Goroka, and the Cocoa and Coconut Institute. We also thank themany people who have taken time to talk with us about marketplaces and the moral issuesthey present. Mark Busse’s research on marketplaces in PNG has been funded by The Uni-versity of Auckland and The Royal Society of New Zealand. Timothy Sharp’s research hasbeen funded by The Australian National University, Curtin University and the AustralianCentre for International Agricultural Research. We are grateful to Neil Maclean for his care-ful editorial eye and valuable comments, both on our Introduction and on the other papersin this special issue.

NOTES

1. The marketplace is ‘both a specific geographical place and a localized set of social institutions, transactions,social actors, organizations, products, trade practices, and cultural meanings motivated by a wide variety of fac-tors including, but not limited to, “purely economic” or “market” forces’ (Bestor 2004:20).

2. The use of the word maket in Tok Pisin roughly mirrors its English cognate. Maket can refer to a place(Tokarara maket, the place called ‘Tokarara Market’), the process of selling (mi bai maket, ‘I am going to sell’),and to the market as an abstraction (maket em i sot, ‘the market is in short supply’; maket em i pulap, ‘the mar-ket is full (oversupplied)’; maket em i bagarap, ‘the market is not working’).

3. Similar points have been made about local PNG understandings of bisnis (Banks 1999; Curry 2005; Sharp2013a; A. Strathern 1972). Curry (2005) emphasizes that just because a trade store looks like a store does notmean that motives or business practices are the same as people in the global North imagine them to be.

4. Underhill-Sem et al. (2014:308) make the critical point that the money earned by women in marketplaces isused both to support their households and to contribute to community activities such as building and maintainschools, clinics, and churches.

5. For a vivid description of the wide variety of activities that took place in the Agora, or main marketplace, inAthens in the time of Socrates, see Hughes (2011).

6. Indeed, many marketplace visitors neither buy nor sell (Epstein 1982:38). Historically, this created misgivingson the part of colonial officials who reproduced the separation between the social and the economic by imagin-ing, in Jackson’s (1976:176) words, that the ‘market-place was for commercial not social transactions’. It hasalso presented challenges to recent attempts to remake Port Moresby’s marketplaces (Craig and Porter 2017;UN WOMEN 2012), and is a frustration for some marketplace officers. Conversely, the idea that commercialactivities have their proper place is evident in attempts by various urban authorities to remove vendors fromurban parklands, public bus stops and roadsides (Connell 2003).

7. An important contribution of this paper is to provide a reasonably comprehensive reference list of the writingto date on modern PNG marketplaces. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s marketplaces attracted scholarly attentionfrom anthropologists, geographers and economists (see Brookfield 1969a, 1969b, 1969c; Benjamin 1985;Bourke 1986a, 1986b; Carrier and Carrier 1989; Dakeyne 1969; Epstein 1961, 1968, 1982; Flores and Harris


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1982; Gewertz 1977, 1978, 1983; Harding 1967; Hide 1975, 1978; Hogbin 1969; Jackson 1976; Jackson andKolta 1974; Keil 1977; Maclean 1989; Salisbury 1970; Mahoney 1980; McCullough 1971; Modjeska 1985;Sillitoe 1978; Straatmans 1968; von Fleckenstein 1976; Walsh 1982, 1986; Ward et al. 1974, 1978; andWeinand 1976). By contrast, there was very little marketplace research through the 1990s to the mid 2000s(the notable exception is Benediktsson’s (1998, 2002) research (see also Bourke 2005; Hide 1993). There hasbeen renewed research interest in marketplaces since the late 2000s. This research has generally had a develop-mental, livelihoods and commodity chain focus, and much of it appears in the grey literature (see Anderson2008; Allen et al. 2009; Bonney et al. 2012; Chang et al. 2013; Chang et al. 2010; Chang et al. 2016; Changand Be’Soer 2011; Chang and Spriggs 2007; Curry et al. 2012; Dewey 2011; FPDA 2009; Koczberski andCurry 2005; Omot et al. 2010; Mullen et al. 2015; Underhill-Sem et al. 2014; UN WOMEN 2011, 2012;Vinning and Galgal 2008; Vinning et al. 2008). Only recently has there again been ethnographic attentiongiven to marketplaces (see Barnett-Naghshineh 2015, 2016; Beer 2008; Beer and Church 2019; Busse 2014;Craig and Porter 2017; Pickles 2013; Schram 2016; Sharp 2012, 2013a, 2014, 2016; Sharp and Busse 2019).

8. Schram (2016) offers a recent discussion of morality in a small rural marketplace in island Milne Bay Province.Minnegal and Dwyer (2017:106–111) give a recent discussion of a rural marketplace in remote Western Prov-ince. Maclean (1989) provides a rich discussion of a remote Highland marketplace in the 1980s.

9. We use the term intermediary (or market intermediary) rather than the more common middlemen to avoid thegender specificity of the latter term. This is important given that both men and women act as intermediaries inPNG marketplaces.

10. There is a considerable ethnographic literature on pre-colonial trade throughout Melanesia. For instance, seeMalinowski 1920, 1921, 1932; Mead 1930; Hogbin 1935; Schwartz 1963; Harding 1967, 1994; Epstein 1968;Salisbury 1970; Godelier 1971, 1977; Sahlins 1972; Keil 1974, 1977; Hughes 1977; Sillitoe 1978; Leach andLeach 1983; Barlow 1985; Lipset 1985; Healey 1985, 1990; Kirch 1991; Gell 1992. This list is far fromexhaustive. These accounts describe the exchange systems as they were at the time of contact or soon after (seeKirch 1991).

11. Melanesian ethnography’s emphasis on gift exchange has often obscured the presence and role of trade (Carrier1998; Gell 1992; Gregory 2019; Healey 1990). For instance, far more is known of the Trobriand kulaprestations than the more mundane gimwali barter exchanges that accompany the kula (Keesing and Strathern1998; cf. Malinowski 1920, 1921, 1932).

12. For instance, the Tolai people (East New Britain) had a system of marketplaces and a local shell currency, tabu,at the time of European colonization (Salisbury 1970). The Motuan and Mekeo people also traditionally ‘tradedat specific locations at regular time intervals’ (Forbes 1973:3), as did groups in the middle Sepik (Gewertz1977) and in the Vitiaz Strait (Harding 1967:150–1).

13. Today, marketplaces continue to be seen as instruments of development. UN Women’s recent use of market-places as a means to increase urban safety for women is an example of this (Cox 2015; Keen and Ride 2018;UN WOMEN 2012; Underhill-Sem et al. 2014). They also sometimes remain entangled with political agendas,most conspicuously when marketplaces are built by local politicians.

14. This complements Bourke’s (1986a) account of marketplace changes to the mid-1980s.15. Underhill-Sem et al. (2014:307) note that while Pacific marketplaces are dynamic places, which are central to

food security and livelihoods, they are also places of ‘insecurity and exploitation’ for women vendors (cf. Craigand Porter 2017).

16. This is by no means solely a concern for Melanesian societies. All societies make distinctions by which theydemarcate spheres of exchange to separate off potentially contentious transactions that may undermine long-term social reproduction (Bloch and Parry 1989:26; cf. Bohannon 1955; Sahlins 1972; Sillitoe 2006).

17. In many Melanesian communities, sharing betel nut helps create and maintain social relationships. AmongMekeo ‘betel [nut] cannot be bought; it can only be given. A refusal to give betel [nut] is tantamount to ignor-ing the other as a person’ (Bergendorff 1996:145; also see Sharp 2016).

18. Although marketplaces are closely associated with women’s daily routines, women’s activities in marketplacesare also viewed with some moral angst. Men often do not like their wives spending too much time at the mar-ketplace. Women are watched in the marketplace by men for protection but also, as Beer (2008:101) observesof Wampar (Morobe Province), because there is ‘a general notion that women engaged in trade may offer notonly garden products but also sex.’

19. The appropriate price for these food parcels on the Gazelle has been a matter of contention for some time (seeSimet 1991:66–9).

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