Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Western ideas about property for the creation of “Woodlark Island,” a concept replacing “Muyuw,” a place in the northeast Kula Ring. The consequence of this replacement is a new consciousness thrilled by the experience of new forms of power and lulled by the consumption of beer.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the development of Woodlark Island and the rise of Western ideas about property from the middle third of the 19th Century to the present. "Woodlark," a Western identity, is becoming the defining force for an island that has increasingly been placed at the originating end of Western commodity chains rather than one of the strategic nodes in the interisland Kula Ring through which its original place, "Muyuw," was reciprocally determined. On the one hand the paper traces the key moments in the making of Woodlark stemming from the (English) King's formal appropriation of roughly 95% of the island in the 1890s to the indigenous populations treating its land as a commodity today. On the other hand it discusses the alternative systems of circulation from which many actors have their original orientations. The paper concludes with a hypothesis about the coupling of these two dimensions showing how a consciousness is created that is more thrilled by the experience of new sources of power than by the articulation of earlier forms of action and lulled by the purchase of beer as a new circulatory process comes to a full stop.