Paper short abstract:

For the villagers of Awim in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea the state is absent, except that its presence is felt in the village court. Although they avoid employing the court to solve problems, it re-emerges through the customary hand-screw ‘ritual’.

Paper long abstract:

For the villagers of Awim in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea the state, with its much promised services, is absent, except that its presence is notoriously felt through the institution of the village court. When deciding about the appropriate way to solve a particular problem, the court is the epitome of what people call the new system, which they contrapose to the hand-screw, the 'ritual' that stands for the customary way. Although it might at first appear that people choose between two equivalent options, I show that these are not actually equivalent and consequently the choice is not a free one, because it is affected by certain stories about the court's procedures. As a result, the employment of village court in problem solving is always avoided. However, during the hand-screw, a 'ritual' in which people express their sorrows to each other in order to solve a problem amongst themselves, the court not only 're-appears' in speeches and talks, but establishes the very conditions of possibility of the ritual's efficaciousness. Through the discussion of the dialectical moments of the court, which begin with the court being one of the two choices, proceeds to the court being avoided and then, finally, introduced into the hand-screw 'ritual', the aim of this paper is to render analytical other relevant categories used by the people of Awim, such as kastam, law, strength, witness and death, in problem solving processes.