imaginations fed on an increasing amount of information reaching the
Hagen area from outside, through labor migration and thefirst phases of
political change coming with the introduction of local government coun-
cils and the prospects of an elected national House of Assembly, as a
forerunner of an independent Parliament. Cash cropping from the cultiva-
tion of coffee, along with the new taxes payable to the local council, added
stresses from the level of the increasing significance of state money and the
subsequent demise of the value placed on pearl shells and other shell
valuables that had been used to stabilize intergroup relations and to
enhance the growth of the influence of local leaders through their deploy-
ment of these wealth items in peace settlements between groups. In other
words, the new movement arose in a time of speeded up political and
economic change, with an entanglement of the people’s perspectives on
the world to which they were increasingly exposed.
The instigators of the movement came from a group with a turbulent
local history, the Yelipi clan of the populous Minembi tribe. Their story, as
well as their actual clan name, revealed that they were war refugees, driven
out from an original territory far to the south in a different dialect area,
and obliged to seek help from affinal relations in a clan of the Tipuka tribe,
after they had fallen out with their paired allies in the Minembi tribe. They
had been granted an infertile, rocky territory on which to settle, and they
had also recently failed in an attempt to establish themselves via a set of
pearl shell and pig transactions with neighboring partners.
The movement, therefore, had the double aim of reversing relations of
inequality with their neighbors and further raising the level of their wealth
in new monetary terms in comparison with the colonial government and
its settlers, who owned and operated coffee plantations in the area.
How, then, did the new rituals aim to deal with this situation? The
central symbol was a set of red wooden boxes of the kind sold in Chinese-
owned stores in coastal locations and brought home by returning labor
migrants with trade goods such as clothing which the migrants could share
with their relatives. These boxes were re-purposed by the cultists andfilled
with old pieces of metal, and then placed securely in secluded houses built
for the storage of wealth. The participants made sacrifices of pigs and
invocations to their ancestors, asking them to turn the contents of the
boxes into the introduced state money notes.
While such prayers to ancestors, accompanied by pork sacrifices, were
entirely in line with customary ritual forms, the red box element was new
and unprecedented in local ritual logic. This element also induced
14 BREAKING THE FRAMES