packed only a single large suitcase to take into thefield, which he handled
himself, and the pair departed before long for the Ok Tedi area. The report
he wrote contained much sensible observation on conditions in the hinter-
lands of the mine. In his biographical account, he also notes that the
occasion of this revisit enabled him to establish points of comparison and
contrast between the Baktaman and neighboring Faiwolmin speakers, and
he uncovered a series of variations in ritual practices. Transcending the
limits of the local Baktaman study he was able to gain a wider view of the
meanings of ritual practices, which he turned to good use in his book
‘Cosmologies in the Making’(Barth 1987 ). Secrecy would preclude the
widespread sharing or diffusion of cultural forms of ritual. Barth found
that in particular communities there could be incremental efforts by experts
to enrich and harmonize the ritual codes. But it is evident that the overall
effect would not be to build up systematic and complex elaborations of
meaning. The process of integration would instead be partial and depen-
dent on individual experts as thinkers and innovators.
In suggesting that there could be moves towards integration of themes
Barth was actually following a line of thought that at least touched on a
part of Lévi-Strauss’s work on‘La Pensée Sauvage’( 1962 ), in which Lévi-
Strauss uses the concept of‘bricolage’and points to how concrete items
can become the vehicles of abstract thought. In breaking with a formal
structuralist approach dependent on binary schemes, and pursuing what
we now would call embodied and immediate meanings, Barthfinally turns
back to the idea that thinking through objects leads to a particular path-
way of understanding the ontologies and philosophies of people.
We can see how in this work Barth eschews both whole system typolo-
gies of exposition and any temptation to impose too much structured
interpretation of his data. This is an approach thatfits well the Baktaman
case, as was his purpose, and indeed, the 1987 bookfits well with a historic
debate about order and integration in New Guinea ritual ensembles of
practice (Brunton 1980 ). In effect, PNG societies show much variation in
this regard. Practices directed towards a category of Female Spirit in the
Mount Hagen area lend themselves well enough to analysis in terms of
binary opposites and their resolution (see, e.g., Strathern and Stewart
1999 ). In terms of the social organization of knowledge a completely
different approach stresses how different ritual experts competed with
one another to define the most effective or‘correct’ways of handling
assemblages of materials, thus following a‘practice’approach rather than
a view of‘structure’. One approach is not superior to the other because
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