contexts of political competition. It does not follow that it can by itself
explain everything. Attempts to make it do so turn it into an -ism. Barth
does not do this, although he did explore the potentially enlightening
applications of game theory to Pathan politics. Even if, as is the case in the
New Guinea Highlands, exchange in general and competitive exchanges
of wealth in particular are very salient and important, this again does not
mean that all social life in these societies is to be seen as composed of
maximizing behavior through transactions. This, too, would be adopting
an‘ismatic’approach. An‘unismatic’approach, by contrast, seeks tofind
insights from the ethnographic materials, and to use theoretical ideas from
whatever source that seem helpful in this enterprise, regardless of whether
this means borrowing from theories that are in their totalizing forms
incompatible with one another.
It is also the case that a particular theory suits better the analysis of one
society as against another. Transactional theory has obvious merits when
one is analyzing New Guinea Highlands exchange systems. Marxist theory
holds insights for the study of class relations and exploitation in capitalist
contexts. Structuralism suits the analysis of societies where many values are
expressed in terms of complementary dyads. A postmodernist approach
easilyfits with working in a society in which social relations arefluid and
there are no obvious determining principles. We cannot use the facts
about one society to refute the theory applied to another. Of course,
what we call‘facts’are already inflected in some way by theory, as Jarvie
argued, or by cultural bias (as Mary Douglas might put it). Everything is
indeed, as phenomenology claims, a matter of perception. But there
remains observation based on curiosity, as Barth maintains, so that not
everything is lost in solipsistic subjectivism. Pathan leaders in the Swat
valley operated in certain observable competitive ways and had resources
to hand based on class differences. If we were to compare political com-
petition in Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea with competition in the
Pathan case, we would soonfind that these two societies had different
structural bases. Pathan society was more stratified, Hagen society more
egalitarian. Therefore, while in both cases leaders may have sought to
maximize their advantages, both cultural rules and economic constraints
were different in the two cases. The result was that accumulation of power
could be greater in the Pathan case, and the use of violence was orche-
strated in accordance with this point. The Pathans had, and have,‘war-
lords’. The Hageners experienced something like an emergence of these
characters with the introduction of guns into their warfare, but their
86 BREAKING THE FRAMES