Chambri

ETHNONYMS: Chambuli, Tchambuli

Orientation

Identification. The Chambri (called Tchambuli by Margaret Mead) live south of the Sepik River on an island Mountain in Chambri Lake in East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea.

Location. Chambri Lake is approximately 143°10′ E and 4°7′ S. The lake is created by the overflow of two of the Sepik's tributaries. This overflow occurs during the northwest monsoon season, from September to March, when rainfall nearly doubles in intensity from a dry-season average of 2.07 centimeters to an average of 3.72 centimeters per month.

Demography. In 1933, Mead reported that the Chambri population was approximately 500 people, but it is likely that this estimate was too low. It may well have excluded some 250 people: migrant laborers away on plantations, as well as their wives and children remaining on Chambri Island. In 1987, the total number of Chambri living on Chambri Island, and elsewhere in Papua New Guinea and beyond, was about 1,500. Of these, approximately one-half were living in the three contiguous home villages of Kilimbit, Indingai, and Wombun. The next-largest cluster of Chambri live in a settlement on the outskirts of the provincial capital of Wewak.

linguistic Affiliation. The Chambri language is a member of the Nor Pondo Family of Non-Austronesian languages and is related to Yimas, Karawari, Angoram, Murik, and Kopar.

History and Cultural Relations

Because the Chambri were a preliterate people, one can only speculate about their history. It is likely that their distant ancestors lived in small, semisedentary hunting and gathering bands. Perhaps in response to the intrusion of those Ndu speakers who became the Iatmul, the bands of early Chambri coalesced about 1,000 years ago and eventually formed what are now the three Chambri villages on the shores of the fishrich lake. The Chambri were contacted first by Australians in the early 1920s, and by 1924 relations between them were well established. Extensive labor migration to distant plantations began in 1927. In 1933, Mead and Reo Fortune worked for six months as anthropologists among the Chambri, and in 1959 Catholic missionaries completed construction at Indingai village of the most elaborate church in the Middle Sepik. The peoples of the Sepik River, those living along its northern and southern tributaries and those further south in the Sepik Hills, are united in a regional trading system based on interpenetrating ecological zones. This system links the Chambri with their neighbors—particularly the Mali and Bisis speakers of the Sepik Hills and the Iatmul of the Sepik River—in an exchange network that includes not only Subsistence goods but ceremonial complexes.

Settlements

The three Chambri villages stretch along the shore of Chambri Island and range in population from 250 to 350. Each village has five men's houses, although at any given time some of them may be house sites only. In its ideal form, a Chambri men's house is an impressive two-story structure with high gable ends, surmounted with carved finíais, large oval second-story windows, and elaborately carved and painted interior posts and other heavy timbers. Membership in a men's house is patrilineally inherited and includes men from several patricians. Formerly, and to some extent still, women marrying into a clan lived in a large multifamily clan house. Those Chambri currently residing in Wewak live in a crowded squatters' settlement, as large as a Chambri village, composed of small houses made of a variety of scavenged or bush materials. The residential pattern at the camp in Wewak replicates that on Chambri Island, with migrants from Kilimbit, Indingai, and Wombun living in their own respective sections.

Economy

Subsistence and Commercial Activities. The Chambri subsist primarily on fish they catch and on sago they either baiter for with surplus fish—as they had done prior to European contact—or purchase with money. In 1987, the Chambri acquired 15 percent of their sago through barter. Principal sources of income now come from the sale of smoked fish to migrant laborers in the towns and the sale of carvings and other artifacts to art dealers and to tourists. The Chambri supplement their diet of fish and sago with greens and fruits from the forest; some also grow watermelons, yams, beans, and other vegetables during the dry season on the exposed lake bottom. Chickens and ducks are common, far more so than pigs.

Industrial Arts. Prior to European contact, the Chambri were producers and purveyors of specialized commodities used throughout the Middle Sepik region. Women wove large mosquito bags from rattan and reeds; men made tools from stone quarried on Chambri Mountain. Today, both men and women produce for the tourist trade with women weaving baskets from reeds and men carving wooden artifacts, based on traditional designs of ritual figures.

Trade. Fish-for-sago barter markets are still regularly held in the Sepik Hills between Chambri and Sepik Hills women. In addition, there is a market held twice a week on Chambri where foodstuffs are available for purchase with money.

Division of Labor. Chambri women are responsible for fishing, marketing, and food preparation. Chambri men, in addition to their ritual responsibilities, build houses, canoes, and carve artifacts. Formerly, warfare and production and trade in stone tools were also important male activities.

Land Tenure. Land is patrilineally inherited as are fishing areas. Women use the fishing areas of their husbands. It is not uncommon, in addition, for individuals to gain temporary access to the resources of their matrilateral kin.

Kinship

Kin Groups and Descent. The Chambri divide themselves into over thirty exogamous patricians and into two sets—one affinal and the other initiatory—of partially cross-cutting patrimoieties. The patricians are landowning, residential, and ceremonial groups named for their founders; members refer to each other as the people of the same totems, indicating the common inheritance of numerous totemic names and powers. Together, all clan members assume responsibility for paying, and receiving payment on, affinal debts.

Kinship Terminology. Chambri kinship terminology is of the Omaha type, using the criterion of mother's brother's daughter equals mother's sister.

Marriage and Family

Marriage. Polygyny has become increasingly rare since the early 1960s when the Catholic mission became fully established in the area. Mother's brother's daughter marriage is the most commonly stated preference; 30 percent of Chambri marriages do take place with a member of the matrilateral cross cousin's clan. Although subject to some recent change, most marriages are still within the village and virtually all are with other Chambri. Given that Chambri settlements are both dense and contiguous, when a woman leaves her clan land to move to that of her husband, she still remains close to her natal kin. Marriage involves prestations of bride-wealth, traditionally in shells and now in money. Prestations by wife takers are of great political importance and provide the context for a clan to demonstrate its wealth and importance. In their turn, wife givers reciprocate with food. Among non-Catholics, divorce may be initiated by either husband or wife, frequently for reasons of incompatibility or infertility. However, divorce is discouraged by kin on both sides since it should involve a return of affinal payments. In cases of Divorce, young children remain with their mothers until they are old enough to assume patrilineal responsibilities.

Domestic Unit. Formerly all women lived in large multi-family clan houses, which functioned as maps of family Solidarity and affinal interdependence. Each of a man's wives would situate her cooking hearth in the portion of the house allocated to her husband and fasten there the carved hook bearing the totemic insignia of her own patrician. From this hook, she would hang the basket containing a portion of her patrimony of shell valuables. Today, under the influence of the Catholic church and a cash economy, these houses have been largely replaced by smaller, single-family dwellings. Clan members often prefer living in these smaller dwellings Because they can better protect private purchased goods, such as radios, from agnatic claims.

Inheritance. Property including land, fishing rights, and valuables, as well as ritual prerogatives, implements, and powers, are inherited by male and, to a lesser extent, by female patrician members.

Socialization. Mothers take responsibility for primary Socialization; nonetheless, they frequently leave their children with their sisters or with other women when they have work to do, particularly when they go out to fish. Young children are rarely left with men who, although affectionate and indulgent, regard excrement and urine as polluting. A bond of great importance to Chambri children is with their mothers' brothers. Frequently, if disgruntled, children will seek solace from these matrilateral kinsmen. Moreover, mothers' brothers have an essential role as nurturers in the initiation, through scarification, of their sisters' sons.

Sociopolitical Organization

Social Organization. Chambri society is largely egalitarian with all patricians, except those linked through marriage, considered potential equals. For affinally related clans, wife givers are regarded as superior to wife takers. Gender relations are also of relative equality, with men and women operating in largely autonomous spheres. The Chambri never developed a strong male-oriented military organization in large part because, as valued providers of specialized commodities, they were left in relative peace. Relations of trade mitigated also against the development of male dominance because Chambri men could not have appreciably increased the flow of valuables to themselves through the control of women and their products.

Political Organization. Through his own marriage(s) and those of his junior agnates, a Chambri man becomes immersed in complex obligations that provide him with the opportunity of achieving political eminence. The struggle to make impressive affinal payments generates widespread competition in which men try to show that they are at least the equal of all others in their capacity to compensate wife givers. Those individuals and patricians unable to compete in the politics of affinal exchange are likely to become subsumed as clients of those who are more successful. In addition, since 1975 when Papua New Guinea became a nation, the Chambri have voted in, and have often provided candidates for, local, regional, provincial, and national elections.

Social Control. In the past, and still to a limited extent, internal and external social control was maintained through violence or threats of violence focusing on sorcery and raiding. Conflicts were and are resolved through debates in men's houses; today, as well, the Chambri have recourse to the judicial procedures of the state, such as local and regional courts. For Chambri living in Wewak, the police are often called in when conflict threatens to get out of control. In most of these cases when police help is sought, the dispute is subsequently settled with payment of damages, determined during a Community meeting, followed by a ceremony of reconciliation.

Conflict. Although, as mentioned, the Chambri lived in relative peace with their neighbors, they were, on occasion, both perpetrators and victims of the head-hunting raids that were both sources and indicators of ritual power.

Religion and Expressive Culture

Religious Beliefs. Since the early 1960s the Chambri have considered themselves to be staunch Catholics. They are, at the same time, convinced that all power, whether social or natural, is ancestral power. Religion—as well as politics and, indeed, all activities of importance—focuses on evoking and embodying ancestral power through the recitation of (usually secret) ancestral names. In addition to the spirits of the dead are a variety of autochthonous powers that dwell in stones, whirlpools, trees, and, most importantly, crocodiles. All are thought to act not only on their own volition but under the control of those Chambri who know the relevant rituals. Religious Practitioners. All adult persons have some knowledge of efficacious names; by definition, powerful men are the most knowledgeable about these names. Anyone who knows secret names—that is, who has power—has the capacity for sorcery. Some men and women have the special capacity to be possessed by spirits from their maternal line in order to diagnose illness, misfortune, and the causes of death. Others contact paternal spirits in dreams for the same purposes.

Ceremonies. Many Chambri ceremonies are rites of passage during which persons are increasingly incorporated into their patricians. At the same time, matrilateral kin are presented with affinal payments to compensate them for the corresponding diminution of their maternal portion of these Persons. The most elaborate of these ceremonies is initiation during which young men receive the hundreds of incisions on their backs, arms, and upper thighs that release the maternal blood that contributed to their fetal development. Other ceremonies, requiring the evocation of the powers of particular patricians, are believed to ensure that, for instance, the wet season will come, particular species of fish will reproduce, and fruits of the forest will be plentiful. Through the performance of such clan-held ceremonial prerogatives and obligations, a totemic division of labor emerges in which, through the efforts of all, the universe is regulated.

Arts. Whether in the form of drums, masks, carved or painted men's house timbers, or decorated hooks, art for the Chambri embodies ancestral powers and/or refers to clan-based claims to those powers. The art now made for the tourist trade is largely derived from these forms, but it is not Invested with ancestral power.

Medicine. Since it is believed that people succumb to disease only when they are depleted of power—sometimes as the result of sorcery—indigenous curing practices attempt to restore that lost power. This kind of cure can be done through several, frequently combined, means: offended ancestors are compensated, often through animal sacrifice; medicines, bespelled so as to become imbued with ancestral power, are applied to, or consumed by, the sick person. Today, the Chambri have access to a local aid post and to mission and provincial hospitals. Western medicine, although eagerly used, has not replaced traditional diagnoses and treatments.

Death and Afterlife. Chambri ideas about the destination of spirits are, by their own acknowledgment, inconsistent: spirits are variously believed to go to the Christian heaven, to remain in ancestral ground, and to travel to a remote place no living being has visited. Regardless of any particular view, however, Chambri also insist that the dead are never very Distant. They believe that the living and the dead readily engage in each other's affairs.

See alsoIatmul

Bibliography

Errington, Frederick, and Deborah Gewertz (1986). "A Confluence of Powers: Entropy and Importation among the Chambri." Oceania 57:99-113.

Errington, Frederick, and Deborah Gewertz (1987). Cultural Alternatives and a Feminist Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gewertz, Deborah (1983). Sepik River Societies: A Historical Ethnography of the Chambn and Their Neighbors. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Gewertz, Deborah, and Frederick Errington (1991). Twisted Histories, Altered Contexts: Representing the Chambri in a World System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mead, Margaret (1935). Sex and Temperament. New York: Morrow.

DEBORAH GEWERTZ