Brokerage, bridewealth and benefits on a resource frontier in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

In this paper, we examine tensions over intermarriage and resource sharing between two groups on a Papua New Guinean resource frontier. These tensions are mediated by a ‘brokerage fix’ led by Febi clan heads responding to financial demands from their Pangia neighbours and sometime affines. Here social and financial debts have become entangled in the shadow of much‐anticipated resource rents. In the ethnographic case study considered here, tensions over unpaid (cash) bridewealth—successfully resolved through cultural brokerage—reflect not only the debt itself, but broader questions about the relationship between the two groups. In this case, we argue that the dynamics of brokerage from within involve shifting modes of relational and transactional exchange across competing temporalities. The task of the broker emerges as being the re‐establishment of the grounds for a relational mode of sharing, with future long‐term benefits foregrounded over demands for repayment of past debt.