'the One and the Two': Mainlanders and Saltwater People in Buka, Bougainville (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION The motivation for this article lies in an ethnographic puzzle encountered during fieldwork in the Buka area in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea in 2004-05. On the one hand, Buka people themselves and the ethnographic literature on the area emphasize the close integration of the area, in terms of kinship, politics, economic relations and culture.' 'All of us in Buka are one', people often said. On the other hand, people distinguished sharply between 'mainlanders', who lived as gardeners on Buka Island, and 'saltwater people', who lived as fishing people on the Western Islands, four small inhabited islands on top of the Buka fringing reef. My hosts for most of my fieldwork, the saltwater people on Pororan Island, told me that the mainlanders were 'entirely different people' from themselves; the mainlanders who hosted me at Lontis Village on the Buka north coast and at Gagan Village in the interior confirmed this. Both mainlanders and saltwater people noted the same points of contrast between the two sides. Most prominent among those were the contrast in predominant subsistence activities, fishing and gardening respectively, a contrast in the physical outline of villages, which were said to be neat on the mainland and disorderly on Pororan Island, and finally different degrees of knowledge of ancestral habits and relations, high on the mainland and low on Pororan.