When I was about to leave the island of Baluan in 1988, after two years of fieldwork, the old woman Alup Nakeau gave me a special gift. It was large polished shell knife, called yanul, that according to traditional rules could be used only by lapans – that are traditional leaders – to cut and distribute a bunch of betelnut on ceremonial occasions (Ohnemus 1996). Alup Nakeau was then the oldest living member of the Sauka clan into which I had been adopted. She was the eldest child of Ninou Solok, who had been the last acknowledged lapan of the Sauka. The yanul not only connects me to Ninou Solok but through him also to an important event in the cultural history of the island.

In order to explain the importance of this event I have to sketch a little bit of the preceding cultural history of the island. Baluan is the birth place of Paliau Maloat, a political and religious reformer who has become very well-known in comparative studies of religious movements thanks to the work of Margaret Mead (especially 1956) and Theodore Schwartz (1962), see also Otto (1992a, 1998). After the Second World War, which had a great impact on Manus, Paliau succeeded in mobilising a large number of villages in a truly revolutionary reform movement. The overall aim of the movement was to become equal with the white colonisers. Paliau claimed to have received direct access to the same kind of knowledge that had made the white people so rich and powerful. He started to reorganise village life according to models he had learned while serving as a sergeant in the colonial constabulary. An important focus of his reform was the abolition of local traditions, which he thought were hampering progress. In particular the spectacular lapan feasts with the butchery of large numbers of pigs and the elaborate marriage ceremonies had to be discontinued because they were considered a waste of wealth and energy. This revolutionary restructuring had an enormous impact on social relations as local traditional leaders were deprived of one of their most important means of asserting their status.