Appendix C
Meat Protein Consumption by the Sexes
over the Life Course

In chapter 8, I stated that, by my estimates, contemporary Seltaman men and women are roughly balanced in their access to meat protein over the course of their lifetimes. A more detailed examination of this point is worth undertaking as part of the dialogue over gender and generosity initiated by Raymond Kelly.

Kelly was able to report for the Etoro some (slight) material disprivileging of men entailed by their assumption of the owner's pork taboo and the longer hours of labor time involved in male hunting (1993:532, 539, 578). By demonstrating this, he was able to put a very fine point on his generosity argument. He summarizes his findings as follows:

Men devote more hours of labor to subsistence food production than women because prestige is earned through individual effort and the division of labor puts men not women in a position to earn prestige. Women obtain items of greater material value in exchange for items of lesser material value in that they receive scarce animal protein for amply available starch staples. Women also have superior access to animal protein over the course of a lifetime. When the system is evaluated in terms of these material benefits, women are thus seen to be in an advantaged position. However, an evaluation of the system in terms of the distribution of prestige is conducive to precisely the opposite conclusion . . . The critical point is to recognize that a complementary distribution of prestige and material benefit is intrinsic to these systems insofar as prestige is often earned by providing material benefits to others (e.g., by distributing game widely). (498-99; emph. added)

Are prestige and material benefit (as Kelly is defining the latter) in the same sort of complementary distribution among the Seltaman? I have no labor data to offer on the point of labor equality, other than to observe that Seltaman men do very little hunting compared to the Etoro and thus could not be putting in longer hours in that fashion. I have been able to examine in greater detail the other metric chosen by Kelly, access to meat protein over the course of a lifetime, so I will turn to this.

In table C1, I have put together estimates of both the typical weights and the availability of the principal meat species consumed yearly by the Seltaman to produce an availability ranking of the primary meat sources. Running beside this ranking is an estimate of the relative portion of the yearly meat supply going to "womenfolk" and "menfolk."

Table C1. Seltaman Primary Meat Sources, by Proportion to Total and by Gender Allocation

Creature	Mean Wt (kilo)	No./Year	Wt/Year, Rounded	% Total/Yr	% Accessible	Yearly Portion
					Wo/Chi	Wo/Chi	Men
grown domestic pig	36	15	540	25.72	50	270	270
piglets and shoats	6	75	450	21.43	90	405	45
midsize domestic pig	15	20	300	14.29	50	150	150
wild pig	22	9	198	9.43	0	0	198
cassowary	18	9	162	7.72	0	0	162
watom (D. vanheurni)	3	37.59	112.77	5.37	50	56.39	56.38
kwemnok (P. gymnotis)	2.75	24.76	68.09	3.24	50	34.05	34.04
ngarem (P. vestitus)	2.5	23.83	59.58	2.84	50	29.79	29.79
kitem (P. sericeus)	2	20.16	40.32	1.92	50	20.16	20.16
birds, frugivores	0.2	180	36	1.71	50	18	18
python sp.	6	4	24	1.14	50	12	12
kayang (Ps. cupreus)	1.75	12.83	22.45	1.07	50	11.23	11.22
deim-arik (P. orientalis)	2	9.16	18.32	0.87	50	9.16	9.16
akhuni (D. goodfellowi)	8	2.75	22	1.05	0	0	22
brush turkeys	0.7	12	8.4	0.40	90	7.56	0.84
sop (Ps. forbesi)	0.6	10.09	6.1	0.29	50	3.05	3.05
kuter (Uromys sp.)	0.8	6.42	5.1	0.24	75	3.83	1.27
birds, insectivores	0.1	40	4	0.19	75	3	1
sarip (S. maculatus)	4	1	4	0.19	50	2	2
frogs (packet)	0.1	40	4	0.19	50	2	2
water rats and lizards	0.4	8	3.2	0.15	100	3.2	0
kayuuk (M. longicauda)	0.4	4.58	1.83	0.09	50	0.92	0.91
ngarfem (Dactylopsila sp.)	0.5	4.58	2.29	0.11	75	1.72	0.57
kimisok (P. raffrayana)	0.8	2.75	2.2	0.10	75	1.65	0.55
mein (Mallomys sp.)	1.3	0.91	1.18	0.06	75	0.89	0.29
ngorim (P. carmelitae)	1	1.82	1.82	0.09	50	0.91	0.91
bakonkaak (E. kalubu)	1	0.91	0.91	0.04	90	0.82	0.09
somin (H. goliath)	0.7	0.91	0.64	0.03	75	0.48	0.16
wares (A. imitator)	0.5	0.91	0.46	0.02	75	0.35	0.11
Total			2,099.66			1,048.16	1,051.5

The table embeds a number of assumptions that require comment. Of my various data those on domestic pig consumption are the firmest, being based on a running inventory of the Seltaman pig herd over the course of fourteen months. But even here, weight assumptions had to be made, since it was impossible to get the real weight of every consumed pig. For estimates of pig weights in the field, I measured a range of full-grown, midsized, shoat-sized, and piglets then applied the American pig farmer's formula:

heart girth x heart girth x length
400

The weight figures derived in this fashion were adjusted downward 20 percent for the many moribund piglets and shoats killed to forestall their natural demise, as these were often emaciated. From these operations, mean weights of full-grown, midsized, and the downward adjusted category "piglet-shoat" were derived. It is these mean weights that appear in the table.

In regard to the large game species, wild pig and cassowary, I split the difference between two rather divergent capture rates recorded during my first and later visits to arrive at an estimate of 1.5 of these creatures per month. Weight averages were estimated from using diverse strategies. (1)

Midsized game, the marsupials and rodents, produced primarily by male archers (often accompanied by dogs) presented less of a problem. The proportional representation of the different species in the hunters' catch became clear from a sample of reported hunting excursions, and the mean weights for these recorded by zoologist Timothy Flannery served to fill in the weight column. The question of how many such creatures are consumed over the course of a given interval was rather more difficult, but I was able to arrive at a ballpark figure, using methods described in appendix A. It should be pointed out that the capture rate and weights for midsized game do not make a whole lot of difference to the "gender fairness" argument, since the majority of midsized game species are equally permitted to "people of women's houses" and "people of men's houses." In order to gain some sense of the proportion of consumed meat falling into the midsized game category, however, I took very seriously the capture rates that came from the sacred hunts and large group hunts that Seltaman reported to me (see app. A).

The next matter to be taken up was how to translate the food taboos into a portrait of men's and women's portion of the meat diet. The key distinction, it seems to me, is the one that the Seltaman themselves make through the taboo system: that between "people of women's houses"--that is, all females and uninitiated male children--and all others, roughly "menfolk." With this as a starting point, I translated the taboos as follows:

1. When a meat is tabooed to women and children, then, of course, they are credited with a zero portion.
    
2. When a meat is classified as "for everyone," women and children are credited with a 50 percent portion. (In the unusual case of pythons both some men and some women may suffer temporary taboos, but the disability is about even. This then translated into a 50 percent portion for both sexes.)
    
3. When a meat is tabooed to men until they have given mafuum initiation to their juniors, women are credited with a 75 percent portion.
    
4. When a meat that is tabooed to men for much of their youth and mid-years is also singled out by men as one they abnegate for life or until advanced old age, then women and children are credited with a 90 percent portion. For reasons explained in chapter 3 women are also credited with a 90 percent portion of domestic piglets and shoats, even though these are not formerly tabooed to men who are not their owners.
    
5. For some of the meats for which it seems safe to credit women and children with a 100 percent portion--baby animals, tiny mice creatures, etc.--I obtained no data about rate, and therefore I did not try to incorporate them. It is doubtful that these items even rival insectivorous birds in terms of their yearly weight contribution, and the recipients of them are almost invariably children, not adult women. Women, however, are in an excellent position to monopolize virtually all of the water rats and water lizards captured on frogging expeditions, so these items will stand in as the women's 100 percent category of thing. To reflect what little I know of their capture rates, I am here estimating that, for every five packets of frogs brought in, one of these creatures will be taken.
    

We will keep in mind that men are subject, somewhat unpredictably throughout the remainder of their life course, to the sudden imposition of temporary funerary taboos, which may sideline them from an occasional large domestic pork feast (simultaneously doubling the supply going to women and children on that occasion) or, much less often, from consumption of any game unwittingly brought into the village on the day of a death (this too would have to be routed to the wanangameriin). The first imposition occurred twice during my first two visits; the second, never. Weighing against this, however, are the meats taken by men on sacred hunts, and these hunts occurred roughly quarterly during my first two visits. All of the creatures taken on sacred hunts are consumed entirely in the men's house, with senior initiates receiving the "women/children" items. My calculations put the sacred hunt meat yearly weight at a level approximately equivalent to one midsize pig. Since funerary taboos might block roughly this amount of pork to the initiated men, let us pronounce these two imbalances a wash.

In regard to the question of gender inequality in the distribution of meat, we can cut to the chase simply by eliminating the meat sources that are allocated evenly and taking a look at what remains. The results appear in table C2.

Table C2. Seltaman Unequally Allocated Meats, by Proportion to Total and by Gender Allocation

Creature	Mean Wt (kilo)	No./Year	Wt/Year, Rounded	% Total/Yr	% Accessible	Yearly Portion
					Wo/Chi	Wo/Chi	Men
piglets and shoats	6	75	450	52.30	90	405	45
wild pig	22	9	198	23.01	0	0	198
cassowary	18	9	162	18.83	0	0	162
akhuni (D. goodfellowi)	8	2.75	22	2.56	0	0	22
brush turkeys	0.7	12	8.4	0.98	90	7.56	0.84
kuter (Uromys sp.)	0.8	6.42	5.1	0.59	75	3.83	1.27
birds, insectivores	0.1	40	4	0.46	75	3	1
water rats and lizards	0.4	8	3.2	0.37	100	3.2	0
ngarfem (Dactylopsila sp.)	0.5	4.58	2.29	0.27	75	1.72	0.57
kimisok (P. raffrayana)	0.8	2.75	2.2	0.26	75	1.65	0.55
mein (Mallomys sp.)	1.3	0.91	1.18	0.14	75	0.89	0.29
bakonkaak (E. kalubu)	1	0.91	0.91	0.11	90	0.82	0.09
somin (H. goliath)	0.7	0.91	0.64	0.07	75	0.48	0.16
wares (A. imitator)	0.5	0.91	0.46	0.05	75	0.35	0.11
Total			860.38			428.5	431.88

The sleeper in the system, if we consider what anthropologists usually measure when discussing food taboos, is the category of moribund piglets and shoats. These account for an astonishing proportion of the Seltaman total yearly meat consumption, coming in a close second behind the top-ranked "grown domestic pig" and at the head of the list of the unevenly distributed meats. (2) Moreover, it seems to overcome handily the gender gap that would appear if we considered wild species only and may in some years put women slightly ahead. At any rate, the totals are too close to give an edge to either gender.

Meanwhile, women and children's monopolization of that wide assortment of hunted and foraged species, the assortment that often preoccupies anthropologists' accounts of New Guinea food taboos, is virtually insignificant in the allocation of meat between the genders. Why is this? Because, as already discussed in chapter 6, the "women and children" designated species are overwhelmingly medium to tiny in size and infrequently to rarely caught.

The next question that arises is whether these relatively egalitarian findings apply to the Seltaman of that hypothetically more traditional past, prior to pacification? Is there, in other words, an earlier (or simply a historically probable other) state of the system that would enable us to better see how the system itself bears upon gender equality? It is illuminating to alter our model in the direction of Barth's study of the neighboring and highly comparable Baktaman done in the late 1960s. It is not important that the comparison table we construct here be historically accurate--the data are too imprecise to attain any hope of that--but only that it bring out a picture of what the gendered allocation of meats would look like if we moved the contemporary Seltaman backward in time, in the direction of the 1960s Baktaman. Accordingly, I propose the following adjustments:

1. The Baktaman pig herd was smaller, by about 25 percent (Barth 1975:37). Thus, I will adjust the relevant proportions of Seltaman pork, in this case piglet and shoat meat, downward by that same percentage.
    
2. The rate at which men hunted, both individually and as part of sacred hunt groups, was greater by many-fold for the Barth-era Baktaman. Barth reports that about two-thirds of Baktaman men would leave the village daily to peruse the bush for game or check traps. Moreover, sacred hunts occurred then almost monthly (Barth 1975:79; 1990, pers. comm.). If we were to construct a hypothetical model that simply increases hunting rates and thus capture rates by 100 percent for our hypothetically earlier Seltaman, this would probably understate the actual difference between the two situations but would still be sufficiently revealing.
    
3. Seltaman memories and folk stories indicate a greater familiarity, in the not-so-distant past, with the tree kangaroo dubol (D. dorianus), the tree kangaroo that used to be assigned to the womenfolk, rather than with akhuni (D. goodfellowi or D. spadix), which is reserved for initiated men. My "real-life" hunting sample produced only akhuni, however, no dubol, and I am speculating that the latter has been relatively recently, and perhaps temporarily, hunted down. Rather than perpetuate a tree kangaroo skew, I will drop akhuni from the adjusted sample. I have no way of factoring in any other differential rates at which different wild species would have been represented in the hunters' bag as a function of the earlier state of the Seltaman hunting range. So the remaining relative proportions will be preserved as they are.
    
4. The Baktaman game taboos were different from those of contemporary Seltaman in a more male-favoring direction as well as in finer discriminations between male initiates (Barth 1975:182). Indeed, even grown domestic pig was not shared evenly between the sexes among the Baktaman. To what extent was this also true of the earlier Seltaman? I will incorporate here only those differences that Seltaman men remember as having characterized their own earlier way of life. These are that:
    
   1. Women did not share their frog catch with menfolk.
       
   2. Initiated men abnegated for life most of the "women/children" marsupials and rodents, viz. ngarfem, mein/dakhon, bakhonkaak, somin, and wares.
       
   3. The phalanger kwemnok was reserved (in secret) for very senior males only.
       

The results of these adjustments appear in table C3.

Table C3. Seltaman Earlier Situation, by Proportion to Total and by Gender Allocation

Creature	Mean Wt (kilo)	No./Year	Wt/Year, Rounded	% Total/Yr	% Accessible	Yearly Portion
					Wo/Chi	Wo/Chi	Men
piglets and shoats	6	56	336	26.75	90	302.4	33.6
wild pig	22	18	396	31.53	0	0	396
cassowary	18	18	324	25.80	0	0	324
kwemnok (P. gymnotis)	2.75	50	137.5	10.95	0	0	137.5
brush turkeys	0.7	24	16.8	1.34	90	15.12	1.68
kuter (Uromys sp.)	0.8	14	11.2	0.89	75	8.4	2.8
birds, insectivores	0.1	80	8	0.64	75	6	2
frogs (packet)	0.1	80	8	0.64	100	8	0
water rats and lizards	0.4	16	6.4	0.51	100	6.4	0
ngarfem (Dactylopsila sp.)	0.5	10	5	0.40	100	5	0
mein (Mallomys sp.)	1.3	2	2.6	0.21	100	2.6	0
bakonkaak (E. kalubu)	1	2	2	0.16	100	2	0
somin (H. goliath)	0.7	2	1.4	0.11	100	1.4	0
wares (A. imitator)	0.5	2	1	0.08	100	1	0
Total			1255.9			358.32	897.58

The gender gap is now substantial: men's share of the unequally distributed meat is 2.5 times women's share. In a word, moving the system back in a more "traditional" direction increases the material advantage that Seltaman men enjoyed over Seltaman women. This puts Seltaman more in line with not just the Barth-era Baktaman but the other Mountain Ok groups studied during that same earlier ethnographic period (Morren 1975; Hyndman 1979; Jones 1980; Brumbaugh 1980a; Poole 1976). There is, of course, not a shred of evidence that the men of any of these groups enjoyed any less prestige than the contemporary Seltaman men. I am of the opinion, then, that Kelly's vision of a complementary distribution of prestige and material advantage in small tribal cultures receives no support from the Mountain Ok area.

The change from the probable earlier state of affairs to the contemporary, more egalitarian state of affairs is crucially linked to the decline of men's hunting and a compensatory increased reliance on the domestic pig. Two factors should be mentioned as probably most important in the historical decline of Seltaman men's hunting. One is the fixing of the southeastern Min villages in long-term locations subsequent to pacification and in response to the urgings of the various missions. This has meant that the close hunting ranges surrounding these villages have been hunted down over the past three decades for virtually all of the southeastern Faiwol speakers, including Seltaman.

The second factor is simply an apparent growing disinclination on the part of men to maintain a high game yield, as indicated by lax trap checking, but also by the general decline in excursions. This disinclination may be conditioned by several factors, including the dietary ones of increased pork consumption and access to trade store meats, and the more "energic" one of having over the years to travel longer distances to effect the same capture rate. The role of the flashlight requires investigation too. Some men told me that once a man has become accustomed to its use, he is ineffective at spotting night game without it. The crucial skill of hunting "eye-nothing" in the traditional manner is thus being lost, and night excursions accordingly become limited by the flashlight battery supply. Finally, I speculate that pacification has entailed a relaxing of male sociality and a concomitant decrease in gender-segregated eating and that this too has helped to shape the hunting disinclination.

Notes

1. I am basing my estimate of wild pig sizes not on actual observation, for the most part, but upon Seltaman men's insistence that most of the wild pigs they capture fall into the category of a village midsized pig rather than a large pig. My estimate of mountain cassowary (Casaurius bennetti) was arrived at through a juggling of sources: Handbook of Birds of the World, 1:97, states an enigmatic 17.6 kg as "weight," but anyone accustomed to reading wildlife reports from these areas will suspect that this is the weight of a single captured bird, not a mean. Two other weights, recorded in regard to museum specimens, are given as 22 kg and 23 kg (Alan P. Peterson, Ned Johnson, and Carla Cicero 1998, pers. comm.). Given the politics of the argument here, I have erred on the light side and settled for 18 kg as the mean weight. Seltaman men were vague in their estimates, when asked, but I gathered that, in comparison to wild pig, cassowary was more often insufficient in volume to distribute to the other village.
    
2. It may be suspected that women prematurely declare a piglet or shoat ailing in order to avail themselves of its meat. This may happen occasionally, but all of the cases that came to my attention accorded well with the Seltaman claim that they make every effort to spare the animal and only strike when it is clearly on its last legs.