This study describes in detail the main features of the social organization of the Wovan people who inhabit the Western Schrader ranges on the northern fringe of the Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea and explores the utility of a processual approach to the contraction of marriage in such a description. This approach was formulated to comprehend adequately the Wovan data and is shown to be capable of accounting for the inherent tensions in Wovan social organization.
Wovan social relations are structured around kinship, locality, and the performance of rituals of initiation. The hierarchy inherent in kinship and successive initiation is constantly undermined by the dissolution of consanguineous kinship in favor of affinity through marriage and the egalitarian nature of co-initiation. The tensions between the two organizational modes, hierarchical and egalitarian, are made manifest in the contraction of marriage. An analysis of marriage provides the lens through which the totality of Wovan social organization is viewed.
Endogamous marriage provides the essential dynamic of Wovan society, creating short term disunity in the interests of long term harmony. The contraction of marriage is presented both as event (that is, short term social behavior) and process (that is, having long term organizational implications). Arranged marriage and sister exchange function to reaffirm the existing order. Elopement challenges the authority of elder males to make marital decisions affecting both females and younger males and allows women to participate actively in mate selection. As event, marriage is shown to generate conflict and to be divisive in the community. Each mode of marriage (agreement, arrangement, and elopement) is examined and the social and political implications of each is outlined. Marriage as process continually re-establishes consanguinity within the community, and this, in turn, is utilized to delimit community boundaries and to provide the community with a sense of unity and continuity.
The view of marriage as both unifying and divisive is contrasted with the institutional view of marriage, prevalent in the literature, that stresses only the unifying aspect of marriage, and is shown to have utility in the analysis of ethnographic data beyond the Wovan context.
