cultural efflorescence and political evolution on the Sepik River

This paper argues that the precolonial political system of the Manambu, a people of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea, was in a process of evolving institutions of rank, and that these patterns of hereditary stratification were emerging into existence from a religious ideology based in the male initiatory system. What made ritual an important motive force of political evolution in this society, was that prestigious ritual forms had exchange value in the regional system of intertribal trade. [Manambu, Sepik, Melanesia, political evolution, ritual, trade]