“Bom Bombed Kwin”: How Two Card Games Model Contemporary Goroka

“Bom Bombed Kwin”: How Two Card Games Model Contemporary Goroka Anthony Pickles, University of St Andrews The early Twentieth Century saw the card game laki spreading across Papua New Guinea, hitting Goroka in the 1950’s. The rules were simple, though regional variations proved revealing, generating new games in turn while being supplemented by waves of invention from elsewhere. In 2009, when I arrived in Goroka, I recorded 24 card games, each with a lineage traceable to this apical ancestor. Here I describe the two games that dominate the scene today: kwin (‘queen’) and bom (‘bomb’). Their rules are complex, and their characters contrasted: one is thought slow, the other fast; one is longstanding, the other a craze; one high stakes, one low stakes; one for the old, one for the young; and one is more “Melanesian”, one irresponsible. This paper analyses the indigenous history of kwin and bom, their rules, and the way they relate to each other through Gorokan eyes. While their moral status is ambivalent, each are responsive media allowing players to engage others across kinship and affinal boundaries; test and act upon their efficacy; detect the disruptive negative thoughts of others; and cultivate the thoughts they see as necessary to success. I argue kwin and bom are among a repertoire of indigenous analytics used by people at different life-stages; they model and enact Goroka because they propagate the types of thought they cater to, and fall victim to that thought in turn, so for example: fast games make fast thoughts that get bored with the game and invent others to take their place.

Before colonisation, plantations, and indentured labour, the peoples now called Papua New Guineans did not gamble. When in 1907 colonial authorities found that indigenous peoples had started gambling, it was made illegal. Governor General Sir Hubert Murray argued, paternalistically, that ‘primitives’ were incapable of exercising self-control in the face of this exogenous vice. From that time until present, most forms of gambling have remained outside the law. In 2009-10, when I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Goroka (a Highlands market town), it was Papua New Guinea’s self-confessed gambling capital: 73% of over-sixteen’s gambled, mostly illegally at cards. Since their introduction, card games have remained the most pervasive and the paradigmatic form of gambling, complemented today by legal slot machines and bookies, and illegal bingo, darts, lotteries, and informal sports-betting. Card gambling swept through the country with the money economy, became indigenised, morphed and transformed to reflect local diversity, in the process becoming a daily activity for many. Most early documentation of gambling’s spread refers to the card game laki as the primary or only gambling game. Early reports describe it in relatively homogenous terms. Each player received a certain number of cards, the total value was calculated, ignoring double digits, and a winning total was the closest to a given value, usually 9 or 10. Later reports show increasing variation as games were indigenised in different directions.

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Evidence shows that laki hit Goroka around 1952, becoming commonplace by 1958. Though laki in its original form had all but disappeared from Goroka during my fieldwork, the two card games that dominated today both possess a genealogy of indigenous transformation that leads back to laki.

SLIDE Laki was, and all card games today are, interpersonal games, usually played for modest stakes. Run-of-the-mill card games never had a ‘house’, the dealer rotated, and no party had a statistical ‘edge’. There were no card games involving an element of bluff, in fact, when I demonstrated the bluffing game poker it usually ended in outright dismissal of the game as a potential source of anger and suspicion. Instead, card games in 2010 revolved around controlling or anticipating the flow of cards between players. Most importantly, cards were understood as vehicles for configuration, as a set of symbols with internal relations that were ready to come into winning combination if the cards “liked” the player. In order to configure cards, players themselves had to be configured, their “brains had to be right”. To do so meant securing harmonious relations with fellow competitors, as well as with one’s relations outside of the game. In turn this required gifting, both to players who had lost to you, and to outsiders, because others’ negative thoughts could enter into one’s own brain. To be afflicted with others’ deleterious thoughts caused ashen, ugly skin, and dirty blood; cards would detect this as you touched them, and refuse to configure themselves properly (see Pickles 2012; c.f. O’Hanlon 1989). Card gambling, in short, required a mastery of social responsibility over and above what one would normally delimit as the game, so that one could givewhile-taking-away. The two dominant games during my time were kwin (‘queen’) and bom (‘bomb’), but the innovation of new games was continuous and rapid. Kwin was oftentimes believed to have come from a merging of two games in the 1970’s that were called blok (where matching cards of different suits were the aim) and kala (where consecutive cards of the same suit were desired). Bom has swept the scene in the last few years and is a recent elaboration on the longstanding game ‘last card’. Bom superseded a myriad of other games which are now very rare, except kwin. These can be seen on this slide, which is one of a number of card-game genealogies I collected. Today I am going to argue that the games’ changeability is a powerful metaphoric model for characterising Gorokan life. Kwin and bom are thought to be of different characters, and appeal to different moods and temperaments that I am about to describe, and this in turn affects how quickly they will be outmoded. In this short paper there is not enough time to describe the workings of the games in detail. I will concentrate upon tactics, and as to the form of games it will have to suffice to say that kwin is an indigenous version of rummy, where one tries to make all seven of the cards in one’s hand into sets. In Bom the aim is to lose all your cards. One player follows another in putting down a card, 2

either following suit or card value; cards are picked up for mistakes or inability to follow the leading card. Through people’s tactics, I will describe the kinds of thought that each game is supposed to foster, and why one game, bom, can be perceived to triumph in popularity over another game, kwin, through its own terms: bom bombed kwin, my title, and a particularly memorable joke that I heard when asking about the changing popularity of games.

Kwin and bom represent points on either side of a dialectic applying to all games: that of speediness and thoughtfulness. In the general absence of an explanatory framework based upon a balance between skill and contingency, Gorokans consider games in terms of the speed of their paten (‘pattern’). A pattern may be too fast to allow a person to impose or discern the game’s future direction, or if slower, one’s ‘ideas’ make their impact felt upon it. Those games which to me might involve a large element of chance or luck (like the original game laki and the contemporary game bom) are typically mechanical in their gameplay, and so tend to occur more speedily. It is this speed that people identify with games that are beyond one’s control, rather than lingering on the chanciness of moments within a game. There are a series of moments at which a person might act within a game, whose turnaround is objectified into a game which is either speedy, with many moments requiring immediate action, or slower, with more considered choices.

In Goroka bom is the major fast game, kwin is the chief slow one. People’s preferences are couched in terms of one being too fast or slow for them, and these penchants are correlated with peoples’ life stages, generating stimulating parallels with Frederick Damon’s work on Muyuw Island in the northeast of the Kula ring. Damon has written on Kula valuable categories’ analogical relationship with age grades and the behaviour appropriate to people in these grades (2002). In Goroka the young are thought to be metabolically speedy and thus attracted inexorably toward faster forms of gaming. Damon found that low rank Kula items move “[w]ithout reason”, as do the young who are accused of “running around without reason”, their acts create only “[i]mpermanent relations” that do not lead to fame; both the young and low rank kula valuables thus have no “names” (ibid: 126). Older people in Goroka are supposed to be slower and more considered, and therefore keener on kwin and other ‘thinking games’. High rank and thus high value Kula arm shells and necklaces are said to “[o]nly move when [the] path [is] well laid out” as do the elderly there. Between these poles, married but not yet old people in Goroka express different preferences at different times but show a

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tendency toward kwin as they get older. Middle rank Kula valuables move “[f]ast, but with intentionality” corresponding to those who are “[m]arried but still very active”. On Muyuw, temporality is literally measured by Kula participation, the marks of time on the body evidence the effort put into Kula (ibid: 116). What is more, people aspire to handle high rank valuables “so they can be like them” (ibid: 127), a kind of transmission that I found literalised in Goroka when people play games that instil them with the speed of thought they desire, marking and cultivating the speed that defines them. Furthermore, one’s speed, or thoughtfulness, at different stages in life are believed to make one more likely to succeed in the corresponding game, because one’s thought processes synchronise more easily to the pace of that game. Young people are already at an advantage for bom, older people for kwin. The different types of game act to cultivate their particular speed of thought as well: fast games ‘heat’ people up, getting their thoughts going, and testing them out, while thinking games clear people’s heads and allow them to focus. Thus thought and speed are cultivable attributes of people that are fed by the speed of the game, altering peoples’ mental states toward either speediness or thoughtfulness.

To play well in all card games, fast or slow, is to have effective aidia (lit. ’ideas’) guiding your gameplay. Particularly in kwin, having good aidia meant being a ‘corner man’. Each player in a five player game is their own kona, and it is a mark of some distinction to be a standout kona man among a group of experienced players. Players feel the presence of a kona man in the lack of opportunities they receive from the player before them, who discards only unhelpful cards during the course of their turns. When players compare their cards at the end of a game it is to see who the best kona man was. Now a kona can be broken down into a simple pivot relationship, where a player is constrained by their own circumstances and the card offered by the previous player, causing them to think carefully and act accordingly. When they do act, they must be aware that they are having an equal effect upon the player that follows them. So each player acts with two others in mind, one of which is the direct cause of their action, the other will be directly affected by it. Hence the imagistic term ‘corner’.

SLIDE This characterisation fits a Strathernian separation between cause and

effect, and a comparison between a kona and Strathern’s use of Deborah Battaglia’s (1983: 296-297) diagram will be profitable here. It also keeps my analogy with the Kula running. In her famous example, Battaglia’s informant describes the Sabarl axe or the elbow as the image of flows of wealth, in this case the segaiya payment that goes from mother’s brother’s child to ego’s child, but is thought to be induced by ego. For Strathern this is the ideal illustration of the pivot relationship that 4

she sees as the location of agency in Melanesia, where the past relationship between two people causes an effect on a third, but the person who acts on that third attributes the cause of their action to the first, who might seem uninvolved to our eyes.

SLIDE A game of kwin can be seen as

formed by overlapping pivot relationships; The Sabarl axe is expanded and formalised anew. To gloss tactics in kwin, the kona acts always with two relations in mind, one which causes their own actions, and one which will be affected, and a kona man is able to exercise some skill in turning this pivot relationship to their advantage. So much for kwin.

Meanwhile Bom, the archetypical fast game, where, taking it in turns, the aim is to match either suit or rank to the leading card until your cards have gone, works differently, and though causation appears similar, there is no talk of corners or cornerman. What is important in bom is that there are many possible cards which can be played in response to any given suit, and these change the direction of the game. Correspondingly people say that bom has many more chances to win than kwin, and they come thick and fast. These include opportunities to rid yourself of cards, but there are also opportunities to lay a combination of cards or to change the suit to favour your hand. Most of the time you only have one or two options, in which case players simply play the highest value card they can, which makes much of the play automatic and very speedy indeed; quite unlike the ruminations sparked by kwin. This catches out inattentive or inexperienced players (i.e. me) and forces them to pick up two cards. The game is characterised by rapid opening and curtailing of opportunities to pull the game towards you, but while opportunities to manipulate play come thick and fast, they are nevertheless only glimpses of victory, which require quick thinking to take advantage of. The many rounds, one after another, and the speed by which decisions are made and turns taken, make it the most popular ‘fast game’. In Bom, speed and ideas manifest themselves in the idiom of the paten, the dominant term used to characterise tactics (as opposed to kona). This idiom is directed toward the cards themselves and their patterns, not to the mastery of others’ tactics and thoughts. Paten is conceived as a diachronic unfolding: revealing itself over time and then extrapolated into the future. Because play is faster in bom, the pattern unfolds faster. The pattern also changes constantly, as players take opportunities to change suit or symbol. In kwin the pattern remains locked in people’s hands and the general relationship between cards on the ground, whereas the pattern in bom is visible, immediate, and changeable. Of course when a player changes the pattern from ♦s into ♣s, they are controlling the 5

pattern, and so pattern in bom visibly changes all the time as the result of one’s actions. Another player can piggyback this change to victory, or change it once more, because there are many possible cards that can follow on. The paten and its change become a place where a person can calibrate themselves in the knowledge that it is moving too fast to be controlled by another for long. This is where the analogy between low-rank Kula valuables and bom comes to fruition: bom seems to act like the unnamed low-value Kula artefacts that are said to go every which way, neither retaining a coherent flow nor making a significant difference to the order of things in and of themselves. Bom likewise is a place where those who would graduate to kwin learn to hone their pattern-discerning skills, but the thoughts which work for bom are importantly not sufficiently konalike (what I would call relational) to be considered morally positive. People say that kwin is part of the “Melanesian Way”, a generally positive statement, while bom is not, because the pattern of bom is oriented towards fast money rather than sharing, and the pattern appears between cards without sufficient reference to people. One of the main attractions of bom for the young is the fact that the paten is constantly changing. A close informant Alfonse, who was particularly partial to bom, echoed this argument, he said: the reason bom is speedy is the change in patterns, they drive the speed. He thought that opportunities open and close more quickly, and you have to be aware and keep your mind open to new patterns or you will not be able to win. Allowing one’s thoughts to speed up carries its own risk, because bom is so fast it gets you excited, and this can quickly turn into anger; vigilance is therefore essential. While kwin might be understood to be a game for friends, a thinking game where older players are typically respectful of each other, bom, with its fast changing pattern, is often derided as too fast, not involving enough interactions. Older people complain that bom, despite its low stakes, involves only a lust for money, not sitting down well with people. The game could be regarded as more money-oriented because the focus on the changing pattern means players are not engaged with other people, an accusation often levelled at the young who enjoy it so much. If we relate this back to the argument made about kwin and the kona man, who is a successful but socially responsible (relational) being, then the changing paten of bom may be understood as directed to a more abstracted set of relations between cards, and a corresponding lack of regard for other people.

To conclude, I have characterised kwin and bom as different, age-ranked, value-laden, thoughtprovoking means of engagement with others. The final point I wish to bring out is how one might approach Gorokans perception that Bom’s growing popularity evidences a moral decline, a growing preoccupation with easy and fast money, and the waning of the ‘Melanesian way’. Bom is accused of 6

skipping past people for material success, part of a continuing critique of development. Nevertheless, such statements only tell one side of the story.

SLIDE As this card game

genealogy suggests, for the purposes of analysis the two games must be understood together, and within the lifecycle of a person, for it is assumed that young minds will slow as they age and their tastes will change correspondingly. It is clear from my card-genealogical material that fast games have long been a concern for Gorokans, and it seems likely that similar derisions were levelled at previous games. Notice the many fast games coloured in red, and how many more there are, and how quickly they are replaced by other fast games. Perhaps it is best then that we understand fast games as gaining quick popularity, propagating a speed of thought that in turn leads to boredom, and the desire to invent new variations. Notice how long Kwin has been around, and we see that the genealogies of the games over time come to model the life-cycles of people’s thoughts in Goroka, and the persistence, within different circles, of the youthful value of speed, and the considered thought of age. What is more interesting analytically is the fact that Bom is perceived to succeed not as a mere symptom of the young’s growing disinterest in the ways of their elders, or in the explosion in the young population, though these were certainly factors. Instead Bom was thought to be succeeding because it was fostering speedy and fast-money-oriented thought in a sociological sense. It was this sociological critique that led to the deep laughter among a gathering crowd after I asked an informant why kwin was losing popularity; ‘bom bombed kwin’, he said. Thank You.

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