Pigs as Ordinary Wealth

Everywhere you look, in villages or the wilds of New Guinea, you see pigs (Sus scrofa papuensis). ¹ Alive, they clean up village garbage, work the soil of abandoned gardens and constitute a “food reserve on the hoof” (Vayda et al. 1961). They are exchanged by families or groups to acquire wives, dependants and prestige, but also to compensate for a death or to vie in peaceful gift-giving contests. Once killed, their meat becomes the ceremonial meal par excellence. Far from being a mere source of food, then, pigs are a universal, highly charged symbolic object that stands at the heart of a complex web of social relations.