Landmarks and Kwoma identity

Abstract

This paper discusses how various landmarks serve as symbols of identity for the Kwoma, a people living in the East-Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea, and suggest that geographical space is constructed as an anchor for culturally-construed realities. Three different ideologies are analysed — the origin of the Kwoma people, their history, and their myths — to illustrate how location encapsulates a variety of meanings that serve as identity builders. I argue that the different place-names and landmarks reflect the ideology of landownership that counts every indigenous citizen as a customary landowner (Filer 2006), and that territoriality, i.e., the influence and control over a geographic area (Sack 1986), is determinant of the Kwoma identity.