Hope on remand

Adam Reed University of St Andrews

This article looks at life on remand in a Papua New Guinean prison. It examines the hopefulness of those inmates waiting for court and legal judgment. Their situation is explored through an engagement with the analysis offered by the New Melanesian Ethnography and the emergent eld of hope studies. In particular, attention falls on the concept of hope as a method of knowledge and mode of action. The argument is elaborated and redened by relocating the idiom of hopeful moments in the terrains of dreaming and gambling, a common move among remand prisoners. The article is meant as a contribution to legal anthropology, the anthropology of knowledge, and the ethnography of Melanesia.

During my eldwork at Bomana, Papua New Guineas largest penal institution and only maximum-security facility, convicts repeatedly told me that they had no hope. Typically they would describe their isolation from kin and friends and from familiar scenes outside the gaol. Individuals would complain of the boredom of prison life and of the length of sentences left to serve. Indeed, many wrote songs and poems about that condition. I remember one in particular, entitled Hell on earth, penned in what was a common mixture of Tok Pisin and English phrasings by a long-term prisoner whom I knew well. Like other compositions, the song describes the strangeness and futility of life behind the watchtowers and high fence (hai banis). It bemoans a series of popularly evoked absences: in Bomana, the chorus runs, you have no freedom of movement, no love, no mercy (no gat fridom of movement, no gat luv, no gat merci). More ominously, as the last line warns, all hopes abandon thou art enters. But while the notion of an existence without hope clearly operates in opposition to the notion of a civilian reality outside the gaol (and, as the imagery of the song suggests, against the promise of Christian conversion within it), this is not the only contrast that the composer or other convicted prisoners intend. In fact for them their declared lack of hope is most dramatically thrown into relief by the presence of other kinds of inmates, those on remand. Of the approximately six hundred men locked up in the main compound, nearly one third are awaiting either trial or sentencing. Although only separated by a low fence from the convict cells, these inmates,
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arrested and charged but still looking forward to the passing of legal judgment, remain conspicuously positive, different in both outlook and attitude. It is in the tension between these two incarcerated perspectives, one belonging to the convicted or constitutionally hopeless and the other to the custodial unconvicted or hopeful, that life at Bomana is often drawn out. In this essay I will explore the senses of time and relation to the future that inform the ethnographic category of hope on remand for prisoners at Bomana. An examination of the general conditions of incarceration, including the reported state of convict hopelessness, will be investigated through a focus on the legal experience of the criminally accused. What does hope look like to them? How does it connect to the ordeal of legal process and other elds of remand experience? Beyond that, I ask: What does it mean to declare oneself hopeful or to be identied as a hopeful subject by another? And nally, what does hope on remand do, and how is it taken to operate? These questions are in part inspired by an engagement with the emergent eld of hope studies. At one level, that interdisciplinary project aims to describe the dimensions of others hope, to draw out the ethnographic and historical particularities of the category: for instance, when its authors consider hope as the quality or attribute of persons (see Crapanzano 2003; Genda 2005; Hage 2003; Kasuga 2007; Swedberg 2007). But at another level, it seeks to identify and deploy hope as an action or method of knowledge for scholarly renewal. Led by the work of Miyazaki (2004; 2006), the emphasis here lies with the vitally prospective orientation on the world that he claims hope presents. While the insight is elaborated through his ethnography of Fijian urban villagers and Japanese nance traders, the initial spark comes from a close reading of the philosophy of Bloch, which sees in the practice and expression of hope an acknowledgement of the indeterminate character of knowledge and an alternative to the dominant habit of philosophic contemplation (Miyazaki 2004: 14). In particular, Miyazaki appropriates the stress on a not-yet consciousness, modes of anticipation that continually redirect attention to the fact that something has still to happen or become. He advocates sustaining that momentum into analysis and description. Part of the appeal of this rendering of hope as a form of directionality is that it can highlight the limits of conventional anthropological analysis and social theory. For as Miyazaki points out, the natural tendency to theorize the category or render it an effect or product of social action or language seems to do violence to its inherent future-looking temporal orientation: As soon as hope is approached as the end point of a process, the newness or freshness of the prospective moment that denes that moment as hopeful is lost (2004: 8). The challenge this presents intrigues me, not least because as an anthropologist of Melanesian societies I am familiar with an alternative critique of analytical convention, one that makes use of terms such as effect and artefact in order to offer its own radical re-orientation of knowledge. Sometimes described as the New Melanesian Ethnography (Josephides 1991), and most closely associated with the work of Roy Wagner and Marilyn Strathern, this approach favours a form of relational analysis that reectively deploys ethnographic materials as a means of altering the terms of anthropological description. Most provocatively, readers are asked to imagine Melanesia as a site of immanent humanity (Wagner 1981: 87; and see 1991: 172), where relating is innate rather than the object or purpose of human action and where persons and events appear and disappear as elicited forms or pregured evocations (Strathern 1991: 80). Like
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Miyazaki, there is a desire to sustain the drive or force behind this observation into explanation and ethnographic narration. While these two approaches share certain sympathies, there is also a notable tension in their respective critical edge. Supporters of the New Melanesian Ethnography would be immediately suspicious of any project to universalize the category of hope or identify an exclusive method of knowledge linked to it. Equally, I believe that scholars of hope studies would baulk at the notion that hope can be exclusively understood as an effect or iteration of relational logic. It is in the context of the differences between these respective positions that I introduce hope on remand. References to hope and no hope at Bomana are elaborated through the insights of both sets of analysis and description. Indeed, the distinctiveness of the ethnographic category deployed by prisoners emerges from this deliberate mediation; through the ways it can be shown to work for and against each approach. In the process, I explore the value and challenge for Melanesian anthropology in thinking about and through hope and the value and challenge for hope studies in thinking about and through the example of Melanesian societies and the kind of anthropology they provoke.
Waiting for court

At Bomana, those on remand are straightforwardly and commonly dened by the fact that, unlike convicts, they spend all their time thinking about court (tingting long kot). Individual remand inmates sit in their cell corners and study court papers; those who cant read get their cellmates to help them. Both alone and together they speculate and worry about how the case against them is proceeding: what the witnesses might claim to know, how the police are going about gathering evidence, and whether lawyers and kin are organizing their defence properly. First-timers also dwell on what they might say in court, taking advice from more experienced, recidivist prisoners and preparing draft testimony in little exercise books. In their deliberations, remand inmates are taken to reveal a crucially divided or split mind, one completely occupied by the overriding question of whether they will win their court case and be released or lose and be convicted. Faced by these two radically different prospects or sets of thoughts (tupela tingting), they are said to stand apart and wait for legal judgment. In fact the expectation of an outcome is captured in the vernacular name for a remandee, known by prisoners and warders alike as a wetkot or wait court: that is, someone who waits for his day in court. It is the obvious indeterminacy of this position that for all inmates makes it hopeful. That hope on remand should be vitally tied to a specic mode of waiting would not surprise scholars of hope studies. Indeed, in their work, hope and waiting regularly intersect, one often precipitating an interest in the other (see Crapanzano 1985; 2003; Hage 2003; 2009a).1 In part, this is because, as Swedberg (2007: 21) suggests, hope is a wish for something to come true and so, like waiting, inevitably anticipatory or prospective in momentum. In part, it is because of the inherent passivity of action at work in both notions. But the relationship is not just based on analogy; it seems that waiting can also be integral to the future-looking directionality of the hopeful moment. Crapanzano (2003: 5), for instance, calls for attention to be paid to the waiting time of hope. Conceiving the experience of waiting for court as a form of not-yet consciousness may then be one way of taking seriously the notion of hope on remand.
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Perhaps the nature of this waiting time at Bomana can be best illustrated by considering the ontological status of those prisoners who have to exist without it. As already mentioned, for convicts (kalabus) the problem of incarceration is vitally bound up with the problem of no hope. These inmates claim to be hopeless precisely because their fate is determined. They are or see themselves as an effect or product of specic events: the legal act of conviction and sentencing. As one prisoner explained to me, the remand inmate waits for court but the convict is someone who has already got his time (kisim taim pinis). Put another way, the contrast drawn is between a subject who has still to nd out what he will become and one who knows what has happened to him. Convicts, then, are, quite literally, the endpoint of a process. Indeed, for them that reality is their dilemma; both directly and indirectly, much of my previous writing has been about how these prisoners adjust and respond to that constraint (see Reed 1999; 2003; 2006). As concluded subjects, convicts claim to become the thing they are given, to be weighed down and shaped by the sentence handed down to them (Reed 2003: 93). When introducing themselves to me, they invariably announced the length and terms of conviction. So the author of the song Hell on earth told me that he had eighteen years for wilful murder, another inmate that he had six years for manslaughter, and a third man that he had ve months for drinking and assault. In fact convicts refer to each other as either month men (munman) or year men (yiaman) and judge their characteristic thoughts and actions on that basis. Typically, prisoners claim that the longer the term, the heavier their worries and the slower their movements. While it is true that their focus is naturally directed towards a marked future point in time their Due Date of Release or DDR the convicts I met expressed remarkably little hope in that anticipation. This is partly because that prospect is certain or known. Every convict is told his DDR when he is registered by warders at Bomana; unless he commits a further offence in gaol, that date will always be honoured. But the absence of hope is also because the relationship of present to past and future is acknowledged to be qualitatively different, both from its arrangement on remand and from life outside the perimeter fence. Principally, the distinction lies in the fact that for them conviction marks the setting apart of time into dramatically segregated intervals: the past is now dened as the period before incarceration, the present as the period of incarceration, and the future as the period after incarceration (Reed 2003: 95). Convicts note that this separation has its advantages. For instance, it allows them to develop a certain nostalgia, to reect in a new and considered way on personal biography or the story of their lives: constructing narrative accounts of how they ended up in Bomana. In addition it allows them to discuss and make careful plans for a projected life after release, including speculations about whether to return to their village or stay in the city and the development of ambitious business schemes. But its disadvantage is that the present becomes stretched, indistinct and interminably long. Convicts complain that in prison the days are all the same. This is a timeframe in danger of losing its directionality and which therefore has to be managed. Indeed, for all these inmates, survival is said to be about keeping busy or killing time until the period of detention nishes. Considered as a form of waiting, it is more a matter of endurance or waiting out (see Hage 2009b: 102) than a mode of waiting for something, a distinction that for convicts seems to keep hope in check. Another way of drawing out the contrast is to highlight the kind of hope that convicted prisoners do sometimes make available, namely the Christian anticipations
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of The Second Coming. If convicts, unlike remand inmates, cannot nd hope in their constitution as certain types of prisoners, they can at least seek it through acts of conversion or Christian renewal. Indeed, Bomana is widely recognized as an appropriate site for conversion; in particular, for the movement away from more established Churches to membership of newer, more disciplined or evangelical forms of Christianity that promote a millenarian message. As Christian inmates readily acknowledge, this is not a prison-specic form of hope expectations of The Second Coming are widely reported by anthropologists across Papua New Guinea (see Jebens 2000; Kempf 1992; Kocher Schmid 1999; Robbins 2001) but in gaol, among those convicted and sentenced, it does seem to have its own peculiar resonance. To a certain extent, Christian convicts seem enchanted by the conjunction between the ordeal of waiting their sentence out and the converts experience of waiting for the last day (wetim las de). In both situations, there is a sense in which the present takes the form of an interim (Robbins 2001: 544), a period dened by its discontinuity with the future towards which subjects are directed. Like the convicted prisoner, the convert can be read as killing time until the present is over. However, crucially, convicts also note the difference. Most obviously, there is little equivalence between the respective endings. Waiting out ones sentence does not carry the urgency or absolute conclusiveness of waiting for The Second Coming. It lacks the anticipatory intensity of that Christian hope and the accompanying sense of watching, looking out for signs of the endings arrival. Again, this is partly because that moment the DDR is known. Indeed, it is precisely the drama and indeterminacy of waiting for the Last Day that makes conversion appealing. Christian convicts want to nd an anticipatory momentum to eclipse or render insignicant the tedious waiting out of prison time. While both waiting for the Last Day and waiting for court can be taken to make known a prospective orientation or not-yet consciousness, they do so on quite different terms. The discontinuous future available in Christian hope is singular and total in form, but also continually deferred to the horizon. On occasions, Christians, both inside and outside the gaol, may try to x the Day of Judgement to a calendar date (most commonly, when I was at Bomana, this was the year 2000), but millennial excitement is usually less precise. Indeed, as Robbins (2001: 528) points out, anticipations of The Second Coming across Papua New Guinea do not necessarily imply a radical withdrawal from ordinary lifeways, in the manner assumed in much of the cargo cult literature. Christian subjects may expect the end of the world and still continue to engage enthusiastically in the activities of daily life. Hope on remand is rather different, for the anticipation of the wetkot is informed by the knowledge that some sort of result or conclusion will occur in the near future; he is surrounded by evidence of the fact that legal judgment must be passed. In this regard, the hopeful moment is rather mundane and curtailed in its future-looking orientation. But it is also far more pervasive. Waiting for court does not operate alongside the everyday, in the way Christian hope for The Second Coming can, because for those on remand it is what they do. Indeed, for wetkot the rhythm of the day at Bomana is completed dictated by these concerns. After the cell doors are opened and inmates have hurried to get their tea and biscuits, the bell is rung for morning roll call. On the parade ground, warders read out the names of the court line (kot lain), those due before the judge or magistrate that
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day who must ready themselves to be collected and taken away to town in the yellow prison vans. Those left behind return to the remand compound, where they prepare themselves for their own upcoming court dates by repairing and washing clothes and cutting hair in order to make themselves presentable on the day (a lot of anxiety is caused by the fact that access to civilian clothes and property bags is at the whim of duty warders). Some of them await the arrival of counselling lawyers; others look forward to the weekend visits of family and friends who may have news of latest developments. But the momentum of this life is not just directed towards a single and nal day in court. As remandees are quick to emphasize, there are a whole series of judgments and outcomes to anticipate before that moment is even reached. Upon arrival at Bomana, new remand inmates are searched and processed at reception, where each receives a card with his next court date stamped upon it. This is invariably a pre-trial date; either a ruling for committal to senior court minor charges can be dealt with by a magistrate at the District Court, but major charges must be sent up to the judges at the National Court or a listing where parties appear for mention of their cases, reviews of legal procedure, plea-entering, and future date-setting. Typically, wetkot will make many court appearances over their time in gaol, especially if the charge is a serious criminal offence and the case goes to trial. One man I knew, for instance, charged with wilful murder, had been to District Court seven times over as many months for listings, before a ruling moved him to National Court, where he made several more appearances while he waited a date to be set for his trial hearings. However, the point is not just that the experience of waiting for court is cumulative; it is that for wetkot it appears to be indeterminate at every stage. Remandees know that it is perfectly possible that when they next go to court their charge will be dismissed. Judges or magistrates may release them on a legal technicality, witnesses may withdraw the statements made against them, or the police may fail to produce a prosecuting case. The latter, in particular, is not unusual. The expression he has no le (em i no gat fail) is commonly used as an explanation for a fellow inmates release; it is said that if police cannot provide the defendant with a folder of documented evidence and testimony after a certain number of court appearances (the total is popularly imagined to be ve), then the judge or magistrate will have to throw the case out. This expectation provides its own sense of hopefulness or mounting prospective attention; remand inmates sit around and endlessly discuss whether and when they will receive their les. They also consider whether they might get bail, another possible outcome of a court appearance, and if they do, whether kin and friends will be able or willing to pay it. A further intersection between hope studies and the literature on waiting lies in a shared focus on the issue of agency. Contributors to a recent volume on waiting (Hage 2009a), for instance, concern themselves with the question of whether it is a passive activity or one that allows for expressions of human intentionality. The authors devote much energy to delineating the kinds of agency that exist in different examples of waiting and to categorizing the identied distinctions.2 Similar work takes place in hope studies. Crapanzano (2003), for instance, attempts to differentiate between desire and hope on the basis of the way agency is attributed. For him, desire is effective. It presupposes human agency and a subject who does the desiring; whereas hope depends on some other agency a god, fate, chance, an other for its fullment (2003: 6). Such a stress is intriguing when one considers the waiting time of
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hope on remand, whose form is so obviously dependent on the court system and the whole course of legal prosecution. Indeed, it is precisely here that I believe hope studies has something further to offer my interpretation and more broadly that of the New Melanesian Ethnography. It is clear that on one level hope on remand is considered a capacity whose possession or dispossession essentially differentiates prisoners (remand inmates have it; convicts have none). But while it is possible to read the articulated positions of convicts and remandees as a form of elicitation (the capacities of each position pre-gure the other, both acquired through prior exchanges of perspective) and their deployment of the category of hope on remand as an effect of evoking that difference, this does not do justice to either the trajectory or quality of action that inmates wish to describe. In part, this is because agency is attributed to law or the legal process. But those who wait for court do not just wish for a favourable outcome; they also want to know what will happen to them. In fact at times they seem to treat hope on remand as a technique of knowing, to narrate something close to a method of hope (Miyazaki 2004). Although that method might lie in the technique of legal prosecution and judgment, this fact does not necessarily reduce that knowledge to an artefact or effect of law and governmentality. In addition to highlighting the relative autonomy of this waiting time from its relational dimension (Minnegal 2009), the emphasis suggests that for inmates law might equally be seen as the medium by which hope on remand operates or expresses its own agency as if hope was a parasitical action that needed a host to work through. Wetkot, then, are hopeful not so much by disposition as by situation. To them, this future-looking orientation is less a condition of human persons and more a kind of force or power that dominates them. Unlike the Fijian subjects described by Miyazaki (2004), who seem actively to strive to introduce hopefulness into their dealings with each other, the government, and their God, wetkot do not work to keep hope alive because they imagine that it is something thrust upon them, a necessary condition of being on remand. This idea, that it is hope itself that abandons certain subjects and consumes or directs others, rather than subjects who deploy and sustain it, is, I think, crucial to an understanding of the category. Indeed, I would hold that such a notion perhaps gives more scope to the argument that one needs to pay attention to the independent action of hope in the world. It challenges the tendency in New Melanesian Ethnography to regard the attribution of agency to material or non-material forms and ideas as examples of displacement; a move that would reduce the notion that hope has power to a statement about the order of relations that the category indexes. At the same time the claim disturbs the wider assumption of hope studies, sometimes made explicitly but always there by implication, that hope is something desirable. Wetkot, I suggest, want to highlight and stay focused on the impression that hope has agency. As a result, they offer a far more equivocal valuation of the hopeful moment; in their accounts, the prospective momentum of waiting for court often seems relentless, overwhelming, and exhausting. In fact at times they seem to present the possession of hope as the problem of their incarceration. The point is reinforced by the fact that hopefulness is a quality not just claimed by remandees but also assigned to them by others. Convicts and warders at Bomana continually identify wetkot on that very basis. They are marked out as different precisely because they spend their time endlessly discussing court cases and events outside the
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gaol, rather than concerns and events inside it. The nature of their movement or daily actions also draws this distinction; convicts highlight that, unlike them, remand inmates continually come and go (wetkot go kam), travelling back and forth between Bomana and the courthouse in town. There, they can meet friends and family, make phone calls, chew betel nut, and smoke cigarettes, activities that are either strictly monitored or prohibited in gaol. In addition, both warders and convicts stress that wetkot do not wear the convict uniform (when I rst arrived at Bomana, remandees wore civilian clothes; later on they were issued with blue waistcloths) or embody the same appearance. While convicts must be clean-shaven and close-cropped at all times, remand inmates can keep their hair long, maintaining their beards and moustaches intact. As one convict told me, those on remand are not pure prisoners, they are half-freedom and half-kalabus; or as another convict put it, wetkot have two legs: one inside the gaol and one outside it (ol i gat tupela lek: wanpela lek i stap insait na wanpela lek i stap autsait). Indeed, for convicted prisoners, the remandee is not so much a subject who hopes as hope itself, its personication. This is not an indifferent observation. The fact that the mind of wetkot is divided or split causes convicts resentment and anxiety in equal measure. They complain that the presence of hope on remand, embodied in the look, chatter, high spirits, and anticipations of those waiting for court, disturbs their composure, forcibly reminding them of what they are missing and thus making it harder to manage the present. At the same time they resent the fact that remand inmates seem to offer only a halfhearted commitment to prison society, its obligations and cares. Likewise, warders complain that the expectations of wetkot make them cheeky (bikhet) and disrespectful, noisier than convicts, and less likely to obey orders or behave at roll call. In fact convicts and warders tend to present remand inmates as outsiders or intruders at Bomana; both are quick to point out that, technically, remandees are in the custody of the police, not the correctional services, and so not really the moral or nancial charge of the gaol commandant and his ofcers. Their hopefulness, including the obvious indeterminacy of their court outcome, is held up as justication for the removal of privileges. Unlike convicts, wetkot are not allowed to leave their compound outside roll calls or join work parties; they cannot participate in team sports on the playing eld, grow vegetables, or cook their own rations. They must also put up with a reduced prison issue of razors, soap, and blankets and far greater levels of overcrowding (while the convict cells usually contain around thirty inmates, the remand cells often hold as many as seventy men). In addition, warders allow convicts to dictate the amount of food that wetkot receive. This means that, typically, remand inmates must share a meal portion that would normally divide between half the number of convicts and that the former are usually denied second helpings. If those on remand complain at the discrimination, then they are sharply rebuked by convicts and warders alike; I remember one hungry and disgruntled group of remandees being told by a convicted prisoner that you have no rights here (yu no gat raits long dispela banis). In this treatment, there is a strong sense that because wetkot have hope, or hope has them, they dont deserve the same sympathy as convicts.
Not-yet and already (the method of dreaming)

Up until now my discussions of hope on remand have focused on the stages of legal judgment and the resulting deliberations that animate the reections and conversations
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of wetkot at Bomana. However, I want to argue that there may be another side to this not-yet consciousness. Just as remand inmates spend their waking hours thinking upon and talking about upcoming court cases, so, it is said, they spend their sleeping hours dreaming about them. Whether dozing in cell corners during the daytime or slumbering next to cellmates at night, it seems that the anticipation engendered by waiting for court never leaves them; that there is no relief from the pressure to know how things will turn out. As we shall see, dreaming experiences also make wetkot hopeful. Indeed, I want to suggest that the realm of dreams may provide the terrain in which the directionality of the legal process and its method of hope are best replicated but at the same time most signicantly altered.3 The observation draws me back to some of the lessons of Melanesian anthropology. As remand inmates are quick to point out, the activity of dreaming is not just a manifestation or alternative expression of the momentum that builds when waiting for court; it is also, vitally, a form of presentiment or prediction. Wetkot expect their dreams to reveal that something will happen. More specically, they expect them to predict the outcome of their court case. This apprehension is of course part of a much wider dream technology; anthropologists have long suggested that in Melanesian societies dreaming experiences may be taken to anticipate almost any circumstance (see Gillison 1993; Herdt 1987; Lindstrom 1990; Lohmann 2003; Meggitt 1962; Mimica 2006a; 2006b; Stephen 1979; 1982; Wagner 1972; Weiner 1991).4 This is especially the case when dreamers are already focused upon particular upcoming events with obviously undetermined outcomes: for example, a planned hunting trip, a game of cards, a sexual conquest, or the imminent departure from the village of someone intending to work in a faraway plantation or town (Herdt 1987: 63, 64). As Mimica states, talking about the Yagwoia, the basic attitude towards dreams in general is in terms of their future-mode of orientation (2006a: 29). Indeed, dreams are often taken to indicate that subjects should act upon certain intentions, work to actualize the dream-showing in the wakeful world (Mimica 2006b: 115). The activity is therefore an inherently hopeful project; it instils a prospective momentum in the subject. At Bomana the taken-for-granted predictive quality of dreaming makes remand inmates intensify their speculation about court, for it forces them to state what they think will happen next. Indeed, at almost every meeting, wetkot insisted on telling me their latest dream presentiment. One remandee told me, for example, that he dreamed that at his committal hearing on a charge of conspiracy to armed robbery he will be sent up to the senior court, another that he will be visited by his lawyer, and a third that he will get his bail tariff unexpectedly paid. Others dream of receiving their court le, of magistrates throwing out the case against them (strikim kase blong mi), or judges dramatically acquitting them. As well as dreaming for themselves, wetkot also claim to dream the outcomes of other inmates legal judgments. One man, for instance, stated that he dreamed that at his next court appearance his friend would have his case adjourned. Another inmate reported dreaming that the judge will dismiss the evidence against one of his accomplices. But whether dreaming for themselves or for others, the orientation is always rigorously forwardlooking, tied closely to the relevant stage in that subjects experience of the legal process. In fact wetkot sit around endlessly debating and interpreting their dreams. As well as discussing them with cellmates and comrades, individuals sometimes seek out the
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judgement of other inmates deemed to possess expertise: typically, either through a special knowledge of customary images, symbols, and metaphors or through a reputation for identifying biblical signs.5 This is particularly common when dreams resist more straightforward readings.
I am on a long bus, which is full of women wearing traditional clothes. We come to a junction and stop. The women leave the bus and I follow them. From a watchtower a man calls out the name of one woman and she dances all the way up to it and inside. I do the same. I am walking on a path, but a tree blocks my way so I have to turn back and return home. I am driving a tractor. The wheel of the vehicle wants to take me into the forest but I work hard and keep it on the road. When I put the tractor in reverse I see a boy and a girl washing and decorating their bodies. I ask them what they are doing and they reply that they would like a lift. So we all set off together. I am playing rugby and I kick the ball through the goal posts. I see a boulder roll towards me so I jump into the river to avoid it. The water runs fast and I think I will be swept away. However, I grab the legs of another man, who tells me to stand up and I do. I am standing on a runway, watching an aeroplane land and all the people rush to meet it. Suddenly I nd myself running too, overtaking the crowd and getting there before them.

In these examples, the interpretations offered by the dream expert range widely. The inmate who found himself with a busload of custom-dressed women, for instance, was told that he would be convicted (his National Court trial on a charge of armed robbery started on the following day) because when you enter a house in a dream it always means you will get time (kisim taim). If he had resisted and walked away from the watchtower, then he would win and be released. Similarly, the man who dreams of a tree blocking his path was informed that he would lose his court case because obstacles on journeys tend to predict an imminent failure. The tractordriving dreamer was told that his decision to give the boy and girl a lift indicated that he would be convicted on one charge and receive a sentence of either two weeks or two months one unit of time for each child but that the court would dismiss the other, more serious charges laid against him. For the inmate who dreams of playing rugby, successively converting a try was said to mean that he would win his court case; he was told that if he had hit the posts the outcome would be very different. The dreamer who avoids drowning in the river by holding onto the leg of another was told that when he next goes to court the police would point out and accuse his accomplice, but let him go. Finally, the remandee who falls asleep and sees himself on a runway is told that the dream suggests he will receive his court date ahead of his cellmates. While a prediction of conviction might be expected to block hope, it is important to stress that for those on remand dream analysis remains indeterminate. This is because dreams always reveal themselves in the future, or, in the words of several men I knew, only tell us what they mean afterwards (tokim mipela bihain taim). So, whether the prediction is positive or negative, a prospective momentum stays in place. Wetkot do not believe that dreaming gives them the capacity to act or intervene in the legal process; however, they do assume that dreams are there to be tested against upcoming events. In fact, as inmates regularly told me, individuals resolve to go to court and try out these dreams (go kot na traim dispela driman). In this regard, the waiting time of hope on remand includes doubled sets of anticipations: remandees wait to nd out the outcome of their court case but also wait to discover whether their dream presentiments were true or false.
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Although dreaming contains an inherent forward-looking orientation the predictive quality of dreams leads wetkot to expect or anticipate certain outcomes it also crucially challenges that trajectory. For remand inmates, hope engendered by dreams is not quite the same as the hope engendered by the process of legal judgment. Indeed, I argue that the usual dimensions of a not-yet consciousness, and the kind of method of hope articulated by Miyazaki for anthropology, is thrown into relief by the example of inmates dream interpretations. As previously mentioned, for Miyazaki (2004, and Bloch), the temporal orientation of retrospection or contemplation in philosophy and social analysis is crucially at odds with the dynamics of the hopeful moment, in particular what is for him its consistently prospective momentum. Hope, he tells us, is about the indeterminacy and limitlessness of knowledge, the rejection of models based on predetermined ends (Miyazaki 2004: 15). However, at Bomana, as in Melanesian societies more broadly (see Mimica 2006b: 115), retrospection appears a vital condition of dreaming and therefore of the whole method of hope that that experience describes. For the anticipation necessarily included in the act of dream interpretation or presentiment cannot be separated from the act of identication or assessment that takes place when court outcomes are eventually revealed. At such moments, subjects are compelled to adopt a contemplative glance, to look back and pick out which elements of the dream suggested that conclusion. Of course, this orientation matches a wider strategic contemplation, long recognized and elaborated by scholars of the New Melanesian Ethnography. Indeed, the notion of an immanent humanity (Wagner 1981: 87; and see 1991: 172), where similarity or resemblance between things is taken for granted (Strathern 1991: 80), necessarily incorporates such a retrospective temporality. The point is best illustrated by returning to the work of Miyazaki. Among the rst and most powerful of his ethnographic examples of the hopeful moment is the act of Fijian gift-giving, that point in the exchange cycle when subjects offer an object to the gift-receivers in anticipation of future return (2004: 7). He claims that what is interesting and important about the exchange ritual is that its participants insist on preserving a forward-looking orientation (2004: 11); for him, gift-giving and gift-receiving ceremonies are all about the reproduction and replication of this prospective momentum (and not, for instance, about what ritual exchange produces or effects). However, it is at this stage that a divergence occurs, for the emphasis of his exchange subjects is rather different from that of the subjects of ceremonial exchange described by Wagner and Strathern (and many other Melanesian anthropologists). In the latter case, exchange partners only come to know the strength and value of past gifts retrospectively, through the gifts they later receive. In the same manner they know that present and future capacities are always the result of prior transactions. Something happening now, therefore, is really about past and future moments; as a consequence, it requires subjects to look both ways. Like the act of prediction, retrospective dream judgement at Bomana is recognized as both creative and specialized work. If presentiments do not materialize at court, then inmates sit down and weigh (skelim) the dream again, assessing the possible alternatives. Often the right interpretation is obvious afterwards. One remandee told me, for instance, that when he was incarcerated in a provincial gaol, he dreamed that a helicopter came and collected him and ew him to a city, where he saw many different kinds of men and high fences. At the time, his cellmates informed him that the dream meant he would be acquitted and released. However, he now knows that
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the dream forecast a different end, for at his next court appearance the judge unexpectedly transferred him to Bomana (a maximum-security prison, located just outside the national capital, Port Moresby). Similarly, another wetkot explained that he once dreamed that a clerk from reception came into the remand compound carrying a court folder. The warder called the name of a man charged with murder and told the dreamer that this prisoner had been discharged. He handed the folder over and instructed him to go and tell the lucky remandee. But in the dream, he suddenly felt short of breath and unable to walk, so he failed to deliver the message. When the wetkot awoke, he discussed the dream with his co-accused and they agreed that it indicated that another remand inmate, a stranger, would unlawfully be convicted. In fact, they subsequently discovered that the dream referred to their own court case, for at trial, several months later, a witness gave false testimony against them, which they claim led to their joint conviction. Finally, the prisoner who saw himself while on remand driving a tractor in his dream and offering a lift to a boy and girl told me that he only learned the experiences true signicance after conviction. It turned out, he explained mournfully, that the children in his dream did not indicate a sentence of two weeks or two months but rather a completely unforeseen sentence of two years! In these examples retrospection can reinforce the disappointment of an unlookedfor court outcome. But even if the result identied in dreams is negative, this does not necessarily mean that the act of contemplating legal judgments is out of sympathy with the hopeful moment. In fact I would argue that the backwards-looking orientation of dream identication validates the hopeful quality of dreams for remand inmates. This includes both the sense of anticipation that dreaming elicits and the ensuing acts of prediction. The latter is not possible without the condence and reassurance provided by a retrospective conrmation. If this contradicts the kind of method of hope advocated by Miyazaki, it is because, once actualized and identied in particular dreams, court events appear pregured or even predetermined. They have in some sense already happened: that is, in substituted dream form. The future-looking orientation of waiting for court is therefore in some ways denied. Indeed, it seems important to wetkot that at certain moments the prospective momentum of hope on remand is transformed into a retrospective momentum:6 that is, into a consciousness or action that is both not-yet and already. For them, this is the true lesson of the method of dreaming.
Fifty-fty (the method of gambling)

When describing the unresolved character of the near future, remand inmates often present an idiom of embodied probability. Throughout my time at Bomana, individual wetkot kept telling me that we are the fty-fty people (mipela fty-fty lain). Indeed, they insisted that regardless of the evidence weighted against them, each one has an equal chance of winning or losing his court case. The faith in this position is sometimes startling: I recall one man who admitted he had been caught red-handed by the police, but who still insisted the odds for conviction or acquittal were even. In this case, hopefulness draws its strength from the lessons of gambling, an activity rife throughout the compounds and cells of the gaol. Conceived as an exemplary form of uncertainty, with an inbuilt, accelerated waiting time (everything is about the next bet), the analogue of the wager, I argue, offers another way of guring the remand experience. It also presents wetkot with an opportunity to imagine that
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they can mobilize hope (see Crapanzano 2003): that is, not just wait for court and test their dreams but actually intervene as effective actors in the process of legal judgment. In the remand compound, inmates sit in cell corners and along cell corridors playing endless games of cards or draughts; cards are made by cutting up Red Cross calendars and drawing suits, while draughts boards are made from stolen plywood with toothpaste tops used as counters. They also play a prison board game called Six-Four; this involves four participants throwing dice in order to move along a six-unit track, the aim being to get from a named prison each player chooses a different gaol in Papua New Guinea to home. Typically, the remandees gamble with their ration biscuits (pilai bisket), but also sometimes with prison-issue razor blades and bars of soap. If rations are short or the game involves only two inmates, they may also play forfeits: for instance, by placing a large container of water between them and stating that the loser of each round must drink it down. In whichever form, these gambling activities can often go on for hours or even indenitely, with the winner getting the prize and the losers leaving the game to be replaced by a new set of players. The motivation to keep playing is said to be to pay back and win the biscuit (pe bek na winim bisket). But more broadly, wetkot state that they gamble because they wish to ll the empty days and make the gaps between court appearances pass more quickly. Anthropologists writing about gambling outside the gaol, principally in village settings, emphasize that these games tend to be interpreted through exchange-like forms (Maclean 1984; Mimica 2006b; Mitchell 1988; Zimmer 1986). The worth of ones cards in any one round, for example, can be presented as an achievement, equivalent in form to the achievement of someone able to ensure a favourable ceremonial exchange (Zimmer 1987). Indeed, as Mimica (2006b: 114) points out, writing about the Yagwoia, participants rarely express a notion of blind chance; instead they articulate an indeterminate potential of such activities to work in favour of particular subjects. The tension in such games lies in the effort to extract wealth from other players, to demonstrate, albeit briey, a dominant power of attraction (2006b: 115). In Bomana, this kind of interpretation of gambling is precisely what for remand inmates makes it a relevant analogue to the struggles of the legal process. Just as they conceive themselves outwitting one another in games of cards and draughts, so they sometimes present themselves locked in competitive exchanges with magistrates, witnesses, and police. In the remand compound, inmates advise each other on how to deny their trouble (denyim trable) and induce a favourable result. Before a remandee goes to his trial court, for instance, cellmates hold a party for him; in return for generously provisioning them with cigarettes, they promise to concentrate all their good thoughts on the winning of his case (the assumption exists that thoughts can travel and affect the minds of others, including judges). In a similar vein, Christian inmates hold regular prayer meetings in the cells, where they pray for the success of court appearances and ask God to help them in their trial arrangements. Wetkot also discuss ways of tricking the court and reversing the ow of luck or attraction. This can include the use of sorcery. One inmate told me how some prepare for court by stripping the bark from a tree at Bomana, putting it in their mouth, and chewing it like betel nut. Concentrating their mind on their ancestors (tumbuna), such men do not talk again until they enter the courtroom, where their charmed words are said to make the magistrate or judge believe everything they say.
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540 Adam Reed

More mundanely, remand inmates talk of getting gangmates outside the gaol to intimidate witnesses or of giving false names to the police in order to confuse their investigations. Older, recidivist inmates train the younger ones in how to cheat in court, including helping them to make up a good story and teaching them to stick to it. For many, the ultimate deception is sneak bail, a practice that involves a wetkot on a serious charge swapping identities with another remandee charged with a minor offence. The former takes the place of the latter in court, gets his family to pay the bail fee, and wins release, after which the prisoner left in the remand compound reveals his true identity. In all these stratagems, there is an assumption that the parties involved defendant, police, witnesses, judges are engaged in a ght or transaction between equivalent bodies; the remand inmates I knew advise each other that in court they must play their part (olsem playim part blong yu), ensure that they do all they can to better their opponents, and thus raise the names of both themselves and their comrades. However, the extent to which remand inmates regard themselves as the authors of outcomes in the legal process is also constrained by the principles of the exchange form they invoke. As Strathern (1988) famously highlights, identifying a retrospective assessment at the heart of ritual exchange should also lead one to recognize that in Melanesian societies intentionality is perhaps less clear-cut than one might expect. She states that partners who give or return a gift, extract or attract wealth, do not necessarily hold that they caused that action (1988: 273). In fact they are more likely to insist that they didnt. The norm, Strathern suggests, is for actors to claim that they acted with someone else in mind (1988: 272). At Bomana, this is certainly true of dreams. As well as retrospectively identifying the predictive elements of dream images, remandees reect at length upon the possible causes of these sleep experiences. It is said that dreams can be prompted by the thoughts of kin outside, by God, Satan, or spirits. So while dreamers dream for themselves, they do not intend to enact that state or straightforwardly author it. As with all transacting subjects, remand inmates at Bomana must ultimately reect upon and determine who provoked their actions. Looking again at the gambling analogy can remake the point. As we have seen, the notion that they exist fty-fty is a powerful one for remand inmates because it highlights the ways in which the legal process can be read as a form of competitive exchange, and thus as an activity in which they can register an effect. But perhaps more importantly, it also indicates that wetkot themselves may share in the ontological condition of the wager. As the phrase fty-fty suggests, remandees are not only the subjects who gamble or compete through gambling (who give and return the gift); they are equally the objects of that activity or the items played for. Seen from this perspective, the overriding concern becomes the issue of: Who is gambling? Or: Who is making the wager? For remandees, there is no easy answer to this question. While some may blame enemies outside the gaol, others point to the machinations of kin: a common complaint among remand inmates is that parents and language mates deliberately delay paying a bail fee in order to teach their miscreant son or cousin a lesson. They may attribute their plight to the punishment of God or the games of Satan, an actor who is regularly conceived to tempt or play with human subjects. Finally, they may present themselves as a pawn of the state, of the money economy (see Reed 2003), or the life of the city. The debate is important because it suggests that we might also ask: Whose waiting time or method of hope does the remanded prisoner experience?
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Conclusion

As Swedberg (2007: 23) suggests, it is difcult to render hope without returning to its opposite: no hope or hopelessness. Each category animates the other. But, as he emphasizes, this does not mean that one should assume that the latter is simply a negation or lack of whatever capacities or actions hope is made to stand for. Rather, no hope is a phenomenon in its own right (2007: 23). For Swedberg, the point is best illustrated by highlighting failures of complementarity. Most notable among them is the fact that while subjects are hopeful in targeted and specic ways, they are often hopeless in general, without reference to anything particular. In this regard, Swedberg believes, no hope is qualitatively different or incommensurate. Looking at Bomana, it is clear that he has a point. There, hope on remand, like the wetkot experience more broadly, is tightly dened by the attention devoted to the process of legal judgment. Remandees are hopeful because they are xed on something, an event or series of events in the near future. While the directionality of this attention may be mediated through different terrain and reversed, oscillating between prospective and retrospective orientations, it always remains aimed and specic in focus. As the term suggests, wetkot are rst and foremost those who wait for court. In contrast, convicts at Bomana are dened by a marked lack of directionality. They are hopeless without reference, in the general sense that Swedberg intends. But there is also a signicant difference here; if you will, an additional form of incommensurability. For in gaol no hope is not just out of complement with hope on remand, it is also out of time with it. Just as conviction follows legal judgment, so, in order to feel hopeless, prisoners must rst have felt the anticipations of waiting for court. At Bomana no hope is therefore always after hope on remand, the result of a transformation. However, that hope is always itself. It may come before hopelessness but not inevitably so; as wetkot know well, conviction is only one outcome of legal judgment. To me, the contrast is best evoked in the two alternative ways that inmates can exit the remand compound. Those who go before the judge or magistrate and win their case are usually released from the courthouse immediately; they just disappear from view. But those who lose must return to Bomana and enter the convict cells. Wearing the prison uniform, shaved, and with hair cut short, they are often unrecognizable from the men I knew on remand. Abandoned by hope, they become hopeless.
NOTES I wish to thank the remand inmates and other prisoners and warders of Bomana gaol in Papua New Guinea (eldwork conducted 1994-5). For their very helpful comments and criticism, I am grateful to my anonymous reviewers and the Editor, Matthew Engelke. I would also like to thank Tom Boellstorff, Tony Crook, Melissa Demian, Morten Neilson, Anthony Pickles, Annelise Riles, Will Rollason, and Shari Sabeti. But the chief motivation for writing came from my conversations with Hiro Miyazaki and my, albeit imperfect, reading of his inspiring work. I hope this essay goes some way to acknowledging the debt. 1 The initial interest of Crapanzano (1985) in the pervasive sense of waiting among a group of White South Africans, who anticipate with much foreboding the end of Apartheid, leads him to investigate the analytical category of hope (see Crapanzano 2003). For Hage, the inuence is reversed; his original thesis (Hage 2003) about the relationship between the distributed levels of hope in society and the emergence of mainstream paranoid nationalism, most specically among White Australians, has recently turned into a concern to theorize and ethnographically situate the category of waiting (see Hage 2009a, 2009b). The direction of travel in Crapanzanos work is particularly interesting, given both his foundational role in the emergence of hope studies and the differences in analytical trajectory between him and other key gures such as Miyazaki. In the latters The method of hope (2004), waiting is not nearly as prominent or elaborate an idiom.

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2 Dwyer (2009: 18-20), for instance, theorizes a distinction between situational waiting and existential waiting. The former is a non-passive, engaged mode, where subjects actively work to materialize the object they wait for; while the latter is a state of being without intentionality or targeted ends in mind. Minnegal (2009: 90-2), on the other hand, works to differentiate waiting for from waiting on. For her, the rst term captures an orientation towards a specic future when something will occur; the second term highlights waiting as a form of attendance or reciprocal attention, which she takes to be emblematic of sociality among the Kubo people she worked with in Papua New Guinea. 3 Miyazaki (2004: 28-9) argues that the act of replication is key to the reproduction of hope among his Fijian villagers. At the moment hope is disappointed (or fullled) and thus looks like losing its impetus, these subjects relocate it on a different terrain (2004: 25). So the hopefulness invested in petitions to the government over long-standing claims for land compensation turns into the hopefulness invested in the relations between these subjects, through gift-giving for example, or into the hopefulness invested in relations between subjects and their God (2004: 6-7). While there is no equivalent drive to keep hope alive among remand inmates by deliberately relocating it in alternative terrains, it does seem that dreams at Bomana provide wetkot with a means of re-describing the trajectory of hopeful moments. 4 Anthropologists state that in many Melanesian societies it almost seems that dreams are required before an event can actually take place. Gillison reports that the Gimi people of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea say that women must dream their child before conceiving it (1993: 209), and that future marriage partners should rst anticipate each other in dreams (1993: 233). 5 Most anthropologists who have examined Melanesian dream interpretations identify certain standard images or symbols (see Herdt 1987; Meggitt 1962; Stephen 1979; 1982; Wagner 1972; Weiner 1986; 1991). Weiner (1991: 27), for instance, claims that Foi men have a stock set of metaphoric equivalences, which he regards as conventional rather than innovative in form. He asserts that for the Foi these metaphors are as constant as the trafc signals for us (1986: 125). Meggitt (1962: 224) lists for the Mae Enga twenty-eight examples of an accepted vocabulary of dream symbols, each with its own specic reference value (1962: 226). In Bomana, inmates also identify conventional dream images, drawn from kastam (custom) and biblical sources, but these are said to act as a guide or point to analysis rather than a xed sign. The act of dream interpretation therefore appears a far more uid, open-ended business. 6 In defence of Miyazaki, his denition of hope does shift over time, from a focus on a forward-looking perspective to a focus on the reversal of orientations in methods of knowledge (see Miyazaki 2006; and also Riles 2007). It seems that for him the hopeful moment is increasingly connected with the ability to switch or reorient this directionality (e.g. in the Fijian case, from retrospective to prospective forms of knowing). Read in this light, the activity of dreaming at Bomana is hopeful because it allows remand inmates to reverse the forward-looking knowledge of the legal process into the forwards-backwards knowledge of dream interpretation. But of course this rather idiosyncratic denition of hope is not something prisoners themselves articulate.

REFERENCES Crapanzano, V. 1985. Waiting: the whites of South Africa. New York: Random House. 2003. Reections on hope as a category of social and psychological analaysis. Cultural Anthropology 18, 3-32. Dwyer, P.D. 2009. Worlds of waiting. In Waiting (ed.) G. Hage, 15-26. Melbourne: University Press. Genda, Y. 2005. A nagging sense of job insecurity: the new reality facing Japanese youth (trans. J. Hoff). Tokyo: International House of Japan. Gillison, G. 1993. Between culture and fantasy: a New Guinea Highlands mythology. Chicago: University Press. Hage, G. 2003. Against paranoid nationalism: searching for hope in a shrinking society. Annandale, NSW: Pluto. (ed.) 2009a. Waiting. Melbourne: University Press. 2009b. Waiting out the crisis: on stuckedness and governmentality. In Waiting (ed.) G. Hage, 97-106. Melbourne: University Press. Herdt, G. 1987. Selfhood and discourse in Sambia dream sharing. In Dreaming: anthropological and psychological interpretations (ed.) B. Tedlock, 55-85. Cambridge: University Press. Jebens, H. 2000. Signs of the Second Coming: on eschatological expectation and disappointment in Highland and Seaboard Papua New Guinea. Ethnohistory 47, 171-204. Josephides, L. 1991. Metaphors, metathemes, and the construction of sociality: a critique of the New Melanesian Ethnography. Man (N.S.) 26, 145-61.

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Kasuga, N. 2007. Hope between inside and outside: freeters in Japan. Paper presented at the Hope Studies Conference, University of Tokyo, 18-19 December. Kempf, W. 1992. The Second Coming of the Lord: early Christianization, episodic time, and the cultural construction of continuity in Sibog. Oceania 63, 72-87. Kocher Schmid, C. (ed.) 1999. Expecting the Day of Wrath: versions of the millennium in Papua New Guinea. Boroko, Papua New Guinea: National Research Institute Monograph. Lindstrom, L. 1990. Knowledge and power in a South Pacic society. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Lohmann, I. (ed.) 2003. Dream travelers: sleep experiences and culture in the Western Pacic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Maclean, N. 1984. Is gambling bisnis? The economic and political functions of gambling in the Jimi Valley. Social Analysis 16, 44-59. Meggitt, M. 1962. Dream interpretation among the Mae Enga of New Guinea. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 18, 216-29. Mimica, J. 2006a. Dreams, laki, and mourning: a psychoanalytic ethnography of the Yagwoia inner feminine: part I. Oceania 76, 27-60. 2006b. Dreams, laki, and mourning: a psychoanalytic ethnography of the Yagwoia inner feminine: part II: soul and the oneiro-dynamics of luck. Oceania 76, 113-31. Minnegal, M. 2009. The time is right: waiting, reciprocity and sociality. In Waiting (ed.) G. Hage, 89-96. Melbourne: University Press. Mitchell, W.E. 1988. The defeat of hierarchy: gambling as exchange in a Sepik society. American Ethnologist 15, 638-57. Miyazaki, H. 2004. The method of hope: anthropology, philosophy and Fijian knowledge. Stanford: University Press. 2006. Economy of dreams: hope in global capitalism and its critiques. Cultural Anthropology 21, 147-72. Reed, A. 1999. Anticipating individuals: modes of vision and their social consequence in a Papua New Guinean prison. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 5, 43-56. 2003. Papua New Guineas last place: experiences of constraint in a postcolonial prison. Oxford: Berghahn. 2006. Unfolding documents. In Documents: artifacts of modern knowledge (ed.) A. Riles, 158-80. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press. Riles, A. 2007. Is the law hopeful? Paper presented at the Hope Studies Conference, University of Tokyo, 18-19 December. Robbins, J. 2001. Secrecy and the sense of an ending: narrative, time, and everyday millenariansim in Papua New Guinea and in Christian fundamentalism. Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, 525-51. Stephen, M. 1979. Dreams of change: the innovative role of altered states of consciousness in traditional Melanesian religion. Oceania 50, 3-22. 1982. Dreaming is another power! The social signicance of dreams among the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea. Oceania 53, 106-22. Strathern, M. 1988. The gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1991. Partial connections. Savage, Md: Rowman & Littleeld. Swedberg, R. 2007. The sociological study of hope and the economy: introductory remarks. Paper presented at the Hope Studies Conference, University of Tokyo, 18-19 December. Wagner, R. 1972. Habu: the innovation of meaning in Daribi religion. Chicago: University Press. 1981. The invention of culture. Chicago: University Press. 1991. The fractal person. In Big men and great men: personications of power in Melanesia (eds) M. Godelier & M. Strathern, 159-73. Cambridge: University Press. Weiner, J. 1986. Men, ghosts and dreams among the Foi: literal and gurative modes of interpretation. Oceania 57, 114-27. 1991. The empty place: poetry, space and being among the Foi of Papua New Guinea. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Zimmer, L.J. 1986. Card playing among the Gende: a system for keeping money and social relationships alive. Oceania 56, 245-63. 1987. Gambling with cards in Melanesia and Australia: an introduction. Oceania 58, 1-5.

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Lespoir en dtention provisoire

Rsum Larticle sintresse la vie en dtention provisoire dans une prison de Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guine. Il examine lespoir des dtenus en attente de jugement, explorant la situation de ceux-ci par le biais de lanalyse offerte par la Nouvelle ethnographie mlansienne et le champ mergent des tudes sur lespoir. Plus particulirement, lattention se porte sur le concept despoir en tant que mthode de connaissance et mode daction. Largument est labor et redni en resituant lidiome des moments despoir dans les domaines du rve et du pari, comme le font frquemment les prisonniers en dtention provisoire. Lauteur souhaite ainsi apporter sa contribution lanthropologie juridique, lanthropologie de la connaissance et lethnographie de la Mlansie.

Adam Reed is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. His Melanesian research focuses on issues of incarceration, including attention to colonial and postcolonial governmentality, the politics of vision, money, aesthetics of documents, and popular narratives of nationhood, the city, and crime.

Department of Social Anthropology, St Andrews KY16 9AL, UK. ader@st-andrews.ac.uk

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