ABSTRACT
We have described how distributions to Ponarn as a community were arranged in displays that mapped kamals and moieties, the two elements of their kinship structure most clearly contained in village geography. Ponams also arranged the displays of contributions to, and distributions made by, individuals, and these displays represented other key elements in the social order. These individual-focused displays used genealogy instead of geography as their organising theme. In these prestations, piles of gifts represented not kamals and moieties, but ken sis, stocks of people descended from a common male or female ancestor, and the arrangement of the piles represented the genealogical relations among ken sis as the stocks of an individual's kindred. Ponams could read these displays just as anthropologists can read genealogical diagrams, seeing in them relationships of ascent, descent and siblingship. In this chapter we will describe these displays and the ways that they reflected both structural principles and individual contingency. First we will describe the general nature of these displays and some of their structural properties, looking especially at the effect of the succession of generations on the stocks represented in display. After this, we will look at the ways that individual contingency shaped the displays that people made.
