Netbags (bilum) from across Papua New Guinea and pearlshells from one specific area show the kinds of materials on which anthropologists build their knowledge. Both tell us about the body. Both point to a feature that these people emphasise. The body is known by its capacity: it can grow things within, it can bring forth, can reproduce itself in others. One can approximate this notion of bodily capacity to fertility or reproduction. Closer perhaps in English is the way ‘body’ can a stand for a collectivity, an assembly of persons who together produce something.
