This article approaches the analysis of ambivalence in exchange relations between groups in the Pangia area of the Southern Highlands Province in Papua New Guinea from an unusual angle: the structure and materials of a ceremonial longhouse constructed to house participants in a gift-giving occasion. The sponsor of the feast declared that it was to mark peace and alliance with neighbors, but one of the recipients noted that the types of wood used in the building themselves carried threatening and competitive messages encoded non-verbally. Gifts of pearl shells and pork were similarly interpreted as double-sided: both to repair friendships and to declare enmities. The recipients themselves risked, from their point of view, death in accepting these perilous gifts from a longhouse consisting of ‘dangerous woods’. The case study illustrates the possible disjuncture of interpretations of material acts and structures by differently positioned persons in the social arena.
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