Plesman vs. stilman

[apropos]

"The place man and place woman are drawn into crime through the obligations they owe to others or through sorcery and pay-back, where the cause of action is perceived to be separated from its effect (much in the same way that prisoners' dreams and sneezes are said to be coerced by the thoughts of kin). If those from the village or hamlet commit offenses in Port Moresby then they are held to be led into trouble by the city itself, which is said to overwhelm them with its events. By contrast, the steal man is said to be accustomed to city and prison life. He lives between those places, drawn from one to the other. Indeed, steal men assert that they break the law deliberately. Unlike the place people, they hunt out trouble themselves (mipela yet painim trable), are the sole cause of their criminal actions. And this claim to steal on purpose, without coerced causality, is a radical statement, intended as a critique of what steal men regard as conventional Papua New Guinean living."

-- Adam Reed, Papua New Guinea's Last Place: Experiences of Constraint in a Postcolonial Prison, p. 68.