Sir Michael Somare, a firstborn son and heir of a prominent Murik sumon-holder, became the first prime minister of Papua New Guinea in 1975. In order to placate earlier challenges leveled by several secessionist movements, under Somare's stewardship (1975–81) the state embarked on a course not of consolidating its powers and resources but of “giving in” – dispersing them to the provinces (see Lipset 1986). One unintended consequence of his policy of decentralization was to quicken a renewal of intertribal violence (see Clifford et al. 1984; Morauta 1987; Harris 1988). The state became Melanesianized. Led by paradoxical “double agents of law and disorder” (Gordon and Meggitt 1985: 18 n. 4), its legitimacy became less differentiated. The internal efficacy and credibility of Papua New Guinea withered during the 1980s. Relations of power between margin and center became increasingly equal (cf. Fitzpatrick 1980; Black 1984; A. Strathern 1974). Local-level polities were “semiautonomous,” to use Sally Falk Moore's clumsy but apt term (1978b: 55). With no wider matrix of civil authority depriving them of the right to create and enforce moral order, villages, more or less, returned to being unsupervised politicalmoral fields endowed with the agency to devise rules, symbols, customs, and the right to attempt to enforce compliance to them. This revival in indigenous orders instanced Griffiths' (1986) strong notion of legal pluralism in the sense that the local forms of social control were independent of those of the state.