Rethinking Western Motu descent groups

The Motu-Koitabu are the traditional inhabitants of the site of Papua New Guinea's capital city, Port Moresby, and well represented in a body of literature, from the 1870s on, encompassing oral history, archaeology and social anthropology. A basic unit of Motu-Koitabu society is the iduhu, a corporate group which is nowadays conventionally glossed locally as a 'clan' in English, but represented in anthropological literature as more ambiguous in nature than the gloss implies.