Resumo: Drawing on a long history of ethnographic writing in Melanesia that attends to the person as the form that relations take, and that this relational form may manifest in different kinds of bodies, I present an analysis of the destruction of a slit-gong drum in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea during 2010. Bodies or persons must take particular forms, and the way they are constituted: what the substance of the extensions to and through others is, makes a difference. In the village of Reite, all illness is a manifestation of the ill-will of others, or of wider social pathology, as locally understood. This is because the physical body manifests deeper and more significant realities (ever changing relational positions) of which appearance as one thing, or another, is only a moment. 'Crime' is non-existent, but pathology is. The remedies for pathology lie at the level of the relations underlying any physical body and its actions in space and time. This presents a contrast to techno-scientifically mediated social bodies, and to associated remedies for social pathologies (or physical symptoms), and points towards some limitations in the potential of instrumental approaches that target the individual, actions, behaviour, or bodies, misperceiving as they do, the source and practice of social vitality.