European Society for Oceanists 2015 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

Remaking institutions: multiplicity, pluralism and hybridity in the Pacific

Coordinator(s)

Melissa Demian, Alice Street

Session presentation

This panel investigates the way that a ‘standard package’ of institutions of modernist liberal society - including but not limited to medicine, law, education, organized religion, sport, governmental and non-governmental political bodies - have found fertile ground in Pacific societies. By fertile ground we mean explicitly that these institutions have taken root and proliferated into an abundance of forms, not all of those forms recognised as legitimate by the formal entities from which they originally emanated. But this institutional abundance may be indicative of the ways that Pacific peoples use introduced systems of governance, wellbeing and leisure to negotiate between multiple social orders. Far from indicating the failure or weakness of institutions in these societies, we wish to investigate how Pacific peoples deploy their pleasure in engagement with difference and their skill at movement between social orders in order to bring the good life into view.

The panel takes Pacific peoples’ engagements with European institutions on their own terms as a starting point for rethinking social models of and for multiplicity. Formal attempts to govern and structure such engagements have been dominated by models of pluralism (e.g. medical or legal pluralism). Meanwhile social scientists interested in the forms of social and cultural change made apparent in such institutional complexes have often imported models of hybridity or dialectical transformation that were developed for contexts elsewhere. This panel, by contrast, is interested in the models of difference that form the basis for Pacific people’s creative engagement with and reformulation of European institutions. It seeks to build on and critically scrutinise recent work in the anthropology of Melanesia, such as Strathern’s concept of ‘moral analogy’ (Strathern 2011) or Robbins’ appropriation of Dumont’s concept of ‘adoption’ (Robbins 2003), which has sought to describe people’s conceptualisation of and movement between multiple social orders. At the same time we remain attendant to the power relationships that are integral to the running of formal institutions and the inequalities that often follow any apportioning of difference. It is anticipated that the papers in this panel will contribute to a better understanding of how formal institutions work in the Pacific and will foster critical reflection on the analytic models of difference that are (often implicitly) employed by social scientists.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

The Institutional context for Melanesian sociality

Reed Adam (University of St Andrews)

There has been very little ethnographic work with institutions in Melanesia; and often what exists tends to approach the institution as a supplement to 'cultural life' or 'sociality' as it already exists. There is an assumption that institutions must be understood in the context of Melanesian societies; indeed, much of the literature considers the response of 'local' peoples and cosmologies to these 'introduced' organisational bodies. Through a reflection on ethnographic work in a Papua New Guinean prison carried out in the 1990s, and through new work with Papua New Guinean expatriates in Western Australia, I aim to reverse the usual trajectory of anthropological analysis and description and to propose an examination of the institutional context for Melanesian sociality.

Objectified knowledge and relational being: Changing orientations in negotiating multiple social orders in university education

Ivo Soeren Syndicus (Maynooth University)

In Papua New Guinea (PNG), formal education is embraced as a driver for change. Particularly university education is associated with an explicit concern for transforming social and cultural orders rather than their (implicit) reproduction. University students are encouraged to change themselves, and thus to become agents of change towards the betterment of the nation. A central tenet of change is to attain individual discipline based on learned rules, conventions, and formal procedure, which is regarded part of the process of university education. Yet, the struggle to impose (or embrace) such discipline often appears called into question by intuitive concerns to act in accordance with specific relationships, which some perceive as pulling actors back from achieving the institutional and broader ideal of change. Based on one year as student and 18 months of subsequent ethnographic fieldwork on higher education at the University of Goroka in the PNG Highlands, in this paper I synthesize and theorize some of the issues university actors encounter in the process of actively advancing change. I suggest that the negotiation between multiple social and cultural orders may be fruitfully analysed by paying attention to the inherent change of orientation demanded by particular institutional forms, from acting as informed through a relational being-in-the-world, to acting based on an epistemically oriented knowing-about-the-world. While such conflicting orientations pose challenges specifically for actors in the institution of a university, as both subjects and agents of change, it may potentially also be a fruitful perspective in relation to legal and religious institutions.

The Magic of the Court

Melissa Demian (University of St Andrews)

Papua New Guinea’s Sorcery Act was repealed by its Parliament in 2013, in response to a sensational series of sorcery-related killings and widespread sentiment among the legal profession that the Act was no longer fit for purpose. In particular, the Act’s provision that fear of sorcery could be used as a defence in murder cases was felt to be out of step with the times. No legislation has yet been enacted to replace it. At the level of the National and District Courts, this legal vacuum is largely unproblematic as sorcery-related cases rarely make it that far “up” the country’s legal hierarchy. It is instead the Village Courts which remain at the front line of dealing with sorcery accusations and other cases more obliquely to do with concerns about sorcery. These courts, already operating in an almost total absence of state oversight, are now thoroughly on their own when it comes to dealing with cases acknowledged by many Village Court magistrates as by far the most difficult type brought to them. In this paper I consider a matched set of conundrums. The first is practical: how do Village Courts deal with sorcery-related cases in the absence of any legal framework for them to do so? The obvious answer would seem to be that they must invent sorcery law on the hoof, as it were, which leads to the second and more theoretical conundrum: when the state has declared its disinterest in dealing with an issue of pressing concern to most Papua New Guineans, how does the humble Village Court gather to itself the authority of the state in the face of such disinterest?

"The Relatives are Always Watching": Surveillance and Subjectivity in a PNG Nursing College

Barbara Anne Andersen (Massey University, Albany)

Surveillance has been described as a key feature of public health institutions, with Foucault and others detailing the centrality of the gaze to the production of modern subjects. Street (2014) has argued that in Papua New Guinea population-wide surveillance has never been part of the institutional mandate of the health sector: rather, patients struggle to make themselves “seen” by the state. However, trainee nurses in the PNG public health system are taught that they are under constant surveillance—not by management, the state, or the law, but by the relatives of clients. The gaze of “the relatives” is invoked as a disciplinary counterforce, a check on the excessive power of the health worker to grant or deny access to care. Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork in a Highlands nursing college, I argue that the imagined power of relatives to constrain nurses’ actions has significant consequences for service delivery. Moreover, as part of the socializing discourses aimed at young nurses, the gaze of the relatives is incorporated into their emerging subjectivities as educated Papua New Guineans. The paper proposes that this arrangement of gazes does not index institutional weakness or dysfunction, but is a socially and morally coherent--and deliberately cultivated--institutional form.

Compliance as Capacity: Form and Efficacy in the Papua New Guinean Meeting Room

Alice Street (University of Edinburgh)

This article revisits anthropological debates about cultural change via the ethnography of governmental institutions in Papua New Guinea. Meetings are an important means by which donors expect bureaucrats in Papua New Guinea to plan for the future. Donors also complain that those meetings achieve nothing. The planning meeting is held up as a perfect example of ‘compliance’; a mimesis of ‘best practice’ that performs efficacy without achieving it. Civil servants are accused of using donor-funded meetings to display political power rather than improve service-delivery. This article takes the concept of ‘compliance’ as a starting point for reinvigorating debates about cultural change in Melanesia.

Drawing on ethnography of planning meetings in a Papua New Guinean Provincial Health Department I argue that ‘compliance’ should be understood less as the assumption of ‘empty forms’ than the efficacious achievement of form, which generates productive responses from donors and civil servants alike. This focus on form provides the basis for the navigation of a route between opposing sides in recent debates about continuity versus change in Melanesia. While the encompassment of bureaucratic technologies within established modes of exchange is evidence of cultural continuity, public servants themselves focused on the accomplishment of new forms of managerial efficacy in their relationships with international donors. The question becomes less whether sound evidence of cultural continuity or change can be found (both always can) than how Melanesian engagements with difference as a basis for efficacious action might challenge anthropological concerns with cultural meanings, explanations or values.

False Identity Documents and Other Secrets of Everyday Life

Leslie Butt (University of Victoria)

The power of national institutions often lies in their claim to provide the stability, and fixity, necessary for the smooth operation of a state. This paper explores the extent to which the movement between multiple social orders thrives in institutional realms where parameters of citizenship are involved. National borders, and national citizenship, are perhaps among the most intractable of imported institutions. I am particularly interested in interpretations, meanings and manipulations around the birth certificate. Of all the identity documents conferred over a lifetime, birth registration is particularly critical in tying a person to a nation, and potentially providing access to state resources. I describe the creation of false birth certificate documents as a site where the engagement and recreation of expected institutional norms might clarify some features of institutional power. Counterfeit or falsified documents are ubiquitous in everyday life in Indonesia and the Pacific. As Adam Reed notes for Papua New Guinea, the look of many non-state identity documents reveals a creative engagement with regimes of authority: mimicking legality can reveal transformative agendas in how actors replicate norms on one hand, and subvert them on the other. In Indonesia, false documents are ubiquitous, and pervades the Indonesian world more broadly; "anything can be faked," notes Brabandt. In research conducted in Lombok in 2014, families routinely manipulate false IDs as part of the strategies of everyday life to manage social relations. False documents intended to serve as substitutes for state-produced ID, however, must credibly replicate the official form. The creativity around false IDs thus lies below the surface of the document’s textures, lines and forms. This paper looks at two cases of the underground strategies taken by families to procure birth registration certificates which, while “legal” in the sense of being state documents, are fake in the sense that the carrier of the document is not who the document says it is. Identity documents are not documents about persons as much as they are political objects which shed light on strategic local objectives. The cases provide insights into the secretive ways people recreate state requirements at the local level, as well as the limits on creative remaking of national institutions. The creative transcendence institutions potentially offer local groups is not evenly available. Differential access drives home the strong link between the potential fixity of state institutions and their capacity to keep down, and keep immobile some people in mundane ways, while conferring the privilege of access to resources and benefits to those with the capacity to negotiate local cultural institutions, and to participate in reworking state requirements more successfully.

Foreign powers: Christian mytho-history and secular statebuilding in the Solomon Islands

Debra McDougall (University of Melbourne)

This paper seeks to apply some of the insights anthropological research on Pacific Christianity to the study of Pacific states, with particular reference to Solomon Islands during the era of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI). Like missionary literature of an earlier era, contemporary policy literature on the so-called “weak” states of Melanesia emphasizes the shallowness of the penetration of foreign institutions and the resilience of local institutions. Since the 1980s and 1990s, anthropologists have moved beyond simple models of pluralist or syncretic religious systems to examine what processes of Christianization reveal about local models of difference, morality, and historical change. Far from resisting the foreign and unfamiliar, island Melanesians seem to have been attracted to the potential of these new institutions to transform their own social worlds; the foreignness of Christianity was and remains an enduring part of its appeal and power. Engagements with Christian institutions are not parallel to those of the secular state: postcolonial Christianity in all of its diversity has flourished as the postcolonial state has withdrawn. Yet to understand what local people hope to achieve in their engagements with the secular institutions of the modern state, we must understand the way their aspirations for political change are informed by the mytho-history of Christian conversion.

Fundraising in Fiji

Matti Eräsaari (University of Manchester)

Fundraisers are the prevalent way to maintain community welfare in Fiji. The most typical examples range from fundraising for village infrastructure – roads, schools, water etc. – to the church organisation: the pastor’s upkeep, visits to other congregations, and so forth. General fundraisers share many common features with the tithing carried out in the dominant Methodist church, perhaps the most striking being an all-embracing need for strict quantification and written records. Hence all fundraising – whether organised by the village community (vakakoro) or the church (lotu) – exhibits a time-consuming, ritualised structure that pays particular attention to personal names and the sums accompanying them. Historically, the formal features of tithing and fundraising go back to colonial taxation and its obsession with ledgers, but in the present they serve the emergent ideals of egalitarianism particularly well by foregrounding communal accountability. Yet the very fact that the fundraising form agrees so well with a particular communitarian ethos is in itself also a source of dissent. Hence for example many Christian denominations break away from mainstream Methodist practice precisely through the discontinuation of tithing, whilst others virtually reverse the Methodist practice by making tithes impersonal, unquantified, even hidden. The formal features of these practices, in short, comprise more than just a tool for collecting money: they make up a system of meaningful differences.

‘Because the bank couldn’t give us that kind of interest’: Financial Institutions, Their Critiques and Counterfeits in Papua New Guinea

John Cox (La Trobe University)

The “‘standard package’ of institutions of modernist liberal society” surely includes banks, both commercial and central, as fundamental institutions for saving and lending money in capitalist economies. Their central role in controlling flows of money, particularly debt, makes them objects of popular resentment and political or moral critique. In addition, banks become the object of mimicry in the form of alternative financial systems and even counterfeiting through scams and fraud (Maurer 2006).
In Papua New Guinea (PNG) banks are perceived as being ‘only for the top people’; servicing and enriching an elite while neglecting the developmental needs of the population at large. This popular critique is more often heard as a moral lament than a political rallying cry. It reveals emerging class divisions as an important axis of difference that lies at the heart of creative engagements with and reformulations of European institutions in PNG.
Lies also loom large in these engagement in the form of scams. Indeed, as Verdery demonstrated in her masterly (1995) study of the Romanian pyramid scam Caritas, scams can offer ‘windows’ through which the features of social and economic transformations can be seen more clearly. This is indeed the case in PNG, where the ‘fast money scheme’ (Ponzi scam) U-Vistract has developed an elaborate ideology that critiques and counterfeits the banking system. In doing so, a scam both rejuvenates hopes for a good life and articulates the ‘hidden injuries of class’ (Gewertz and Errington 1999) that underpin modern Melanesian experiences of formal institutions within a capitalist economy.