European Society for Oceanists 2015 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

Beyond the human in the Pacific

Coordinator(s)

Almut Schneider, Katharina Schneider

Session presentation

The panel is an occasion for bringing ideas and figures of thought from the Euro-American nexus of ideas on multi-species ethnography (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010) together with ethnographic observations from the Pacific, with the aim of exploring them comparatively in a regional context and making them productive for each other. There is plenty of ethnographic material on non-humans to be found in publications on the Pacific, but often it forms a part of the background to the ethnographic descriptions and analysis (notable exceptions include Majnep and Bulmer 1977; Dwyer 1990; Sillitoe 2003). Some of this background has more recently been recovered for theoretical purposes, for instance the Orokaiva pig husband (Descola 2013; see also K. Schneider 2013). Much of this Pacific material, however, remains under-analysed for the contribution it could make to current theoretical debates. We invite papers that examine ethnographic material on relations between humans and pigs, birds, taro, yam, bananas or others, be it original or published. Papers may challenge theoretically oriented arguments through the use of ethnography, and/or formulate questions for further ethnographic research beyond the human in the Pacific.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

People, Birds and Navigation around the Pacific

Richard Feinberg (Kent State University)

Around the Pacific, birds are identified with human activities, and often with people themselves. On the Polynesian islands of Anutan and Tikopia in the southeastern Solomon Islands, large seafaring canoes with covered bows and sterns are termed vaka pai (or fai) manu ‘birdlike canoes’, and the bow and stern are carved to resemble birds. Navigators on those islands, as elsewhere in Oceania, use birds to home in on an island when they get close but are not yet able to observe it visually. Anuta’s most important navigational constellation is Manu ‘Bird’. Its body (Te Tino a Manu) is Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, and its wings are Canopus and Procyon, creating an asterism that covers a major portion of the sky. In Anuta’s version of the Maui story, Manu is a demigod who provides humans with fire. And a visitor to Anuta is referred to as ‘a seabird’ (te manu o te moana). On neighboring Taumako, one of the foundational tales relates Te Ube (The Pigeon)’s critical role in teaching the culture hero, Lata, how to build the first voyaging canoe (te puke), and such canoes (te puke and te alo lili) have carved images of Te Ube implanted on their bows and sterns. On Polowat in Micronesia’s Caroline Islands, the major voyaging constellation is also known as “a big bird,” although Gladwin (1970) reports that Polowat’s “Bird” is Altair rather than Sirius. Farther afield, at the end of the film, “Dead Birds,” the narrator calls attention to the experience of mortality that birds and people share, as well as the critical point of contrast: that people—unlike birds—are aware of their mortality. On Rapanui in eastern Polynesia, the “Birdman (Tangata Manu) Cult” equates birds with prominent human beings—a point further underscored by the Hawaiian chiefs’ feather capes. And, returning to the Santa Cruz region of the southeastern Solomons, scrolls of muahau, so-called red feather money, were essential for acquiring a spouse. This paper will survey the bird motif and its distribution through much of Oceania, and it will suggest directions for further exploration.

The Frigate Bird in Nauruan cultural heritage and beyond

Nancy Pollock (Victoria University of Wellington)

The close interaction between Frigate Birds in Nauruan daily socio-cultural life and the symbolism associated with them has been captured and maintained over the last 100 years, despite the destructive intrusions of phosphate mining. Claims that Nauruan culture has been ‘killed by capitalism’ are belied by the blogs by recent visitors who are puzzled to see these great birds sitting docilely on posts around the shoreline of Nauru, and being fed fish by the men of the tribe that marks them as their own. Nauruans have maintained a cultural heritage in which the frigate bird persists as a strong symbol for this single island, mid-Pacific, yet is considered part of a much wider oceanic world .
I draw on Kayser’s account (1935)of both practice and meanings as a base for underlining the importance of the persistence of the Frigate Bird in Nauruan cultural life, and also in their social life in the early 20th century. Birds are tamed to sit on posts along the shoreline, but after a month fly free to return to those posts each evening. They are cared for by special men designated by the tribe that claims ownership and for whom the birds used to be designated as their brides. The birds ‘are’ the ancestors, and thus an integral part of the island social structure. Gender differences are underlined as the female birds have particular significance for this matrilineal society.
The birds play an even larger part in the socio-cultural life of central Pacific societies and beyond. During the day they soar above the wider Pacific ocean at great heights, and thus it is not surprising that they are also part of the social systems of other societies’ cultural beliefs, but not so well documented as Kayser’s account of Nauruan beliefs and practices. In the paper I address the birds’ well recognized role as guides for navigators seeking land across wide ocean spaces. I also refer to the inclusion of the birds’ movements and their feathers in dance performances so important to neighbouring Kiribati culture. And the incorporation of an image onto the tail of Nauru’s planes, and into Nauru’s coat of arms, as well as into the flags of several of these nations, provide strong indications of the bird’s high cultural significance that persists for these island nations. The symbolism further persists in a wider genre of poems and carvings beyond the central Pacific. Islands of the Frigate Birds (Tarte 2009) warrant greater discussion. The frigate bird reminds us that these Pacific communities see themselves in Hau’ofa’s ‘Sea of Islands’ in many ways.

Pacific Feathers and the “Nature” of the Artefact

Hannah Rose Van Wely

Scholarly ethnographic and art historical interpretations of non-human objects have historically imposed a popular Eurocentric construction which exaggerates the significance of animated beings and simplifies the multi-sensorial experience of indigenous aesthetics. However, a nascent critique against this construction has been peripherally building over the last half-century in regard to Pacific featherwork and feather trade. As striking and culturally significant materials in Polynesia and Melanesia, feathers are objects whose attributes are decreasingly interpreted as purely appropriated bird symbolism. Four case studies highlighting specialized contexts of feather use in Santa Cruz, Tahiti, Hawaii, and Papua New Guinea illustrate the transformational efficacies of these partible substances. Whether perceived as mediators between humans, spirits, birds, and objects or as materials with unique aesthetic properties, Pacific feathers offer a renewed way of considering the synthesis of binary tropes such as nature vs. culture, interiority vs. exteriority, animated vs. inanimate, and human vs. other.

The Life of Birds is the Life of People? Totemism and Naturalism in Aboriginal Australia - a Case Study

John Morton (La Trobe University)

Radcliffe-Brown’s question about moiety totemism - ‘Why all these birds?’ - was employed by Lévi-Strauss’s as a prompt for his conclusion that animals’ ‘perceptible reality permits the embodiment of ideas and relations conceived by speculative thought on the basis of empirical observations’ - that animals are ‘good to think’ (as he more famously put it). Radcliffe-Brown and Lévi-Strauss favoured broad comparative sweeps in their studies, but Philippe Descola has more recently sought to refine their conclusions by narrowly specifying totemism’s terms and relations in order to compare and contrast it with other modes of existence (animism, analogism and naturalism). In particular, Descola insists that totemic collectives bring humans and non-humans together as wholly identical beings, whereas this is not possible in other ontological frames.

In this paper, we partially test Descola’s views through a single case study - the use of gender totems in Aboriginal Gippsland (south-eastern Australia), an area originally occupied exclusively by speakers of Ganai (‘Kurnai’) and related languages. We examine the classical ethnography of the region, principally provided by A. W. Howitt, who describes the gender totems as Djiitgun and Yiirung (the Superb Fairy-wren or Malurus cyaneus and the Southern Emu-wren Stipiturus malachurus respectively), and compare and contrast it with what is known about both contemporary attitudes towards these species in Gippsland and what is said about the birds by biologists operating within a ‘naturalist’ (Darwinian) paradigm. We further assess the degree to which there has been an ontological shift in Gippsland as a result of colonial and postcolonial dynamics, in particular in relation to the manner in which wrens and other creatures might or might not be said to be included in some ethnographically accessible ‘society of nature’.

Melanesian pigs - trying another perspective

Almut Schneider (Goethe University Frankfurt)

The importance of pigs in Papua New Guinea societies and for anthropologists working in Melanesia is notorious and long-established. However, recent interest in human-animal relations stimulate some new questions: how can the relationship, the close attachment between men/women and pigs be described, is it a matter of identification, are pigs ‘companions’, persons, relatives or agents? I propose to look afresh at various ethnographic descriptions from different periods that are concerned with the place of pigs in social life, pigs circulating in ceremonial exchanges, pigs in gardens and forests, and pigs with men and women. What can Melanesian pigs contribute to the discussion about domesticated and companion animals?

Yams and ancestors: the representations of nature, humans and non-humans in Kanak societies (Paicî area, New Caledonia)

Isabelle Leblic (CNRS - Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique)

In Kanak societies, as in numerous non-western societies, the opposition nature / culture is not effective. The idea of "nature" is at the origin of a conception or a particular organization of the world that is the Kanak cosmology composed of humans as well as of non-humans. According to their conceptions of nature, spirits, geniuses and ancestors intervene in every human action. They also intervene more generally in the world, and also consequently in "nature", its use as well as its management. Among these non-human entities, there are many “things” that anthropologists (after Leenhardt) named "totem" and that Paicî people call “things of elsewhere” in opposition to “things of the earth”. All these non-human entities are linked to animals and plants, the most important of which is yam, associated with persons and shell-money.

Giving up naturalism: for an anthropology of ways of being in the world in New Guinea

Florence Brunois-Pasina (LAS/College-de-france)

After a critical analysis of the history of anthropological thought as it was applied in New Guinea for describing and interpreting relationships between people, non-human beings and their environment, the author suggests undoing naturalist ideas and concepts in favour of using a certain ontological relativism for trying to understand the various ways of being in the world in New Guinea.