European Society for Oceanists 2015 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

Muddled models - revisiting Oceania’s classic texts

Coordinator(s)

Susanne Kuehling

Session presentation

The session invites papers that revisit a classic theme, model, narrative, or generally held assumption, by Europeans about Pacific Islanders. Oceania has profoundly inspired scholars to construct models about humanity. Across the disciplines and especially within Anthropology, Oceania’s variety and unexpected patterns have always been challenging to unfold. Perhaps it is time to pay respect to our academic ancestors by creating a collection of classical themes, especially as this year marks the centennial of Malinowski’s arrival in the Trobriand Islands.

This session proposes a critical engagement with anthropology’s models based on Pacific Island societies. Since Silverman’s work on kinship on Banaba island, and as fieldworking researchers, many of us have found that classical models are perhaps too rigid, stereotypical, or not adequate for the realities on the ground. It seems timely to revisit some of the ‘classic’ cases, amending theoretical stances or testing them on newer data. Rather than a Freeman-like critique, we would like to explore how our models hold in the light of more recent changes. What about Samoan teenagers, “Sambia” substance ideologies, big men, Oedipus, Lapita pottery, Moka, kula, sawai, navigation, kinship, mana, gender relations (and the list goes on), in the light of mobile phones, social media, global politics and economics, with rising sea levels and radioactive pollution? How do the models match up with today’s world?

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

Kula exchange: a model worth muddling

Susanne Kuehling (University of Regina)

This paper is about kula exchange in Southeastern Papua New Guinea, famous for its ‘clockwise/anticlockwise’ motion of valuables. Kula has become a textbook example for gift exchange and delayed reciprocity. This paper argues that academia has invented kula as an isolated, archaic, swiftly operating practice. By focusing on its mechanic principles and by postulating homo economicus as driven solely by rational choice (aiming for fame), the academic kula model is too sterile.

“Challenging the model of alienable and inalienable possessions.”

Hoem Ingjerd (University of Oslo)

This paper argues that our common model of alienable and inalienable possession (Weiner 1992) orients us to see value as inherent in the object and as intimately tied to certain forms of exchange. If we instead focus more broadly: on qualities of action whereby different kinds of value is created, transformed and dispersed, we are better equipped to understand economic behavior in general. On applying the model of alienable/inalienable wealth to Polynesia, qualitatively different distinctions between kinds of things; kinds of actions (forms of control); and kinds of relationships are too easily conflated. Opening up this model allows us to see more nuances of what Appadurai (1986) has described early on as the social life of things.
In the atoll society of Tokelau, we find commodities that may turn into valued possessions through being used as gifts; consumption employed as ways of creating wealth; inalienable objects that find their way onto the market etc. – All these are examples of economic behavior found elsewhere in the world. The locally significant distinction into kinds of action: into things that are possible to control and things that are not controllable, has its origin in parts of the Pacific however, and we are well rewarded by lending this model our full ethnographic attention.

“Great men” and modernity: revisiting the Baruya of Papua New Guinea

Anne-Sylvie Malbrancke (EHESS - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)

The Baruya of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea became famous in anthropology for “Great Men” model that Godelier forged (1986), enriching previous paradigms (Sahlins 1963). The Great man has already created much debate and discussion (see Godelier and Strathern 1991), but little has been said about its relationship to Western-like, capitalist modernity. Ben Finney (1973) argued that the “Big men” were entrepreneurs in the making, whose culture suited the new glove of colonial modernity. What about the Great men in this new reality? The Baruya remain virtually “off the grid”, with hardly any Digicel coverage and no internet, but they are now part of a state that imposes its rules on them via the electoral system, the action of magistrates and village courts, and through local schools in English. Some Baruya also engage in the international market economy by selling coffee and migrating to town or coastal plantations for wage labour. The impact of churches has led to a decrease in the importance and role of initiations. Who are the Great men today? Have the Great men just disappeared? Does it even make sense to use those terms? How do the Baruya relate to this way of presenting their society? Maybe the process is not so much that of a “bigmanization” of Baruya society (Liep 1991: 46-47) as it is a “de-greatmanization” of society (Bolyanatz 2000: 122)? But one has to wonder whether such models blur reality, and are potentially at odds with what is observed on the field.

Tok Piksa vs. Photographs: From Clarity to "Muddle"

Allison Jablonko

In 2014 I returned to the Simbai Valley in Papua New Guinea where I had done my first fieldwork in 1963. My initial trip was fueled by Margaret Mead's enthusiasm for visual documentation, and my return fifty years later was the recognition of my obligation to put into the hands of the subjects of the photographs copies which they would be able to use in their own way. My daughter and granddaughter accompanied me. We had no idea whether anyone I had known in the area would still be alive to meet us or to receive the photographs. Inspired by Bateson and Mead's careful analytic work, I hoped that my images would allow me to move forward to gain an understanding of the Maring people now. The intense personal encounters which actually ensued with the people who did remember me, or had heard of my earlier visit, highlighted the reality of the conference statement: “Pacific Islanders increasingly demand to define priorities in their connections with Europe from their own perspective." The Maring presented demands in behavioral and material forms far more forceful than pictures on exhibit or talk alone. Thus, though in inspiration based on the beautifully articulated textual-visual presentations of Mead and Bateson, the return of the photographs, which I had rather too innocently conceived of as a simple act of reciprocity, brought me face-to-face with multiple differing perspectives on a situation which, in its current complexity, could well be called "muddled."

Muddling models in the maneaba: Social differentiation and Undifferentiation in a Southern Kiribati meetinghouse

Petra Maria Autio (University of Helsinki)

In the Kiribati (formerly Gilbertese) society, the meetinghouse or maneaba, comprised of clans and their sitting places is a central institution. The classic model of the maneaba and the clans (boti/iinaki) comprising it, provided by H.E. Maude developing on A. Grimble's work, is one of increasing social differentiation from an apical ancestor. Later this model, which at the same time is a model of Kiribati kinship, has been critically qualified by others, such as H. Lundsgaarde, M. Silverman and W. Geddes. On a more general level of Pacific anthropological models, the ideal form of the boti/iinaki organisation resembles that of the conical clan. These models, however, are in a seeming contradiction with another persistent narrative of the maneaba as a relatively egalitarian organisation, of senior men participating in decision-making on an equal footing, and an absence of chiefs, especially in the Southern Gilberts Islands.
In this paper I will discuss the classic models of the Kiribati meetinghouse with reference to my research on the maneaba organisation in Tabiteuea, southern Kiribati. By analysing meetinghouse practices and narratives, I introduce the concept of 'undifferentiation' to describe the ways in which the differentiated, classic meetinghouse structure is transformed. Yet I will suggest that this process, and the resulting decentralised structure, is predicated on the differentiation, implied in the classic models. The paper is based on my PhD research, using fieldwork data from 1999-2000, and here I aim to engage in discussion both the classic models of the Kiribati meetinghouse as well as the more general model of the conical clan. Instead of asking whether there might be conical clans in Kiribati, I hope to critically reflect on the usefulness of the model(s) in understanding Southern Kiribati society.

Muddled models of kinship: Flexibility and double descent on the Epoon Atoll, Marshall Islands

Ola Gunhildrud Berta (University of Oslo)

The Marshallese typically refer to themselves as matrilineal, thereby echoing a long line of anthropological work in the Marshalls. Anthropologists writing in the former part of the 1900s relied a great deal on rigid kinship systems and classificatory terms, thus missing some of the flexibility and complexities that often characterize everyday life. The anthropological literature from the Marshalls have had a tendency to continue this tradition by emphasizing matrilineal connections. However, I wish to challenge the idea of unalterable membership of the matrilineage (Kiste and Rynkiewich 1976, 213), that the matrilineage necessarily supersedes patrilineal affiliations (Walsh 2003, 122), or that the Marshallese are solely matrilineal by descent (Spoehr 1949, 155). Based on fieldwork from the Epoon Atoll in the southern Marshall Islands, I propose that this structured cosmos does not fit the empirical chaos I experienced. Instead, I argue that the high level of flexibility regarding kin relations and land inheritance is more in line with double descent than pure matrilineality. In any case, it’s muddled.

"This is paper for the people of Papua. It is not for the white men“: Francis Edgar Williams and The Papuan Villager

Martin Soukup (Charles University)

The objective of the presentation is to provide results of the analysis of Francis Edgar Williams’s activities and views as a government anthropologist in Territory of Papua during the period of 1928–1943. A special attention is devoted to the journal of The Papuan Villager. FA Williams was the journal’s founder and editor in chief for all his career in the Papuan services. The author builds upon the analysis of content of the first volume of The Papuan Villager, which is assessed in the context of both FA Williams’s professional anthropological writings and ideas of administration of Territory of Papua. Williams had to combine some mutually incompatible responsibilities and views during his professional lifetime. As an anthropologist he carefully recorded ethnographic data, as an official he had to promote the ideas of his administration. The Papuan Villager holds an imprint of this two basically incompatible responsibilities and activities. Williams also provided comprehensive criticism of functionalism, which he conceived to be inadequate in regard to the nature of culture. However, functionalism was also principally incompatible with the mission of the administration. The author argues that Williams’s opinions on directed cultural changes, functionalism and education of the natives, as are expressed in an essays The Blending of Cultures and Creed of a Government Anthropologist, are already contained in a basic form in the first volume of The Papuan Villager.