Introduction: Fracturing Boundaries of Time and Place in Melanesian Anthropology

Abstract

The notion of knowledge as discourse contrived, political and constitutive of realities can destabilise disciplinary definition, consensus and authority. It denaturalised historians' comfortable certainties about the ontological reality of the past, the transparency of primary sources and the objectivity of their own enterprise (Barthes 1970; White 1978, 1987). It exposed anthropology to obloquy as an intellectual arm of Western colonialism and neocolonialism and condemned its practitioners to ponder the vertiginous prospects of a discipline at once embedded in history and no longer able to avoid the imperative to do history.1 It also helped transform the margins between the disciplines from despised badlands inhabited by weirdo misfits and renegades into a liberating and exhilarating liminal zone, Victor Turner's 'fructile chaos, a storehouse of possibilities, not a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and structures' (1986:42). I have long trodden those once lonely spaces, and now enjoy being a trendy rather than a loony. For all this synergy, the disciplines of History and Anthropology are not dead, pessimistic postmodern homogenisation/fragmentation and Cultural Studies notwithstanding; nor ought they to be, so long as 'discipline' means control of self rather than others, and leaves space to explore and celebrate various ways of looking at and doing things. Generally speaking, historians and anthropologists have different temporal foci, dramatised in anthropologists' experiential anchorage in the compelling fieldwork present: grubbing away in archives is present enough and has its attractions, but it's scarcely ethnographic in the sense of direct encounters with real people. The tyranny of outcomes,2 the urge to reinvent the past as cause of a later present, teleologically designated as effect, and to telescope backwards in time later outcomes perceived as inevitable, may be a widespread human propensity and is intrinsic to all Whig varieties of history;3 it must be particularly poignant and seductive for an historically-minded ethnographer, determined to resist the discipline's fading impulse to essentialise the primitive as timeless exotics, yet steeped in the emotions and immediacy of present indigenous constructions of the past (their histories, partial, like all histories) and of an ethnographic present which it is her or his purpose to explain. Ethnographic historians seek the best of both disciplinary worlds: to subvert the tyranny of outcomes by directing their gaze to contemporary textual traces of past actions, and to construe those