Narrative, Memory, and the Self in Southwestern New Britain

Abstract

In philosophy and classics, in literary criticism, in history, and in anthropology, particular narrative styles have been thought to reveal different concepts of self. Autobiographical narrative understood as a "recovery of lost time"—as a retrospective joining of the past incidents of a life in order to assign life a patterned or thematic meaning—has seemed an expressive form particularly suited to convey a unitary notion of the self. Both autobiography and the unitary concept of self have been viewed as consummately Western culture forms. This essay questions classifications that posit a vast divide between the nature of Western and non‐Western concepts of self, and thus between the character of Western and non‐Western life stories. As it shows how New Britainers use different narrative forms to come to terms with different types of experience, it reveals how the manifold structures of the Melanesian self are continually rearticulated in discourse. The essay is primarily about the phenomenology of memory in Melanesia; it is about the constitutive role that memory plays in the establishment of identity.