SYMMETRICAL SCHIZMOGENESIS REVISITED?

Abstract

I too have become critical of aspects of Sepik River Societies (SRS) during the ten years since I completed the manuscript. My criticism, though, is significantly different from Bowden's. Interestingly, many of the differences between our appraisals of SRS seem anticipated in my Oceania (1985) review of his book, Yena. I criticized him for providing detail without apparent purpose and for ignoring a politically informed critique of the nature-culture dichotomy (MacCormack and Strathern 1981) central to his argument. For my part, I now fault SRS for its less than explicit theory about the nature and effects of political hegemony. For his part, Bowden faults the book for its accuracy of specific detail or explication; he does not address more important issues about the interpretation of data, such as considering what of consequence might be said about political processes. Generalizations are, of course, ultimately based on particulars, yet the opposite is also true. Particulars take their meaning from the processes in which they figure. As I presently see it, the primary importance of SRS was to demonstrate that regional systems, like a world system, may be predicated upon power asymmetries. Although these may not lead to empire, or even to systems of stratified redistribution, they do give a cast an historical directionality to the system. In other words, the interests and characteristics of some within regional systems may have disproportionate effects on those of others. I did not make these points clearly enough and would write SRS differently today. In so doing, I would incorporate ten years of my subsequent work on indigenous theories of power and value and recent discussions about the nature of inequalities in ostensibly egalitarian systems. (See, for two Pacific examples, Carrier and Carrier 1989, and Harrison 1990. See Gewertz and Errington 1991, for a partial corrective in these regards to SRS.) To further my understanding of these regional politics, I would, as well, be grateful for new insights and information. But, from Bowden' s critique, I learn little that would help me revise or reformulate my comprehension of regional patterns of the Middle Sepik. (If humor is to be found in such matters, consider the regional pattern that apparently destines the work of Chambri's female ethnographers to challenge by antipodean male positivists, more comfortable in addressing specifics than in generating alternative explanations of pattern and process.) Bowden' s major discussion of SRS concerns the first of the initial five chapters in which I provide a processual not, as claimed, an evolutionary model of pre-contact regional interaction. This chapter is explicitly the most speculative, based as I say primarily ' upon the published and unpublished data of others to supplement my own observations made during the four weeks I visited among the Iatmul and the Sawos' (p.18). Because the information available to me was limited, I am careful to state in the Introduction: 'The deductions I base upon these data must be taken as approximate, to be judged exclusively by Occam's razor, as the simplest possible explanation of changing relationships through time' (p.15). However, I must stress that these deductions about historical processes are based on detailed knowledge and exposition of the way that at least part of the system worked, that in which the Chambri figured directly. It is this core of knowledge about the Chambri, described