The Guru and the Conjurer: Transactions in Knowledge and the Shaping of Culture in Southeast Asia and Melanesia

Abstract

Differences between traditions of knowledge are illuminated by comparing the transactions in knowledge by which they are reproduced. Whereas the adept in Melanesia initiates novices, the Guru of the great Asian traditions teaches disciples. The initiator is constrained by Melanesian ideas of loss entailed in downward conversions of value, whereas the Guru obtains merit from giving supremely valued enlightenment for modest material returns. Finally, the initiator manipulates iconic knowledge in a regimen of secrecy, whilst the Guru must verbalize his knowledge, and enhance its mass so as not to lose status by running out of maternals. These contrastive binds and pressures generate deep differences in the form, scale and distribution of knowledge in Southeast Asia and Melanesia, with profound historic effects on their cultures, even where similar substantive ideas are embraced. I In his Huxley Memorial Lecture of thirty years ago, Firth (1959) rightly observed that Thomas Henry Huxley is primarily famed for his work as a zoologist, rather than as an anthropologist. Yet in terms of a broader tradition of scholarship I would urge that he provides contemporary social anthropology with an ideal and a challenge. Huxley's genius lay in his willingness to abandon an established framework ofimmobile, ordered knowledge for the tentative and incomplete, but dynamic, paradigm offered by Darwin. But having embraced its vision mainly on the basis of intuition, he proceeded to apply rigorous scholarship and creative imagination to the task of re-casting received biological wisdom in its new and unproven terms. It would be a fitting tribute to him today if we could take a small step in the same direction for our conception of cultural and social phenomena. I shall try to do so through the comparison of two great ethnographic regions Southeast Asia and Melanesia. Let me begin very concretely with materials from two areas, in northern Bali and in Inner New Guinea, based on fieldwork in each area, and then build up my analysis from the insights these materials may provide. I came to Bali after New Guinea, and readily saw the contrast we have been taught to expect: from the neolithic jungles of New Guinea I had arrived in a literate, great civilization, with plough and cereal agriculture, markets, temples, and courts. Clearly, Bali lies at the eastern end of Kroeber's great Oikumene of Old World Civilizations. A kind of cultural Wallace Line separates it to the East from the nearby, and physically in many ways similar, regions of Melanesia.