Melanesian Anthropology Research Articles

Objects as Insights: R. H. Codrington’s ethnographic collections from Melanesia

The Revd Robert Henry Codrington (1830–1922) is best known today as one of the founding fathers of Melanesian anthropology. Having joined the Melanesian Mission in 1865, Codrington served as headmaster of its training college on Norfolk Island from 1867 until his retirement in 1887. From this base, he travelled regularly throughout the region, carrying out his official duties and pursuing (with what Nick Stanley characterizes as a remarkably humanist perspective) groundbreaking linguistic and anthropological research, especially in northern Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. From 1880 he began publishing articles in academic journals, and in 1891 the Clarendon Press issued his The Melanesians: Studies in their anthropology and folklore, which is widely regarded as the first systematic study of its kind. It was standard anthropological practice at the time to study and collect objects alongside, and as part of, information about other aspects of social and cultural life, but it is clear from his publications that Codrington had an especially developed interest in Melanesian art and material culture. As Stanley demonstrates in his very welcome new study, this interest lay behind and was made manifest in the extensive collections that Codrington amassed during his time in the Pacific. To begin with, he attempted to make systematic collections for, first, the Blackmore Museum in Salisbury (not far from the family home in Wroughton), and then for the British Museum. Neither of these attempts was particularly successful, however, as the museums’ curators would not tell him what they wanted or respond to what he had sent them.

Out of the box, onto the web: Digitizing images in the Tuzin Archive for Melanesian Anthropology

How are ethnographic photographs from the twentieth century accessed and represented in the twenty-first century? This report from the Tuzin Archive for Melanesian Anthropology at the University of California San Diego Library provides an overview of the photographic materials, arrangements and types of documentation in the archive, followed by summaries of specific digitization projects of the photographs from physician Sylvester Lambert and anthropologists Roger Keesing and Harold Scheffler, among others. Through the process of digitization and online access, ethnographic photographs are transformed and may be discovered and contextualized in new ways. Utilizing new technologies and forming broad collaborations, these digitization projects incorporate both anthropological and archival practices and also raise ethical questions. This is an in-depth look at what is digitized and how it is described to re/create meaning and context and to bring new life to these images.

Cultural Hybridity in Conversion: An Examination of Hapkas Christology as Resistance and Innovation in Drusilla Modjeska’s The Mountain

Abstract This essay analyzes Christian witness, applying a post-colonial lens to Drusilla Modjeska’s The Mountain to account for conversion and transformation in Papua New Guinea. A hapkas (half-caste) Christology of indigenous agency, communal transformation and hybridity is examined in dialogue with New Testament themes of genealogy, redemption as gift and Jesus as the new Adam. Jesus as “good man true” is placed in critical dialogue with masculine identity tropes in Melanesian anthropology. Jesus as ancestor gift of Canaanite descent is located in relation to scholarship that respects indigenous cultures as Old Testament and post-colonial theologies of revelation which affirm cultural hybridity and indigenous innovation in conversion across cultures. This hapkas Christology demonstrates how a received message of Christian mission is transformed in a crossing of cultures.

Choreographic Objects

Several successful contemporary dance companies in Europe are experimenting with new ways of presenting choreography and movement utilising digital media. Here, an analysis is offered of the context in which these innovations are stimulated, focusing on their efforts to demonstrate that contemporary dance is a ‘knowledge-producing’ endeavour. I tie this to the demands of knowledge economies. I then offer an analysis of specific projects and the ‘choreographic objects’ that result from them utilising exchange theory drawn in part from Melanesian anthropology. The resulting analysis of things-in-the-making and things-in-circulation reveals how choreographic objects are shaped by dance practitioners' views of themselves, their interests, and their desire to control perceptions of their practice as well as by the need to find an appropriate mode in which to demonstrate the value of this practice through the transfer of knowledge. The move towards ‘knowledge production’ and towards recasting relationships with audiences are construed as experiments with the form of social relations through new forms of transaction. I come to re-present the digital creations of dance companies as ‘prototype’ forms for relational engagement with audiences and the wider public.

Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place

[Extract] Stasch introduces this book as an analysis of the ways 'in which Korowai people of West Papua, Indonesia, make qualities of otherness the central focus of their social relations' (1). In detailing the implications of this point, the book emerges as a fine contribution to Melanesian anthropology and proposes a new of way of thinking about social relationships. His emphasis on 'otherness-focused social relating' is explicitly presented as 'an effort to complicate the idea of relational personhood in Melanesianist anthropology' (184), an attempt to transform conventional understanding that positive social relationships, at their kernel, involve pure identity. Instead, he wants us to understand a community where otherness and identity are always co-present and interdependent. Through some excellent, sometimes astounding, ethnography he succeeds in developing these points into a subtle and thoughtful portrait of Korowai sociality.

Beyond polarization and partition in Melanesian anthropology: a comment on Mosko's ‘Partible penitents’

Beyond polarization and partition in Melanesian anthropology: a comment on Mosko's ‘Partible penitents’

Ethnographic parallels and the denial of history

An ever more Pacific-looking past of Britain and other parts of Europe is being constructed by archaeologists. Melanesian anthropology is being continually mined for supposed ethnographic parallels to elucidate the European Neolithic with its ‘Big Man’ societies and ‘dividual’ individuals. Although this Melanesian turn in European archaeology is fuelled by a detailed poring over of the minutiae of Pacific and other Third and Fourth World ethnographies, it manages to ignore totally the results of the archaeology of these ethnography-rich regions. This paper discusses the long-term commentary provided by archaeology on the short-term vision provided by the ethnography of Melanesia. It questions the appropriateness of much of the use of analogy by archaeologists in the face of population declines in much of Melanesia in the recent past by something like 90 per cent of pre-contact figures and in the face of evidence that the classic ‘Big Man’ style of leadership in that region is arguably as modern a creation as the Welfare State, and is a social form possible only under conditions of colonialist pacification.

Social Relations and the Green Critique of Capitalism in Melanesia

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore what a critical environmental perspective would look like in Melanesia, where the distinction between nature and culture, and the expectation that science interprets the former in terms of the latter, may not apply. I consider changes in scientific knowledge production and the shift from cultural ecology to political ecology in Melanesian anthropology, including the argument that Melanesians are neither conservationists nor environmentalists. In contrast, I show how people exposed to pollution from the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea mobilize their understandings of difference in a green critique of capitalism. I examine a strategy session of local activists, a public meeting about their campaign against the mine, and a sorcery tribunal. Finally, I suggest that Melanesian ideas about social relations provide a useful ethnographic analogy for thinking about the mobility and short temporal horizons of contemporary capitalism.

From Invisible Christians to Gothic Theatre: The Romance of the Millennial in Melanesian Anthropology

This paper is a history and textual critique of the anthropology of millennial, pentecostal, and charismatic Christianity in Melanesia located in relation to interpretations of indigenous religiosities worldwide, particularly mainstream Christianity but including cargo cults and millenarianism generally. An important subtext is the correlation between anthropological scholarship and the empirical settings of fieldwork, historicizing ethnographic texts in terms of indigenous actions and desires which subtly helped mould particular representations. Anthropologys major national traditions have been pervasively secular, romantic, and ahistoric. In Melanesia anthropologists essentialized exotic, traditional ritual complexes and mostly elided the less dramatic, mobile religious practices and experiences of the evergrowing majority of Melanesians who appropriated varieties of Christianity to their own ends. Only recently has mainstream Melanesian Christianity become a proper topic for ethnography, often in conjunction with a prolific literature on the politics of tradition. Emblematic of the extent to which anthropologists are shifting Christianity from outside to within Melanesian religiosity is an emergent ethnographic focus on burgeoning pentecostal, charismatic, and millennial Christianity. Such movements may better cater to the disciplines expertise in exotic ritualizing than the seeming mundanity of mainstream Christian practices, but there is also powerful indigenous impetus in anthropologys romance with the millennial.

Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition

List of contributors Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: the embeddedness of property C. M. Hann 2. 'Sharing is not a form of exchange': an analysis of property-sharing in immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies James Woodburn 3. Property as a way of knowing on Evenki lands in Arctic Siberia David G. Anderson 4. Property and social relations in Melanesian anthropology James G. Carrier 5. The mystery of property: inheritance and industrialization in England and Japan Alan MacFarlane 6. An unsettled frontier: property, blood and US federal policy Paula L. Wagoner 7. Property values: ownership, legitimacy and land markets in Northern Cyprus Julie Scott 8. Property and power in Transylvania's decollectivization Katherine Verdery 9. Property rights, regulation and environmental protection: some Anglo-Romanian contrasts William Howarth 10. Dowry and the rights of women to property Jack Goody 11. Divisions of interest and languages of ownership Marilyn Strathern Notes Bibliography Index.

Between Reproduction and Transformation: Ethnography and Modernity in Melanesia

Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift Exchange, and Custom in the Tanga Islands. ROBERT FOSTER. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; xxii + 288 pp. Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia. ROBERT FOSTER, ed. Ann Arbor The University of Michigan Press, 1995; vi + 280 pp. Children of the Blood: Society, Reproduction and Cosmology in New Guinea. BERNARD JUILLERAT. Trans. by Nora Scott. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1996; xxx + 601 pp. The State and Its Enemies in Papua New Guinea. ALEXANDER WANEK. Cornwall: Curzon Press and The Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 1996; xv + 332 pp. It is by now commonplace to remark that theoretical positions within anthropology are often tied to specific ethnographic regions (Appadurai 1986, 1988; Fardon 1990). Less often considered is the question of what conditions must obtain in order for the theory attached to a particular region to appear important to those working elsewhere. Why do local traditions of anthropological work sometimes seem widely applicable? Why did African lineages become the model of social structure, for example, or South and Southeast Asia the places where so much of the initial theorization of issues of colonial domination and resistance was set? I will not propose here a model for the process by which local theoretical traditions take on a gloss that renders them of wider interest. I suspect that regional ethnographic traditions sometimes simply get lucky. The concerns of the discipline at large (often determined by things going on at home) play off of conspicuous features of local societies and then those societies come to serve as privileged cases for testing the theories that grow up around those concerns. Melanesian ethnography has often benefited from this sort of benign bestowal of interest. Initially, this was so because it dealt with small, late-contacted societies of the kind that anthropologists used to treasure as living laboratories or simply as places in which to document the diversity of human arrangements. Then, when symbolism was a matter of foremost concern, the elaborate ritual life and mythical traditions of the region kept it in the forefront of the discipline. Finally, and most recently, in the 1970s and 1980s, when much anthropological interest was directed at questions of gender, the salience of gender distinctions for Melanesians gave their ethnographers the resources with which to play an important role in the ensuing debates. Despite this history of centrality, however, during the 1990s the discipline has not reached out to Melanesianist work as it once did (Knauft n.d.; cf. M. Strathern 1990). This is because the concerns of anthropologists have recently turned from documenting and interpreting differences between cultures to exploring how differences within and between cultures are concatenated and managed through practices that are broadly political in character. This shift in anthropological thinking, really quite epochal when cast in the perhaps exaggerated terms I use above, has left Melanesian anthropology somewhat out in the cold. To begin with, Melanesians have never gone in for creating stable identities for themselves-arguably, they do not think in terms of them. This is a theme that runs through Melanesianist anthropology all the way from the somewhat misconceived but nonetheless telling loose structure debates of the 1960s up through M. Strathern's The gender of the gift (1988). Engaged with the topic of gender, that book was the last Melanesianist work to succeed in gaining attention as a piece of general anthropology. But it was also widely held to be extraordinarily difficult. This is at least in part because it raises fundamental questions about the notions of identity that underlie so much of the contemporary anthropology of the creation and management of difference. Strathern's critique of the fit between Western notions of identity and the models of power and domination they underwrite, on the one hand, and Melanesian ideas, on the other, is widely considered important in Melanesianist circles. …

Why We Return to Papua New Guinea

In this article we reflect upon the continued significance of ethnography to anthropology. To do so, we consider what of importance has compelled us to return frequently to Papua New Guinea. Focusing primarily on a confrontation between a Chambri big man and a Chambri evangelical woman, we establish what we think remains (rather) unique about contemporary Papua New Guinea (and perhaps about Melanesia more generally). Our analysis shows Papua New Guinea as a place where the global intersects the local in axiomatically condensed form. Within the lifetimes of most adults, colonialism, missionization, military occupation, independence, development, transnational capitalism, and charismatic Christianity have all provided contexts in which a diversity of local peoples, responding to the extensive transformation of their lives, have generated a range of desires and an active sense of the possibility of enacting those desires. Our analysis reveals, thus, a preoccupation with local agency that demonstrates with instructive immediacy the contingency and variability characteristic of the local instantiation and shaping of global processes. [ethnography, Papua New Guinea, globalization, gender, culture areas] During various public presentations over the past few years we have often been asked troubling questions which focus on whither Papua New Guinea? (or, more generally, whither Melanesia?) in contemporary anthropology. Thus, at one university, after discussing hybridity, imagined communities, and transnational capitalism in Papua New Guinea-in other words, topics we thought would grab an audience of contemporary academics-an anthropologist (a non-Melanesianist) inquired critically to this effect: Although Papua New Guinea has brought us much of importance in anthropology concerning, for example, leadership and economic exchange-from models of egalitarian and stratified redistribution to critiques of formalist economics-the anthropology you're describing could be happening anywhere. What's coming out of Papua New Guinea that's especially instructive? Given the prevalence with which we have heard such responses suggesting Papua New Guinea's contemporary peripherality-or, at least, noncentrality-to the discipline (along with scuttle-butt that Melanesia is, for purposes of employment, no longer a trendy culture area), we were not surprised when the editors of the major book series devoted to ethnography convened a session at the 1995 meetings of the American Anthropological Association entitled, Globalization and the Future of `Culture Areas': Anthropology in Transition. The session abstract asked, among other things: In what contexts does the construct of a Melanesian anthropology become irrelevant or even downright debilitating? Conversely, if the contemporary anthropology of Melanesia has something distinctive, or even critical, to offer-such that scholars working elsewhere might benefit from engaging with it-what might that contribution be? This article is our effort to wrestle with these questions. As should be obvious from the frame we have already established, the answer we will try to provide concerning whither Papua New Guinea?that part of Melanesia we know best-in contemporary anthropology is not the one we would have given when we began our anthropological careers in the late 1960s (for Fred) and early 1970s (for Deborah). We have elsewhere described these early years as a time when Papua New Guinea's important place in the discipline was as the pristine, the untouched and the remote (Gewertz and Errington 1991: 14-15). For us, as for other anthropologists, Papua New Guinea was still the unknown. Before going into the field, we read books such as Patrol into yesterday (McCarthy 1963) and New Guinea: The last unknown (Souter 1963). And if we were not to be the first Europeans to discover a people, we would, we thought, be at least the first actually to live among them. …

Introduction: Fracturing Boundaries of Time and Place in Melanesian Anthropology

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

History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology. JAMES G. CARRIER, ed

<i>History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology</i>. JAMES G. CARRIER, ed

History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology

Melanesian societies, like village societies in many parts of the world, are frequently portrayed as existing in a timeless, traditional present. These seven original essays offer an alternative view, one showing that historical evidence can and must inform our understanding of contemporary cultures. This collection brings together anthropologists and historians who maintain that the timeless-traditionalism approach of anthropology is inadequate. Life in the existing societies of Melanesia cannot be understood, they say, without examining how these societies are shaped by Western influences. The historical perspective that acknowledges ongoing political, economic, and social change results in less stereotypical descriptions of these traditional cultures. Historians an anthropologists of Melanesia and the Pacific will find here original and enlightening work that is sure to influence the theoretical orientation of Melanesian anthropology.

History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology

History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology

History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology

History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology

Regional Studies in Anthropology: A Melanesian Prospectus

Previous articleNext article No AccessReportsRegional Studies in Anthropology: A Melanesian ProspectusJohn TerrellJohn Terrell Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 34, Number 2Apr., 1993 Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/204157 Views: 6Total views on this site Citations: 5Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1993 The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological ResearchPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:John Edward Terrell, Kevin O. Pope, James R. Goff Chapter 3: Context and Relevance, Fieldiana Anthropology 42 (May 2011): 21–28.https://doi.org/10.3158/0071-4739-42.1.21John Edward Terrell Human biogeography: evidence of our place in nature, Journal of Biogeography 33, no.1212 (Dec 2006): 2088–2098.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2699.2006.01581.xRichard Eves The play of powers made visible: magic and dance in New Ireland, Ethnos 69, no.33 (Sep 2004): 341–362.https://doi.org/10.1080/0014184042000260026John Edward Terrell, Pamela J. Stewart The paradox of human population genetics at the end of the twentieth century, Reviews in Anthropology 25, no.11 (Jun 1996): 13–33.https://doi.org/10.1080/00988157.1996.9978138Bronwen Douglas Introduction: Fracturing Boundaries of Time and Place in Melanesian Anthropology, Oceania 66, no.33 (Feb 2015): 177–188.https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1834-4461.1996.tb02550.x