The Making of Global and Local Modernities in Melanesia

Humiliation, Transformation and the Nature of Cultural Change

Holly Wardlow, Joel Robbins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351886215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Authored by well-established and respected scholars, this work examines the kinds of efforts that have been made to adopt Western modernity in Melanesia and explores the reasons for their varied outcomes. The contributors take the work of Professor Marshall Sahlins as a starting point, assessing his theories of cultural change and of the relationship between cultural intensification and globalizing forces. They acknowledge the importance of Sahlins' ideas, while refining, extending, modifying and critiquing them in light of their own first hand knowledge of Pacific island societies. Also presenting one of Sahlins' less widely available original essays for reference, this book is an exciting contribution to serious anthropological engagement with Papua New Guinea.

Chapter 1

The Economics of Developman in the Pacific¹

Marshall Sahlins

‘Developman.’ I first heard the word on the campus of the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji. At least I thought I heard the word. It was in a conversation between two New Guinea students. One of them inserted the English ‘development’ into a Neo-Melanesian (pidgin) sentence. To me it came out sounding like ‘developman’ – a happy misunderstanding that seems to express truly the initial relation of Pacific island peoples to the encroaching Western economy. The term captures the indigenous way of coping with capitalism, a passing moment that in some places has already lasted more than one hundred years. The first commercial impulse of the local people is not to become just like us, but more like themselves. They do not necessarily despise our commodities. But they are selective in their demands and transformative of their uses of such things. For a long time, or so long as their own relations and ideas of the good life are intact, they use Western goods to furnish these exotic ideas, or even to advance and ‘develop’ them. The object of the islanders is not yet the accumulation of an abstract wealth, the desire for gain optimus maximus that many Western economists have supposed to be primordial. Nor are they yet attacked by the modern disease – recently become a global epidemic – of galloping consumptionitis. That sort of modernity requires a certain kind of individualism: a system in which each person takes the betterment of himself as his life project, thus a society of autonomous individuals preoccupied with private material satisfactions. In contrast, the Pacific peoples, as they are still embedded in relationships of kith and kin, as they are self-consciously social beings, have not yet acknowledged the radical opposition between ‘satisfaction’ and ‘obligation’ by which we rule our lives. Whatever we do for others diminishes our selves; whereas, as a rule in traditional Pacific societies, in doing things for others people constructed themselves.

Referring to ‘pre-capitalist economic formations,’ Marx once praised the sublimity of the ancient conception that made man the objective of production, by contrast to a modern world in which production is the objective of man, and gain the objective of production. Aristotle’s sense of an ‘economy’ whose aim was the welfare of the oikòs and the polis was perhaps the first scholarly treatment of developman economics. Nor is the idea that the economy is socially ordered out of date, however much it seems to us a domain of purely practical wisdom. We only deceive ourselves by this disenchanted consciousness, as if we lived by a purely utilitarian rationality. Not everything in our rationality is rational.

Rationality is the practical wisdom of a cultural order that is based on other principles, the means of a historical mode of existence that as such has no particular claims to material good sense. Our vaunted rationality, what is it but the cunning way we produce all the idiocies of modern life – it is how we acquire rock music, one kind of ‘coke’ or another, VCRs, suburban backyard barbecues, Reeboks, MacDonald’s hamburgers, Walkmans, mink coats, and a lot of other things whose own rationality as ends would be difficult to imagine. The invisible hand of the market economy turns out to be a perverse form of Hegel’s cunning of reason: it is rather a ‘cunning of culture’ which, by using libidinous energies to set a scheme of arbitrary values in motion, harnesses subjective rationality to its own meaningful logic.

So it has been also for many New Guineans. Brought into the orbit of the capitalist World System, this global crusade of economic rationality, they have proven themselves quick studies in commercial cunning – which they use to stage the most extravagant traditional ceremonies anyone could ever remember. More pigs have been eaten and more pearl shells exchanged in these recent shindigs than was ever done in the good old days, not to mention the liberal consumption of such novelties as beer and tinned corned beef. The effect has been more pleasure for the ancestors, which also means greater power and fame for the living. And let the hard-headed development economists or the neocolonial officials complain as they may, this is neither ‘waste’ nor ‘backwardness.’ Precisely, it is development from the perspective of the people concerned: their own culture on a bigger and better scale than they ever had it. As a leader of the Kewa people of the Southern Highlands told the anthropologist: ‘You know what we mean by “development” [in Kewa, ada ma rekato, to raise or awaken the village]: building a “house line” (neada), a men’s house (tapada), killing pigs (gawemena). This we have done.’²

Developman: the enrichment of their own ideas of what mankind is all about.

Objects

Of course, for most Westerners these indigenous ideas are impenetrable, and accordingly the creative uses to which the peoples put even the refuse of the colonial economy must seem to us merely the signs of their indigence. Rena Lederman, an anthropologist from Princeton University, recounts how she and her husband, Michael Merrill, a labor historian, worked through such an experience to a rather different consciousness of the way the Mendi people of the New Guinea Highlands related to our objects.³ Above all the field-workers had to learn – by way of a classic ethnographic epoché – what the Mendi meant by our goods, how they reinvented these things for themselves.

By their apparently impractical and indiscriminate desires for Western things, the Mendi were not simply expressing their own deficiencies. They were not pathetic. At first Mike Merrill thought so. What else could one think of men who had gone all their lives barefoot and are now walking around in rubber galoshes several sizes too large for them? Nor were oversized galoshes the only signs of ‘civilization’ affected by the Mendi in 1977. A torn umbrella, an expensive radio that soon broke down, an aluminum-can arm ornament, a hat made out of a bread wrapper, a Swiss ski parka donned as fancy dress: signs indeed – but of what? This eclectic appropriation of the bits and pieces of Western existence, if it made no functional sense, Merrill decided, must have some other value. Most likely it represented a sense of want and deprivation when confronted by our riches. So at the time Merrill wrote in his journal: ‘One shoe is of no use and in fact is probably a hindrance to walking, especially when its heel is torn out … But one shoe does mean something. It signifies a desire on the part of the owner to have two shoes, and probably not just shoes but everything else as well.’⁴

More than that, one could well foresee that for want of a shoe, the whole culture was lost. Westerners know not only about technology; we also have this certain knowledge of its functional implications, from which it follows that if the Mendi take our material things, they must adopt the whole cultural package. Unable to avoid participating in the meanings and relations of our commodities, they will set themselves on a course of cultural corrosion that must sooner or later rust out their traditional existence. Again from Mike Merrill’s journal:

Articles of Western manufacture have replaced those of local origin … And sooner or later the material will begin to assert its own meaning. For steel axes, textiles, cars, table service, rice and tinned fish, nails, etc., are not neutral objects . They come into the area with their social origins visible and influential . The meanings of the world market must, in the long run, predominate . Eventually the traditional social structure will be eroded by the corrosive action of the articles which are now used in traditional ways, but which contain within them other, more powerful intentions.⁵

But then, if these objects really are signs, a sign is precisely something whose meaning is not contained in its physical presence. The meaning is not self-evident. So we should not be too eager to suppose that the erosive effects of the global economic system come directly from goods in themselves, or even from the relations of their acquisition. There is a whole native world to be undone before such things can be perceived and desired in the capitalist spirit in which they were intended.

As it turned out, the Mendi were gradually able to dissolve the significance that Lederman and Merrill a priori attached to the presence of European objects in the New Guinea Highlands. In two related ways the ethnographers describe how the New Guineans contradicted all preconceptions of their victimization. Or better, they describe two dimensions, as it were subjective and objective, of the process by which the Mendi domesticate their foreign imports: on one hand, by an unassuming assertion of human mastery over anything material; on the other hand, by interpretations and uses of European commodities that were never dreamed of in the philosophy of their production. The Mendi struggled to encompass the capitalist World System in an order that is logically and ontologically even more inclusive: their own system of the world.

There is something distinctive about the relation of nonindustrial people to the domain of the ‘material’ or to ‘nature’: it is generally fearless. Probably because, unlike the Western sense of disenchantment, their world is not simply ‘material.’ Sentient and intelligent, or what we call ‘spiritual,’ nature for them is intelligible and humanly controllable. It is a social and humanized nature. The counterpart in praxis, likewise beyond the experience of most Western people, is the kind of universal confidence and manual competence that Mendi and other so-called underdeveloped peoples show when dealing with a wide variety of material things, whether these be man-made or natural, strange or familiar. They have a ‘hands-on’ attitude, akin to what Veblen called ‘the instinct of workmanship.’ Whereas, when it comes to technology, the instinctive reaction of many Westerners is more like awe. I think I am not speaking merely for myself as a bourgeois intellectual, trained since childhood to be circumspect – and remain ignorant – of machinery of all kinds, when I say that, as technologically sophisticated as Western people are, at least as consumers, a great many are to the same extent alienated from the nature and workings of the objects of their existence. Even in regard to the machinery of everyday life, most of us could not know less – or be more reluctant to take it apart.

Nor do the paradoxes end here, with the manual incompetence of the technologically endowed. There is even greater irony in our sense of intimidation, insofar as it is conditioned by the purely matter-of-fact regard in which we hold ‘things.’ On one hand, they are just that, inanimate material things. On the other hand, as objects to our subjects, at once impenetrable, powerful, and estranged from us, these material things would then act upon us from outside; they constrain us and make us respect them in ways more than reminiscent of a fear of God. Indeed we endow the material with creative Powers. Not content to submit merely on the personal level, we develop this oceanic ideology – which also passes for normal social science – that technology determines us. We even find it plausible that the handmill gave us society with a sovereign and the steam mill, industrial capitalism (Marx). Mills of the gods. In separating themselves from an objective world, Western people constitute external and obdurate Powers before which they must incline. Whereas, by humanizing the powers of the material world, bringing them within the sociable and the knowable, the Mendi (or the Fijians or the Ojibway) are prepared to assert their own mastery. To put it oversimply: we elaborate spiritual relations to the matter-of-fact, while they exercise matter-of-fact relations to the spiritual.⁶

So as time went on, Lederman and Merrill learned to appreciate the Mendi people’s ‘lack of awe at the physical world’ and their ‘ease with its appropriation’ – which also helped explain their nonchalant bricolage of Western flotsam and jetsam. ‘People seem so easily to incorporate Western odds and ends into their everyday lives,’ Lederman reflected, ‘gathering them as casually as they gather bush materials.’ Her field journal continues:

Here most things in the [Mendi] world are generally accessible. People know how to make most of the things they use. How then are Western items, so clearly different in this respect, to be dealt with? Well, as if they were ‘natural,’ of course! … Tolap turns the bread wrapper in his hand for a moment, considering what is to be done with it. The wrapper has no fixed purpose, but may be given one and then shaped to fit it. Is it to be burned or worn?⁷

For the ethnographers, moreover, this hunting and gathering of bread wrappers and umbrella spokes was losing its air of poignancy. It no longer seemed the sign of poverty or unfulfilled desire. Not that it had become familiar, but precisely as it was so strange. There was a logic to the Mendi’s exotic improvisations, which happened to be their own logic. The goods they appropriated were recognizably European, but not the needs and intentions. ‘The Mendi,’ Lederman commented, ‘do not see these objects in the same way we see them: their purposes supplied for us’ (p.8). Rather they could perceive in Western things certain possibilities of human value the manufacturers never envisioned. And the corollary of the people’s practical self-confidence was an intellectual domination: they encompassed our goods in their own meanings, literally in their own scheme of things.

This is a common reaction of peoples the world over to the so-called benefits of so-called civilization. The ethnohistorian of Cree Indians echoes the ethnographer of New Guineans: ‘Most technical innovations adopted by Indians were modified to fit their existing perceptions and social system, and many European goods were employed in Indian culture for purposes other than those for wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – Humiliation and Transformation: Marshall Sahlins and the Study of Cultural Change in Melanesia
• 1 The Economics of Develop-man in the Pacific
• 2 The Humiliations of Sin: Christianity and the Modernization of the Subject among the Urapmin
• 3 Transformations of Desire: Envy and Resentment among the Huli of Papua New Guinea
• 4 ‘We Are Not Straight’: Bumbita Arapesh Strategies for Self-Reflection in the Face of Images of Western Superiority
• 5 Sepik River Selves in a Changing Modernity: From Sahlins to Psychodynamics
• 6 ‘We Are All “Les” Men’: Sorrow and Modernism in Melanesia, or Humor in Paradise
• 7 Moral and Practical Frameworks for the Self in Conditions of Social Change
• 8 The Death of Moka in Post-Colonial Mount Hagen, Highlands, Papua New Guinea
• 9 On the Life and Times of the Ipili Imagination
• 10 On Humiliation and Class in Contemporary Papua New Guinea
• 11 Turning to Violence: Hazarding Intent in Central New Ireland
• 12 Ancestral Vigilance and the Corrective Conscience in Kwaio: Kastom as Culture in a Melanesian Society
• Afterword – Frustrating Modernity in Melanesia
• Index