Hahalis and the Labour of Love

A Social Movement on Buka Island

Max Rimoldi, Eleanor Rimoldi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367716899
• eBook ISBN: 9781000323139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book studies the Hahalis Welfare Society, a Bougainville movement which worked for many years to maintain and reform traditional practices and to retain a degree of autonomy in a world of rapid political change and economic dependency. The first extended ethnography of Buka published in nearly sixty years, this book will be of particular interest to Melanesian specialists.

Introduction

The history presented here does not necessarily represent the views of all the Buka to whom we acknowledge our debt in the preface. It is partial in that by no means all Buka would subscribe to the reading of the past of a few generations of a few families or villages on which our account is based. The partiality matches to some degree the significance of the mediation of interpersonal relationships in the legitimation of authority, which nevertheless takes on forms which are generally accepted on Buka and modified to address increasingly broad areas of change. The continuity over a number of years which we have been able to witness is one which set one movement apart from others.

We are less diffident about appearing to have taken on ourselves the task of representing culture for Buka people when we respond to the diverse accounts which present either the loss of culture as the impulse to social protest or the replacement of culture as the accomplishment of colonialism or so-called 'culture contact'. We must dwell for a while on the strength of attachment to local values and personal moralities which motivated people of the Welfare and other Buka and provided a working basis for their struggle for autonomy. Indeed, we find ourselves emphasising, for one thing, the dominant and general culture of Buka as a source of movement. We doubt the relevance of suggestions, made in analyses of movements said to resemble those on Buka, that marginality is the source of charismatic authority; or that education and experience beyond the horizon of custom are the means of achieving mobilisation bypassing dated traditional legitimacy.

The summary position we propose in introducing our account is that the only meaningful relation between the two terms, subculture and culture, is the practice that creates it; action which establishes the relationship between the two in situations of uncertain relative power which require power to give meaning to that relationship. Any conceptualisation of relationship between cultural part (source of resistance) and cultural whole (object of resistance) remains a version of idealism, because the connection can only hold as one between alternatives opposed in logic until the relationship moves beyond the cultural juxtaposition, to resistance in the form of practice.

In the chapters that follow, reforms of tradition become identified with the expression of tradition, and we establish as a theme the way in which power is constantly evoked and exercised in the act of changing tradition. This requires us to ignore any distinction between changes effected within culture and changes of culture. The analysis presented in our text follows the people we talked to in emphasising division, in its varying political forms, as a primary vehicle of meaning. To that extent we remove any marked threshold leading from movement to culture and back again, without doing violence to reality. For that reason the coherence and continuity of both culture and movement now need to be addressed in the same theoretical terms.

In tentative comparison of recent movements and earlier ones, the possibility might appear to exist of singling out striking similarities in practices adopted by innovative leaders at different places and times, drawing on cultural elements apparently common to Buka. Had we pursued this possibility, we might have rested content with a task of revealing essential uniformities of culture underlying apparent historical contingencies. This might even have been compatible, in a limited sense, with our emphasis on how often the Buka seem to give realistic attention to contradictions entailed in the exercise of political power. Once it had become apparent that analytic distinctions between social movement and cultural practice were impossible to sustain, it might have been possible to emerge with a presentation of reformative programmes, in some ways parallel, as instances of a standing cultural solution in search of a problem.

But, rather than laying claim to subsumptive generalisations about culture, our intent has been on the contrary to suggest the necessity of cultural practices called for by specific historical circumstances, to highlight their adequacy to the particular occasions that call them into being and their reproduction in the dynamics of very particular personal relationships. This made more sense to the Buka than the classificatory exercises that we sometimes offered to them for comment. We do go on in our discussion to suggest that there was a continuous process of abstraction of the concept of power associated with Buka clubhouses and that this was an important process of generalisation. But it is an abstraction that takes place in social practice and had specific material consequences, again taken into account. It was not a demonstration of the effective power of culture, as an already complete subject, to provide for history.

In so far as we present an account of culture, this is not something that we would see standing apart from its contextual practice by historical agents with specific understandings shared (at some points only) with contemporaries and with their own ancestors. We intend to convey a sense, a significant sense, in which culture can be usefully seen as the assertion, for the time and place of a given context, of a relationship between meaningful elements. In this view neither context-dependent meaning nor the manner of the assertion would stand outside the cultural, as the instrumental or contingent process of rearrangement of cultural elements. This would involve a dualism of the sort in which Appadurai (1981) becomes enmeshed in making a further distinction between a superordinate normative structure and the process of negotiation of meaning, which is then not arbitrary - outside the cultural - but directed by rules of contestation. In arguing that it is an empirical task to determine the presence or absence of norms about the debatability of history, he concludes that it would be these norms which provide the means of linking concepts and social action.

Appadurai locates cultural reflexivity in a higher order of tradition, apparently a meta-language, which prescribes the form of renegotiation of cultural meanings. This, if present, is the code which provides the means by which societies can talk about, and not just within, themselves; it guides the cultural structuration of history and thereby also provides the rules for meaningful continuity underlying social change. The normative organisation of discourse about the past, indeed, is claimed to be both the mechanism and the agent of social change. This leads to a conclusion which differs from ours, for the continuity stipulated is an ideational convergence abstracted from variable circumstances. In our account historical practices direct and sustain any convergence of shared meanings exactly in so far as contradictions are identified by the Buka as problems for them to overcome.

An over-exclusive focus on the continuity of successive movements would suggest a coherent tradition of protest, revealed when a thematic concern for change is identified as the one intention in the minds of successive generations of Buka. To subsume varied instances under a general culture of resistance, nativistic or otherwise, also tends to assume a developing response to an imagined continuity of colonial policy. And it thus tends to present the prospective outcome as progressive integration of perspectives; the denial of meaningful conflicts and disagreements as a persisting legacy and the denial of division of community as the outcome of resistance seem to us implicit in attempts to construct the coherence of movement in cultural terms rather than in terms of practices where agents more or less successfully address contradictions with which their past has presented them in terms of greater or lesser clarity. Conflicts rooted in the past are themselves the instruments with which culture is constructed. To recognise this seems to require the abandonment of attempts to distinguish and relate changes within culture and changes of culture. And indeed, it requires us to acknowledge that the conceptual distinctions between institution and movement are all too often a theoretical burden on reality.

Wagner identifies a creative invention of culture evidenced in Melanesien cultic movements, including those concerned with cargo, and equates it with interpretative innovation. In arguing that what is involved is essentially intersubjective collaboration, he reduces movement to discourse and locates this 'midway between subject and event' (1979: 141), the historical object of knowledge, as distinct from the text, now apparently supplanted from its place in the dynamic of change. Legitimacy itself is made to be contingent upon the openness of culture to transformation and upon that alone. Power comes to depend on meaning and continuity of change parallels the lack of dialectic with material process. Lawrence's equally mentalist account of cargo cult (1964) also has the result of displacing the changing material context from any central role in movement formation by virtue of his drawing emergent events back into the local epistemological framework characterised by stability and coherence.

When historical context is only the object of contemplation, the movement is drawn into a cultural stasis consistent with internal epistemological differentiation. In such an account of situational logic, action is dispersed into thought - 'cargo-thinking'. This, in part, is Lawrence's legacy to the discourse in which cargo cults are commonly identified and come to national attention: Swatridge, a commentator on Hahalis among many other things, asserts in the context of discussion of Papua New Guinea attitudes to education that 'European interpretation of the [cargo] cults agree that they rooted [sic] in the deep need of the native peoples to explain, to their own satisfaction, how it was that that the white men had so much and were so powerful, and how they themselves had so little and were so weak' (1985: 13). The logical extension of the idea in anthropological culture seems to us to be the successor model of Jarvie's (1964) logic of the situation, where the cargo movement is dispersed into the universal logic guiding intellectual readjustment to the context presenting itself, the age-old closure of traditional society to change.

The interpretation of these theories of movement presented here suggests that they would locate the impetus to change as above determinate historical processes, external to them and presiding over them. The same can be said of a position that appears to contrast with these theories, but is complementary in that it reinforces the idea that the coherence of culture (discursive or static in its categories) is at issue when we seek to identify the generating conditions of movement. We refer to the long tradition, embracing cargo cult theory as a part, identifiable as breakdown theory, following Charles Tilly and here attending more specifically to culture (see La Barre 1970 for a strong 'pathology' interpretation). The argument that culture, once whole and the author of authentic action, no longer has sense or relevance in situations of disorientating change, such as post-contact Melanesia, would have us direct attention to the absence or systematic irrelevance of culture as the impulse to redress, or compensate, through protest. But the attention is misplaced on to the coherence of culture as external to the action that it is said to suggest.

Cochrane summarises the conclusions of a range of ethnographies of Melanesian cargo cults: the societies 'affected by cult activity in this study suffered from anomie, the breaking down of social ties, and a gradual growth in disintegrative tendencies. Melanesian political activity is the antithesis of anomie: it provides and depends on a "big man", in effect a mechanism for enforcing group solidarity' (1970:151). Traditional political practice, he suggests, is no longer able to effect this cohesion, but the concepts are said to remain the same as a source of compensatory activity: where the means of attaining political ideals in practice are no longer efficacious, it seems, the dependent Melanesians need the recognition of those ideals by the powerful colonisers, and this is the goal of social movement. Because the degree of European contact is believed to be proportional to the incidence of cultic activity, in discussing the Solomons he says: 'movements did not break out on Bougainville where there had been little contact between the Melanesians and the Europeans' (1970:161) - a manifest distortion of the evidence and an inadequate model for explanation of the movements that did appear there; but Cochrane's faithfulness to his theoretical sources in breakdown interpretations is clear.

His analysis of specific movements and his awareness of their political significance do not approach those of Keesing. But we feel that the door to interpretations of culture and political practice such as Cochrane's is left open if we give too much weight to Keesing's generalisation that it is the separation of colonised peoples from political power, their experience of being peripheral, that provides the conditions for their reflexivity about culture. It is this, he believes, that is related to the Melanesiane' extemalisation of culture as an object of their revaluation and it is this that is of special anthropological interest (Keesing 1982: 298).

A revision of this view, mindful though it is of domination, is required if we are correct in our analysis of Buka; for we must then consider that on the contrary it is the convergence of practice and the political contemplation of practice that would define a capacity for reflectiveness, the creative potential that Keesing identifies. It is the existence of an assertive practice that is in itself critical and recognises the contradictions of its own power, not its absence, that makes the question of contemporary Melanesian culture most interesting. Otherwise the distancing of power requires us to follow Keesing in suggesting analysis of re-formulated custom as a symbol of a symbol and then to attribute power itself to a symbol by virtue of its multivocality. This is a plurality of meaning or differentiation that has the capacity to evoke a range of actions which includes logical opposites. The theoretical connection between symbolic effectiveness and historical practice is here progressively emptied of either meaning or necessity.

It is with a similar construction of the relationship between power and culture that Cochrane can equate the distance of lived power from the allegedly displaced political culture as the very reason for the motive power of the latter. The moral plea of Melanesiane is then to have culture recognised, and thus rationalised, by superior colonial power, and their indignation is portrayed as commensurate with the alleged political irrelevance of their most effective political symbols. Despair of autonomous political assertion is not what we shall describe for Buka, and we shall specify the practices involved in a struggle in colonial society for political control over culture, rather than defining culture as removed from the centre of struggle at the outset. It then needs to be said that the struggle does not begin and end with culture: its dominant concern is to combat emerging inequalities of class and to achieve self-determination in colonial society, not least in order to regulate meaningful personal relationships.

These are central points emerging from our wider search for alternatives to culturalist (including breakdown) models that of necessity abstract culture from political movement and movement from practice. New analyses are called for which do not require the premises of the above accounts.

We turn, then, to issues raised some time ago by Worsley which have not gone away since, although his theoretical formulation of them is still debated. His classic comparative study (Worsley 1968 [1957]) which drew systematic attention to the political potential of cargo millenarianism, devoted a chapter to Buka as the case best indicating the continuity of movements. This, he said (1968: 124, 207-8, 233ff.), enabled him to indicate the direction of development towards political organisation and away from the mystical and millenarian protests which first served to overcome the traditional Melanesian particularism and the disunity of the lower orders of colonial society. The mystic charismatic authority is backed up by specific injunctions to love one another, to forget the narrow loyalties of the past, to abandon those things that divide them and to practice a new moral code of brotherly love' (1968: 245).

While Worsley was successful in consolidating the issue of class as a central one, we have here a new kind of dichotomisation of culture and class: in this analysis and others on the emergence of class, community is an emergent phenomenon, a means of political leverage developed on the way to realisation of class interests. Traditional political culture, for Worsley, does not offer anything positive as a medium for the expression of political community or class interests. These are served by the extension of a new form of political consciousness which is increasingly general in its reach and nationalist in its content.

However, the continuity we describe is one of struggle without progressive rationality or changing relative determination by a cultural logic or a class consciousness. And Worsley's general attribution of a felt need to transcend the scope of traditional political power would not suffice given the evidence that we present for Buka. A new displacement seems to begin with Worsley's schema: people's sense of community does not derive from traditional solidarities now threatened but emerges essentially with the contradictions specific to class society. It is not seen as a state to be restored or a prescription of culture, as in some breakdown theories, but as an emergent consciousness of identity of political and economic interest. The relevance of the model for us, however, is marginal, in spite of our eagerness to take up Worsley's intimation of po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Map of Buka Island
• Introduction
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index