Up Close and Personal

On Peripheral Perspectives and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge

Cris Shore, Susanna Trnka, Cris Shore, Susanna Trnka

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857458476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

Combining rich personal accounts from twelve veteran anthropologists with reflexive analyses of the state of anthropology today, this book is a treatise on theory and method offering fresh insights into the production of anthropological knowledge, from the creation of key concepts to major paradigm shifts. Particular focus is given to how 'peripheral perspectives' can help re-shape the discipline and the ways that anthropologists think about contemporary culture and society. From urban Maori communities in Aotearoa/New Zealand to the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, from Arnhem Land in Australia to the villages of Yorkshire, these accounts take us to the heart of the anthropological endeavour, decentring mainstream perspectives, and revealing the intimate relationships and processes that create anthropological knowledge.

Chapter 1

SUFFERING, SELFHOOD AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL ENCOUNTERS
Michael Jackson

You are well known in New Zealand as a poet as well as an anthropologist. Let us begin by asking you to explain how you came to discover anthropology as a discipline and as a way of thinking about the world?

That was probably when I was sixteen and living in a small Taranaki town. The country library service used to bring a selection of books to Inglewood every fortnight. A couple of those books impressed me a lot. One was Daryll Forde’s Habitat, Economy and Society (1956), which intrigued me because it was about the impact of environment on human societies – a kind of environmental determinism – so it related to a school interest I already had in human geography. The other book which made an impact on me was William Howells’s Mankind So Far (1944), a book about hominid evolution. I became fascinated by fossil skulls and questions about human origins. So when I went to the University of Auckland and saw that anthropology was an undergraduate option, those two books were in the back of my mind. But again, it wasn’t social or cultural anthropology that really captured my imagination. It was Jack Golson lecturing on Sumeria and ancient Egypt. My interest in hominid evolution and economy and society shifted to an interest in early civilizations. For that course we used Gordon Childe’s famous book, Man Makes Himself. Golson was an extraordinary lecturer and charismatic figure who went on to pioneer the prehistory of Papua New Guinea and, along with Roger Duff, was one of the archaeologists who gave us a clearer picture of pre-European Maori society. As students we would go on digs to the island of Motutapu, conduct salvage archaeology in Auckland’s Mount Roskill, following Jack and inspired by him.

In New Zealand many anthropologists have spoken about the importance of the encounter with the Maori world in shaping their interest. Can you tell us about your own encounters with Maoridom and how it affected you?

Like a lot of Pakeha (New Zealanders of European, typically British, descent) who came to anthropology, I had a childhood fascination with Maori New Zealanders. One really didn’t have much contact with them – it certainly was not encouraged. It wasn’t ‘apartheid’, but in the bourgeois imagination there was an unspoken assumption that these people were not respectable enough to be true companions or neighbours. But I was a very much a loner as a kid and naturally wound up with other loners, people on the margins. I didn’t interact with other people very much, but one of my closest childhood friends growing up in Inglewood was a Maori boy called Eddie Ngeru. This friendship met the approval of my parents if only because they were glad to see that their shy and reclusive son actually did have a social bone in his body. I vividly remember Eddie’s house because of the hospitality his family showed me. They were very poor and the house was tatty: the linoleum on the floor was cracked; most of the matting consisted of old super phosphate bags; there was a coal range and the furniture was minimal and very battered. But it was a place of immense warmth, and I remember going there and feeling the homeliness of that poverty. That didn’t just come from our friendship. The whole family had an emotional charge and vitality that I didn’t find anywhere else, even though I was raised in a very loving family.

I was also intrigued by the Maori who came up from Waitara selling whitebait during the whitebait season. They were elderly women (kuia) with moko (tattoos) on their chins, smoking pipes like figures out of a Goldie painting.¹ Of course, that was very intriguing to a child, these very exotic people who mysteriously came and went. They didn’t live in the town but sat on the street with their flax kits full of whitebait and kai moana (seafood). Nobody told me to avoid them, but I could see that they inhabited a different world to the one I inhabited. Why did they live in this other place and where was it? What was it like? I gradually fantasized an identification with Maori as the embodiment of the misfit that I felt I was. I grafted my own sense of alienation onto these people who appeared to be living on the margins of society. I remember a particular event when I was about sixteen and my father inducted me into his lodge – the Foresters’ Masonic Lodge. I was instinctively repelled by this organization of men who got very drunk but talked at great length about the charitable work they were doing. I loathed their regalia, pomposity and pretentions. Much to my father’s dismay, I resigned, using as my rationale the fact that Maori weren’t admitted to the lodge and the fact that the lodge’s charity did not extend to Maori. Where this came from, I haven’t the faintest idea. Looking back I can’t see any way of connecting the dots other than that my feeling of not wanting to be a member of that club found expression in my imagining that Maori could never be members of this club either. In a perverse but logical sense, I was a white Maori.

The lodge later informed me that they had framed my letter of resignation, because they’d never encountered such ingratitude. My father, of course, was deeply ashamed. I’m not sure if he ever went back to the Masonic Lodge after I’d spoiled it for him. But it was a sign of the burning sense of injustice I felt about what existed in this country. It haunted me, this sense that my grandparents had migrated to this place and never mentioned the fact that their migration had involved a brutal displacement of an indigenous people. How come these facts were never talked about?

Was this a kind of guilty secret shared by many New Zealanders?

Absolutely, and I remember it wasn’t until I was in my twenties and began to do research to find out who were the tangata whenua in this part of Taranaki that I realized the depth of this. Such research was not easy, and even establishing the name of the tangata whenua (‘people of the land’) was difficult. They were Ngāti Maru, a sub-tribe of Ngāti Awa, who had lived in the upper reaches of the Waitara River. Their domain would have spread into the forests that originally covered the area of Inglewood. During the land wars of the 1860s, Ngāti Maru had given token allegiance to the Maori leader Wiremu Kingi, when he was defending the Waitara block against further encroachments by the British. For that token loyalty to Kingi they were subject to confiscations of their lands, and that is why they were no longer in the Inglewood area. But as children we were told – and I can clearly remember the story, since it was in broad circulation among Pakeha – that there were no Maori where we lived, because they had a superstitious dread that Mount Taranaki would one day walk back to rejoin its kith and kin, the other mountains in the Central North Island, as if Taranaki had gone into kind of exile. This kind of cock-and-bull story was a cover for what was basically a terrible series of historical injustices.

I became interested in this because I wanted to understand the historical quirks of fate that had resulted in my family being in this country. It wasn’t as if the dispossessed poor from the British Isles were willing partners in this project of colonizing New Zealand. I imagine they were pretty ignorant of the situation they were coming to and the implications of their presence here. But the fact of the matter was that these questions were never addressed and for some reason I felt the need to address them. Even now I feel that need. Just last year, armed with the marvellously researched Taranaki report to the Waitangi Tribunal,² which detailed indigenous land claims in the Taranaki region, I found out more about the brutality of the colonization of Taranaki. I was struck by the meanness and the violence. Of course, there was another history of violence that preceded the arrival of Europeans here: inter-tribal warfare. All of that information can be readily accessed today. I drove around Taranaki last year, reconsidering all these questions and still wondering, ‘how I can come to terms with being a child of this nation?’ I don’t feel comfortable here for a lot of reasons, but one of them is this unresolved sense that I really don’t have the right to be here.

So fast-forwarding to your time at university, did any that sense of marginalization connect with the things that you studied as an undergraduate?

Yes. Our first year social anthropology courses were taught by Professor Ralph Piddington, who was a very unprepossessing individual by the standards of an eighteen-year-old New Zealander. He was palsied, he obviously drank to prime himself for teaching, and he was old. You know how intolerant you are at eighteen or nineteen of anyone who is old – let alone slightly doddery or frail. Even though his two-volume introduction to social anthropology still ranks as one of the finest introductions to the subject, it wasn’t until I reread it in my fifties that I realized just how good it is. Reading between the lines, I discovered much of his biography buried in that book. And it’s an extraordinary story. As a PhD student working at LaGrange Bay, in western Australia, among the Karadjeri, Piddington decided that these people were living under such appalling and persecuted conditions that he couldn’t just study them, he had to advocate on their behalf. He therefore wrote an article exposing the injustices for The World, a Socialist newspaper in Sydney, and then again for a Socialist paper in London. As a result, his PhD grant was terminated and he had great difficulty finding the money to finish his PhD. I think he had a Fulbright grant. It was interesting that people like Elkin, who was professor of anthropology at the time, did not oppose the stripping of his grant, because Piddington had stepped beyond the boundaries of what anthropology students were supposed to do. They were expected to do academic studies, not go out and bat for the people they were working with. So Piddington’s story is very compelling, and when I rediscovered it in my fifties I felt such regret for the fact that I had, at the age of eighteen, sat in his lectures and thought such disrespectful things about him. Here was a person I should have admired. If I’d read his book properly, I would have realized anthropology’s implications for social action; i.e. it is not just about studying people but about getting involved in their lives, which may also include dealing directly with social injustices.

Looking back with hindsight, how has anthropology changed, and how has your own thinking about anthropology evolved?

As an undergraduate studying anthropology I had a passionate desire to change the world for the better. Isn’t it everybody’s passion at that age? So I was in revolt against the academy, which I considered out of touch with the real world. In those days it was relatively easy to spend half the year working outside the university. I worked on the waterfront all year round, not only for money but to strike the right balance between university life and what lay outside it.

I did ‘seagulling’ at the docks, i.e. temporary work in a sector that was strongly unionized. You’d go down to what’s called the ‘block’ on one of the waterfront quays and wait to be allocated a job. Somebody would call out the name of a ship on a certain quay – what it was loading, whether the cargo was dirty or dangerous – and then you had the option of raising your hand and being assigned that job for so many hours. If you handled the dirty or dangerous cargo you would get considerable bonuses. I did that regularly.

But I was also committed to the idea of getting out into the world and doing some good. So as soon as I had finished university I went to Australia and eventually landed a job working in Aboriginal welfare in the state of Victoria. I got the job in spite of my youth and the fact that I was competing with more experienced people who had spent many years working in charity organizations like the Salvation Army. I got it because they were impressed by the fact that my degree included anthropology, and they thought this would help me understand Aborigines and be particularly relevant for this kind of work. But I became very disenchanted with ‘Aboriginal welfare’, as it was called in those days. I found that it was simply the benign face of Australia’s assimilationist policies that were still in place. I subsequently went to London and worked in welfare for the London County Council, working with homeless people. Then, when I was about twenty-four, I picked up a job as a volunteer with a United Nations organization in the Congo. But again, that was a period of radical disenchantment, as I realized that the United Nations operations in that part of Africa were a kind of front for Cold War Euro-American political interests. I realized that these great piles of paper which accumulated in the offices of the UN’s Department of Social Affairs did not represent real work being done on the ground, because working as a mere volunteer I would be dispatched to the interior to check out market-garden programmes, cooperatives or various other kinds community-development projects, only to find that there was nothing there. It was a bit like Marlow in Heart of Darkness going into these remote places and finding horror rather than development.

There was also an ongoing war in the Congo, which was profoundly disturbing to me. I’ve described this in my memoir (Jackson 2006a: 97–116). I was in Kasai Province, in a lakeside town called Luluabourg, which had been occupied by the rebels. I was there just after the so-called liberation and the town was still in a state of shambles. There were still unburied bodies. In the middle of this nightmare I was trying to visit villages in a little four-by-four jeep. It was at this time, in one of those villages, that I thought ‘what the hell am I doing here, an agent of a civilizing mission?’ And yet I was face-to-face with the most intriguing things. I was getting glimpses of masquerades and fetishes. Using my minimal French, I was engaging in conversations with villagers. Suddenly I realized, this is what anthropologists did. Rather than going to places to try and change everything, they try to understand everything. But something else interested me more at that time; I didn’t only want to change the world, I wanted to be changed by the world. The idea of undergoing some sort of metamorphosis by exposing myself to these extreme conditions of radical otherness appealed to me as a way in which I could remake myself.

So I found my way, I don’t know how, to an extraordinary community of Franciscan monks who had rehabilitated a coffee plantation that had fallen into ruins after the Belgians abandoned it following the secession of Kasai. The Franciscans had brought it back into production, and all the labour was provided by kids, most of whom were Baluba children who had lost their parents during the war. These kids were showing me around and talking to me about all manner of things. I guess I was having my first ethnographically informed conversations. I was very curious about them: where they came from, who they were. In the midst of this, one evening when I was looking for something to read, I came across a battered copy of Lévi-Strauss’s book Les Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté. It was really dog-eared and some of the pages were missing, but I opened it up and that’s when I discovered anthropology. Nothing I’d encountered as an undergraduate had so captured my intellectual imagination. I was really struck by the opening lines of the book, which stated that anthropology is the study of humankind not the study of a particular people: i.e. it’s not about studying function or structure in the received sense of those words but about the study of the human mind. That, coupled with my desire to go into these villages and actually live in them, helped me conclude that anthropology might well be my path.

I was subsequently asked to leave the Congo, because I wasn’t doing my job properly and the head of the UN Social Affairs Department asked me if I really wanted to be there. Of course, by this time, my mind was somewhere else, even though I was having a great time in Leopoldville, living at the heart of history, as I felt at the time. This was before the Rhodesian war for independence had begun and I was hanging out with members of Joshua Nkomo’s freedom fighters, many of whom were in exile in the Congo and had found their way to Leopoldville. I was involved in things that engrossed me deeply. So I was ambivalent about leaving. But I was obliged to call it quits and went to France and then on to Greece, where I stayed for a while and taught English. When I returned to New Zealand I was in two minds about returning to university. I was gripped by this idea of going to dangerous places to further this metamorphosis and rebirth of myself. I didn’t know much about the Vietnam War, which had escalated in the years I’d been away. I imagined myself as a correspondent, covering the war. At the same time, I explored the possibility of working in Maori welfare. I went down to Wellington for an interview and vividly remember being told that all my welfare experience was actually of little use if I wanted to go into Maori welfare. ‘Maori’, I was told, ‘were not like Africans or Aborigines. Maori were superior to those people.’ I didn’t get the job, but a few days later I met the woman I w...