Book Review of Introduction to the Anthropology of Melanesia: Culture and Tradition by Paul Sillitoe (original) (raw)
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Is it possible to compare two ethnographies and thereby compare how people in different settings encounter and construe their lived and imagined realities? Although the ethnographies reviewed here both concern small communities in Papua New Guinea--one in the highlands and one on the coast--responding to Western dominance and modernity, the two studies also exemplify the idea that it is impossible to make cross-cultural generalizations. This impossibility lies not in the uniqueness of each setting, but in the fact that doing fieldwork and writing ethnography is grounded in the personality of the researcher, his/her interaction with research subjects, and his/her methodological and theoretical approach. The two books reviewed here exemplify this: they are poles apart in terms of the pathos with which the two researchers/ authors represent the social and cultural dynamics in the Papua New Guinean communities they studied --and, consequently, in terms of the conclusions of their research.
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(This paper was published in The Oriental Anthropologist, Vol. 11, No. 2, New Delhi. 2012. The original manuscript is submitted here) It is the outcome of intensive data collected by the author, during the two courses of fieldwork conducted over a period of twenty-seven years: first, during 1974-75, and secondly, during May-June 2002. During the first phase of fieldwork, the author was a young researcher, and during the second phase, a matured and a professional anthropologist. The changes witnessed by him in the Nicobar Islands were unprecedented. Most of his informants, more importantly the key informants in different islands, were lying in their graves. The Island of Chowra, which was then known as the ‘land of wizards and the witchdoctors’ had turned into a ‘land of medical doctors.’ Gone were the days when canoes ceremonially plied between different islands for inter-island trade relationships, somewhat like the kula of the Trobriand Islanders. Women in Chowra no more made earthen pots, which were earlier used by all the Nicobarese due to magico-religious beliefs, supposedly, associated with Chowra pots. Nor could they be found, expectantly, awaiting their husbands along the beach near the elpenam (community houses), who brought coconuts, yams, banana, cloths, pigs, tobacco, and various other domestic items from far off islands. Wearing a loincloth by men had become a history. On the one hand, the standard and quality of life of the islanders had developed; on the other, many of their traditional rituals, beliefs and practices were at the verge of extinction, or had already become extinct. For the author, to witness the changes over twenty-seven years was a great anthropological experience. The paper has been written in a somewhat post-modernistic fashion. Therefore, instead of using the ‘third person’, as an ‘objective’ and ‘passive’ spectator of the phenomena like a ‘natural scientist’, the author has taken the liberty to explain his anthropological experiences in the ‘first person.’ The paper also raises such epistemological questions, as: a. Should an anthropologist include his personal experiences while writing the account of ‘other’s culture’? b. Can an anthropologist/ethnographer ever claim to be authentic? c. Whether reconstruction of a culture is justified?
Although Sahlins proposed it over thirty years ago, and notwithstanding various noteworthy contributions in the interim, a concerted anthropology of history has not yet come into being. This introduction, and the case studies which follow it, lay out the interrogatives of such an endeavor by reference to ethnographic and historical studies of Cuba, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, the United States, and early modern Euro-America. The anthropology of history inquires foremost into the very idea of history—the assumptions, principles, and practices that inform the acquisition of knowledge about the past, and its social presentation. Finding the terms to understand alternative forms of history making requires an ethnographic and historical sense of how the Western concept of history (historicism) came to be and how this historicism is, in fact, lodged within a plurality of alternative practices in Western communities. We see the anthropology of history as a large collective interdisciplinary enterprise that will involve archaeologists, historians, and many others in understanding the possibilities of history as a practice and as an analytic.