The making of global and local modernities in Melanesia: humiliation, transformation and the nature of cultural change

Anthropology and Cultural History in Asia and the Indo-Pacific Series Editors: Pamela 1. Stewart and Andrew Strathem University of Pittsburgh, USA

This series offers a fresh perspective on Asian and Indo-Pacific Anthropology. Acknowledging the increasing impact of transnational flows of ideas and practices across borders, the series widens the established geographical remit of Asian studies to consider the entire ludo-Pacific region. In addition to focussed ethnographic studies, the series incorporates thematic work on issues of cross-regional impact, including globalization, the spread of terrorism, and alternative medical practices. The series further aims to be innovative in its disciplinary breadth, linking anthropological theory with studies in cultural history and religious studies, thus reflecting the current creative interactions between anthropology and historical scholarship that are enriching the study of Asia and the Indo-Pacific region. While the series covers classic themes within the anthropology of the region such as ritual, political and economic issues will also be tackled. Studies of adaptation, change and conflict in small-scale situations enmeshed in wider currents of change will have a significant place in this range of foci. We publish scholarly texts, both single-authored and collaborative as well as collections of thematically organized essays. The series aims to reach a core audience of anthropologists and Asian Studies specialists, but also to be accessible to a broader multidisciplinary readership.

The Making of Global and Local Modernities in Melanesia Humiliation, Transfonnation and the Nature of Cultural Change

Edited by JOEL ROBBINS University of California, USA HOLLY WARDLOW University of Toronto, Canada

Titles in the series

Of Marriage, Violence and Sorcery David McKnight ISBN 0 7546 4465 0

Aboriginal Art, Identity and Appropriation Elizabeth Burns Coleman ISBN 0 7546 4403 0

Expressive Genres and IDstorical Change: Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Taiwan Edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathem ISBN 0 7546 4418 9

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© Joel Robbins and Holly Wardlow 2005

Contents

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List of Contributors Series Editors' Preface Acknowledgements Introduction - Humiliation and Transfonnation: Marshall SaWins and the Study of Cultural Change in Melanesia Joel Robbins

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The making of global and local modernities in Melanesia: humiliation, transfonnation and the nature of cultural change. - (Anthropology and cultural history in Asia and the Indo-Pacific) 1. Social change - Melanesia 2. Humiliation 3. Social evolution 4. Melanesia - Social conditions 5. Melanesia _ Civilization - Foreign influences I. Robbins, Joel, 1961- IT. Wardlow, Holly 306'.0995

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The making of global and local modernities in Melanesia: humiliation, transfonnation, and the nature of cultural change I edited by loeI Robbins and Holly Wardlow. p. cm. -- (Anthropology and cultural history in Asia and the Indo-Pacific) fuc1udes index. ISBN 0-7546-4312-3 1. Ethnology--Melanesia. 2. Indigenous peoples--Melanesia. 3. Social change-Melanesia. 4. Economic development--Melanesia. 5. Ethnopsychology--Melanesia. 6. Culture and globalization--Melanesia. 7. Melanesia--Social conditions. 8. Melanesia-Colonization. 9. Melanesia--Foreign relations. 1. Robbins, loel, 1961- n. Wardlow, Holly. m. Series.

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The Economics of Develop-man in the Pacific Marshall Sahlins

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The Humiliations of Sin: Christianity and the Modernization of the Subject among the Urapmin Joel Robbins

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Transfonnations of Desire: Envy and Resentment among the Huli of Papua New Guinea Holly Wardlow

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'We Are Not Straight': Bumbita Arapesh Strategies for Self-Reflection in the Face ofImages of Western Superiority Stephen C. Leavitt

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Sepik River Selves in a Changing Modernity: From Sahlins to Psychodynamics Eric Kline Silvennan

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'We Are All "Les" Men': Sorrow and Modernism in Melanesia, or Humor in Paradise Douglas Dalton

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Moral and Practical Frameworks for the Self in Conditions of Social Change Lisette Josephides

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The Death of Moka in Post-Colonial Mount Hagen, HighlandS, Papua New Guinea Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern

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On the Life and Times of the rpili Imagination Aletta Biersack

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On Humiliation and Class in Contemporary Papua New Gumea Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz

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Turning to Violence: Hazardiug Intent in Central New Ireland KarenSykes

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Ancestral Vigilance and the Corrective Conscience in Kwaio: Kastom as Culture in a Melanesian Society DavidAkin Mterword - Frustrating Modernity in Melanesia Robert 1. Foster

Index

List of Contributors

David Akin, Comparative Studies in Society and History Aletta Biersack, University of Oregon

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Douglas Dalton, Longwood University Frederick Errington, Trinity College, Hartford

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Robert J. Foster, University of Rochester

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Deborab Gewertz, Amberst College Lisette Josepbides, Queens University, Belfast Stephen C. Leavitt, Union College Joel Robbins, University of California, San Diego Marshall SaWins, University of Chicago Eric Kline Silverman, DePauw University Pamela J. Stewart, University of Pittsburgh Andrew Strathern, University of Pittsburgh Karen Sykes, University of Manchester Holly Wardlow, University of Toronto

Introduction

Humiliation and Transformation: Marshall Sahlins and the Study of Cultural Change in Melanesia Joel Robbins

Marshall Sahlins is one of the most influential living anthropologists. Of the handful of those whose prominence might be said to be similar to his, he is the only one who has made the theorization of cultural change central to hislher work. Dming a period when disciplinary interest is increasingly focused on issues of change - be it under the rubric of globalization, postcolonial transformation, postsoviet transitology or what have you - the importance of his work in this area shows no sign of diminishing. The contributors to this volume take up Sahlins' work on cnltural change, delineating and extending it by applying it to cultures in Melanesia, one of the areas from which Sahlins commonly takes his own examples and one whose literature has clearly shaped his own vision. The result is a set of essays that exemplifies the power of Sahlins' approach while also opening up new questions about it and putting it in dialogue with other important theoretical trends. Along with being the first such collection of papers taking up Sah1ius as a theorist of cnltural change, this volume is also distinctive because it comes to Sahlins' work as it were through the back door. Sahlins is best known as a master of the task of finding continuity in change, and his theoretical work is widely used to produce analyses showing how indigenous orders of meaning have been able to shape even the most cataclysmic transfonnations in ways that allow for their own survival, even if in modified forms. While many of the chapters in this volume also demonstrate continuities across what at first might look like cultural divides, and while they draw on Sahlins' best known work in doing so, none of them take such continuity for granted. This is so because all of the contributors have taken as their starting point a relatively little read 1992 paper of Sahlins' entitled 'The Economics of Develop-man in the Pacific' (reprinted as chapter one here). Sahlins devotes most of this chapter to developing what were at the time of its original publication some relatively new ideas about how people work to preserve and extend indigenous cultural values in the face of change. But at the end of the chapter, he asks what must happen in order for people to give up on such projects of cultural reproduction and exteusion. What kinds of transformations rupture the unfolding of processes of cnltural continuity-in-change on which he focuses? Although Sahlins' discussion of these questions in this chapter

The Making of Global and Local Modernities in Melanesia

Humiliation and Transfonnation: Marshall Sahlins and Cultural Change

is very brief, he does speculate on some answers to them. And because nothing like this discussion appears in any of his more well known published writings, these few pages take on a great importance for anyone who would read his theoretical work in. a thorough way. Such, at least, is the point of view from which the. chapters .m thiS volume take their bearings, for the authors of all of them find their mvesl1gal1ons of continuity enriched by having make them while reckouing with an approach that also comprehends discontinuous change. Foreshadowing a fuller discussion later in this introduction, we can broadly sketch Sahlins' answer to the question of how it is that cultures cease to produce continuity through change by noting that it turns on the notion of humiliation~!~Jl!e will not stop perceiving the world that confronts them through therr receIVed -categories and bending it to their own values until they come to see thos~ categones and values -that is, their culture - as something shameful and debased. To quote a turn of phrase that almost every chapter of the volume discusses: before people give up on their culture, they

At the same time, however, I point out how Sahlins' remarks about humiliation link his work to contemporary discussions in postcolouial theory and, perhaps surprisingly, liberal political thought. We also discuss the extent to which humiliation may be considered a cultural fact, rather than or alongside its more obvious status as a psychological one. In doing so, I review the arguments made in many of the chapters of this volume that humiliation and other 'emotions' may not be as insubstantial players in cultural life as some perspectives, including the structuralist one from which Sahlins takes so much, might suggest.

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must first learn to hate what they already have, what they have always considered their well-being. Beyond that, they have to despise what they are, to hold their own existence in contempt - and want, then, to be someone else (Sahlins, 1992a, p.24).

It is this observation that is the back door through which these papers encounter Sahlins' theory of change. We all begin with his arguments about discontinuity grounded in humiliation, query and develop his observations, and at the same I1me reread his better known arguments about continuity from this novel vantage pomt. The remainder of this introduction is divided into three parts. The first reviews Sablins' theoretical work on cultural change from the late 1980s onward, paying particular attention to a series of well known essays that I :rrgue siguificantly adv~nce Sahlins' basic tbeory of change as laid out most famously m Islands of HIStory. Smce these essays are polemical and were also for the most part written for specific occasions, it is easy to miss the way that taken as a whole they open up a new chapter in Sahlins' work. Only by reading them together, I suggest, can one see the extent to which they have served to enricb his basic theoretical scheme. These essays also provide the context in wbich the chapter reprinted here and its uncharacteristic final few pages needs to be read. I offer such a reading and use it to contextualize the arguments of the chapters of this volume as well. The second part of the introduction focuses on Sahlins' argument about humiliation. I consider the extent to whicb it needs to be seen as making a break with the main body of his work, and suggest that many of the chapters in this volume would argue against seeing it as such. A review of these chapters indicates that it is possible to indigenize humiliation itself, and show how it becomes a spur to the kind of indigenous agency Sahlins' theory of change has always focused up?n. . "The third part of the introduction addresses the fact that humilial10n nught seem ! a rather slender thread upon which to hang a major theory of cultural change. I consider the extent to which it is in fact ouly a placeholder that points to the need to develop a broader theory of the role of cultural debasement in fostering discontinuity. c

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Sahlins on Continuity and Discontinuity in Cultnral Change In the introduction to a recent collection of essays originally publisbed between 1963 and 1999, Sahlins (2000a, p.9) discusses three fundamental ideas around which he has based ltis work on cultural change. First, he notes in passing that 'in all change there is continuity.' Second, he points out more directly that a theme that he develops through all of the texts collected in the volume 'has to do with the cultural integrity of the indigenous peoples. 'And, third, he hints at the importance to his thinking of the idea thatjpdigel)ousJ)~opies-.-rlfe "active .agents' "processes of change, even in those which the other players represent the dominant powers of the world capitalist systeIii--These" three themes are, of course, connected: it is the -enduring integrity of Indlgen()uS peoples and their cultures that constitute the continuities that underlie change, and this integrity endures because indigenous people actively struggle 'to encompass what is happeuing to them in the terms of their own world system' (Sahlins, 2000a, p.lO). Sahlins elaborates each of these points individually in particular essays, but in all of his work their coherence as a framework for studying cultural change is evident. The roots of these three ideas, and of the overall approach to cultural change that Sahlins fashions from them, are various. Sahlins has recently stressed the importance of White's superorganicist symbolic theory in preadapting him to the sophisticated structuralist version of cultural theory be would encounter in the 1960s (Sahlins, 2000a, pp. 10-17). One can also surmise that White's evolutiouism, which Sahlins worked to refine in his early work, also made issues of change fundamental to him to an extent they were not to those who came to study symbolism out of other traditions such as the Parsouian one. If this point is taken, then one might argue that this evolutiouist side of White's thinking also shaped Sahlins' reading of structuralism, allowing him to recognize aspects ofUvi-Strauss' work that most others missed. For Sah1ins appears from the outset to have been aware of the fact that Levi-Strauss was himself interested in history and change, and to have avoided falling for the willfully simple-minded interpretations of the hollcold distinction that refused to credit that it was not a claim about the absence of change, but rather one about the danger of universalizing a Western cultural model of the nature and valne of change as a theoretical construct. Indeed, if The Savage Mind is to be read as a book with a single theme - if it is to be read beyond the bricoleur and tbe science of the concrete of its first chapter -it

to"ses";;"

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The Making of Global and Local Modernities in Melanesia

Humiliation and Transformation: Marshall Sahlins and Cultural Change

has to be read as a book about the relationships that hold between structure and change (Levi-Strauss, 1966). Read in this way, the book is about the work structures do to make change comprehensible either by taking it in on their own terms or transforming themselves under the sway of its force. Uvi-Strauss' point is not that nothing happens in history, it is rather that in societies that do not share the Western valorization of change, lots of structural work gets done to lend history its placid appearance. 1 Continuity is thus a historical product, not an indication of an absence of history. Sahlins seems almost unique among American readers of Uvi-Strauss in recognizing this point early on. As early as 1976 he wrote that:

history, and the concern with issues of agency - come together (Sahlins, 1981, 1985, 1992b, 1995). The model Sahlins' develops in these works - a model of people putting the categories of their culture into play by acting, thus subjecting those categories to risk in the eveut that the fit between category and reality is not a neat one, and finally suffering the transfonnations of categories and the relations between them when there is a mismatch betweeu category and reality - is well enough known that there is no need to lay it out in delail here. This work on Hawaii provides a fully developed example of how Sahlins' theories illuminate particular histories and demonstrate the power of an approach that looks for how a culture can shape processes of change and in doing so relain its own integrity for a longer time than many would expect. Since the late 1980s, Sahlins has also worked to elaborate and defend not only his model as a whole (as in his debate with Obeyesekere), but also to develop new approaches to the study of change that remain faithful to his fundamental commitment to the study culture in its own terms and to recognizing the force of indigenous agency in securing cultural continnity in situations of change. He has done this in a series of polemical chapters pitched against the arguments of world-systems theorists, globalization theorists and post-modernists. Scholars working in each of these areas present arguments that attack Sah\ins' fundamental assumptions, and his goal in these pieces has been to parry these attacks both by offering critical readings of their theoretical underpinnings and by showing how his assumptions and the kinds of argument they underwrite can shed light on situations that on first glance seem to lend themselves most readily to analysis in the terms favored by his opponents. The

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Structuralism developed in the first place out of the encounter with a typ~ of s~ciety, the so-called primitive, distinguished by a special capacity to absorb perturbatlOns ~troduced by the event with a minimum of systematic deformation. By ~ts co~p~hensl0n of that capacity, structuralism takes on the explication of the wo~k of history III Its most powerful form, the persistence of structure by means of event (SaWins, 1976, p.23).

This point would become a central plank of Sah\ins' structural history, and it allowed him to work with a powerful version of structural theory WIthout glVlng up the mterest . . in change that is also part of his Whitean inberitance. Yet at the same time as Sahlins was preadapted both to apprecIating the structuralist interest in symbolism and to recognizing that it contained at least the seeds of a major theory of cultural change, he also brought to his encounter with structuralism an interest in agency, in acting subjects, that was largely lacking m Uvi-Strauss' antihumanistic vision. If Levi-Strauss (1966) could see in Sartre little more than a philosophical gussying up of Western folk ideas about change and about the power of individuals to make themselves, Sahlin~ has. a1way~ had ,-"ore time for the Sartrean notion that the inapact of structure on mdlVlduals IS mediated by the particulars of their life experience and the corollary claim that in acting individuals are guided by structure but do not mechanically reproduce it Sartre's (1968, p.56) point is nicely captured in his famous quip that 'Valery IS a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not e~ery pellt bo~rge01s mtellectu~ is Valery.' In Sahlins, a similar insight leads him to conSider how people s individuality plays a role in the way they take up or negotiate the oPP?rtumlles for meaningful action created by structure (Sahlins, 2000a, p26). In dOll)g so, he IS more attentive to contexts of action, differences of SOClal posItiomng and the variety of culturally available motives than most others who work i~ the

structuralist tradition or in other traditions that are build around sophisllcated conceptions of culture. His theoretical advances in this area have allowed him to create a structuralist approach to history that is far more nuanc~d and attenti~~ to change than anything produced by Uvi-Strauss or others working III the traditIOn he founded. The novelty of Sahlins' approach is evident in his work on Hawaiian history, where all of the elements of his thinking so far discussed - the interest in change, the appreciation of symbolism, the recognition of the value of structuralist thiuking about

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outcome of these encounters is a set of analyses that carry over the most basic points

of Sahlins' Hawaiian work but also add a great deal to it. Because Sahlins' argument about humiliation also arises in the midst of this recent work, it is important to review it here. Sahlins takes on arguments about the corrosive effects of globalization on indigenous cultures in a 2001 piece entitled 'Reports of the Death of Culture Have Been Exaggerated.' Although this piece, like all of Sahlins' recent work, conlains an important theoretical polemic, this feature is less in the forefront here than elsewhere. Instead, in this piece_Sahlins focuses on working with what should be hard cases of globalization for his approach .tohandle to.. show. the value ofthat approach to good ~ffect. Many fodlif~arguethat anthropological notions of culture were historically wounded in assumptions about closed, locany situated cOlmt1]mities. that no .one can anymore accept in a world marked. by migration, exile, and the extensive diffusion gf aspects of Wes!