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Jarillo et al.’s attempted refutation of Malinowski’s claims as to Trobrianders’ “universally” shared belief in balomareincarnation fails. Contrary to their claims, Malinowski’s “Baloma” article (1916) documented wide, often contradictory variation in Islanders’ opinions which his revolutionary methodology was explicitly aimed at resolving. Jarillo et al.’s multidisciplinary research has not produced an explanatory model sufficient to supersede Malinowski’s solution—the formulation of the culture as a functionally integrated totality. Methodologically, they incorporate ethnographic preconceptions arising from Euro-American assumptions about indigenous personhood, agency, exchange, hierarchy, and the afterlife which are incapable of shedding new light on beliefs and practices current in Malinowski’s time. Their claims as to Malinowski’s own Western preconceptions do not change the documented fact that reincarnation beliefs predate his arrival. Finally, Jarillo et al.’s Trobriand collaborators and survey participants have been selected through non-random procedures at variance with the standards of quantitative social science.

Comment on Jones, Graham M. 2017. Magic’s reason: An anthropology of analogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

According to the received wisdom in Melanesian ethnography and elsewhere, Christianity is “unrelentingly individualistic” (e.g., Robbins 2004: 293). In this chapter, drawing upon the notion of “dividual” or “partible personhood” of the New Melanesian Ethnography and implicit in the classic Van Gennepian model of rites of passage, I revisit Louis Dumont’s, Kenelm Burridge’s, and Max Weber’s authoritative conceptualizations of Christian personhood. I seek to demonstrate that in the early Christian church and the later Protestant Reformation of Luther and Calvin, the person, whether human or divine, qualifies instead as a dividual—a kind of agent radically distinct from the canonical “possessive individual” of Western political and economic discourse. Following Dumont, Burridge, and Weber on close reading, I argue that the seeming “individuality” of Christian persons consists merely in singular moments of overarching processes of elicitive detachment, gift-transfer, incorporation, and reciprocation whereby the constituent parts of total or overall dividual persons are transacted. Christian “individualism,” in short, is nothing less than an instance of dividual personhood and agency, fundamentally distinct from the possessive individual of modern secular society.

Lévi‐Strauss's canonic formula for the structure of myth, fx(a): fy(b) ≅ fx(b): fa‐1(y), was boldly intended to bring a “kind of order to what was previously chaos” (1963a [1955]:202, 228). Rarely, however, has Lévi‐Strauss or have others systematically examined the formula's suitability for interpreting authentic mythic texts or—more puzzling, perhaps, given myth's centrality—seriously considered the potentially homologous structuring of nonmythical ethnographic data. In this article I attempt a detailed reinterpretation of the canonic formula and, after appropriately modifying it for the analysis of nonmythical materials, illustrate its empirical suitability with respect to diverse sociocultural contexts of North Mekeo (Papua New Guinea) tradition: notions and practices regarding the human body (eating, excretion, health, illness, sexuality, reproduction), space and time, social classification, political organization, and, finally, myth. By means of these controlled comparisons of nonmyth and myth internal to a single sociocultural system, I show that the revised canonic formula increases the empirical and methodological precision of Lévi‐Straussian structural analyses. The structure of myth, therefore, is not restricted to myths. [dualism (recursion/inversion), myth, social classification, structural analysis, ethnographic method, Melanesia]