Search

Trobriand Islanders adopted card gambling from Europeans in colonial times alongside a growing familiarity with introduced money and commodities. Most ethnographic reports of gambling elsewhere in PNG have concentrated on its secular aspects. Here I focus on its ritual dimension summarized by the notion of laki ('lucky') as expressed in the agentive capacities of a new player, the 'divine dividual', who synthesizes elements of Sahlins's 'divine king' and the 'dividual' of the New Melanesian Ethnography. In accord with the local understandings of spiritual agency, many Trobriand men have adapted pre-existing magical practices for courting, kula, fishing, sorcery etc. to gambling by seeking to encompass the perceived powers of exogenous Europeans, acknowledged as the sources of laki, money and commodities, into their own persons in ways analogous to traditional magicians' reliance upon baloma spirits. Trobriand gambling thus exemplifies how change following from the introduction of novel Western practices can be effectively accommodated to preexisting religious and cultural practices through indigenous modes of personhood and agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Omarakana is arguably the most renowned village in the Trobriand and anthropological worlds. It is the very centre and wellspring of the North Kiriwinan universe and thus a sacred site, serving as the home of the Tabalu chiefly paramountcy. For us anthropologists, it is ground zero for our field methodology, thanks to Malinowski's pioneering research, and probably Melanesia's most hierarchical polity. Ironically, though, very little is actually known ethnographically about Omarakana's spatial layout. In this article I seek to compensate for that deficiency, arguing that Omarakana's seemingly concentric contours encode transformations of indigenous symbolism involving recurrent metaphors drawn from at least three conjoined semantic contexts of wide distribution across the Austronesian sphere and beyond: the double bisection of 'male' versus 'female'; the botanical imagery of 'base', 'body', 'tip', and 'fruit'; and various elements of 'canoe' symbolism. This alternative view of Omarakana's spatio-temporal plan sheds new light on various additional dimensions of Trobriand sociality and cosmology while elaborating classic and contemporary anthropological theories of dualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have long appreciated that animals are ‘good to think’. In this essay I ponder whether plants might be good to think too, and particularly whether there is any sense in asking if plants (along with animals) might also be ‘good to act’. The botanical metaphor of ‘base’, ‘body’, and ‘tip’ animates the origin structures of many if not most societies of the Austronesian world. Less attention has been directed at indigenous elaborations in other socio-cultural domains of the region. Based on recent fieldwork, I outline such ramifications in Trobriand culture, drawing upon the notions of fractal recursion and self-similarity from chaos theory wherein emergent ‘tips’ yield ‘fruit’ which become the condition or ‘base’ for further production and transformation. Accordingly, the base-body-tip-fruit metaphor serves as a cultural template or scenario for social action, shedding new interpretative light on many topics of long-standing anthropological interest (e.g. yam propagation, display, and exchange, kula, mortuary celebration, age categories, fame) as well as more recent theoretical interests. Résumé Les anthropologues ont compris il y a longtemps déjà que les animaux sont « bons à penser ». Dans cet essai, l’auteur se demande si les plantes sont elles aussi bonnes à penser, et en particulier s’il vaut la peine de se demander si les plantes (comme les animaux) pourraient être « bonnes à agir ». La métaphore botanique de « base », « corps » et « tête » anime les structures originelles de beaucoup de sociétés du monde austronésien, sinon toutes. On s’est moins intéressé aux élaborations indigènes de la région dans d’autres domaines socioculturels. Sur la base d’un récent travail de terrain, l’auteur retrace ces ramifications dans la culture trobriandaise, utilisant les notions de récursivité fractale et d’autosimilitude de la théorie du chaos, selon lesquelles les « têtes » donnent des « fruits » qui deviennent la condition ou « base » d’une nouvelle production et transformation. En conséquence, la métaphore base-corps-tête-fruit sert de modèle culturel ou de scénario d’action sociale, jetant un nouvel éclairage interprétatif sur de nombreux sujets qui intéressent depuis longtemps les anthropologues (tels que la propagation, la présentation et l’échange des ignames, la kula, les célébrations mortuaires, les classes d’âge, la renommée), mais aussi sur de nouvelles questions théoriques plus récentes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study which examined the portrayal of Melanesian cultural practices as possessions and the notions of property as a key to the cultural objectification in both pre- and post-colonial settings with reference to ethnographic and historical information regarding the North Mekeo peoples of Papua New Guinea. Cultural objectification and gift exchange theory; Pre- and post-contact cultural objectification; Emergence of charismatic Catholicism.

In Inalienable possessions, Annette Weiner (1992) focuses on the paradox of 'keeping-while-giving' rather than the 'norm of reciprocity' as the central issue of social life, drawing heavily on Trobriand examples. In this article, key elements of Weiner's theory are contrasted with prevailing views of Melanesian personhood and agency and with canonical Western notions of exchange, and her use of the Trobriand materials is juxtaposed with previously published ethnographic accounts of the same practices. It is argued that Weiner's ethnographic illustrations do not lend support to her theory of inalienable possessions; that her conceptual framework is at considerable variance with well-founded understandings of Melanesian sociality; and that the paradox of keeping-while-giving is more appropriately seen as deriving from Western presuppositions of individual boundedness, subjectivity, possession, ownership, and hierarchy, and the need to establish permanence in an entropic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the works of author Michelle Stephen with emphasis on her cultural construction of sorcery. Reference to her work on the Mekeo culture and society; Interpretation of the work; Perception of Stephen in regards to sorcerers.

Comments on the article `Coral gradens and their magic.' Argument on the characterization of a Trobriand chief as a glorified brother-in-law of the whole community; Rejection of the study's interpretation; Theories that logicians and linguists have used to deal with metaphorical concepts.

Opinion. Discusses the concept of chiefdoms among Trobriand Islanders. Evidences of alien influences; Benevolence of fathers to their sons; Confirmation of points under criticism; Comparison of good chiefs to fathers.

Presents an alternative perspective on Trobriand chieftainship and local leadership. Developed theories of personhood, sociality and historical agency for the Pacific; Post-natal paternal feeding and forming; Gendered bodies.

Responding to a number of developing critiques, Sahlins (1991) has recently adapted his 'structural history' model to accommodate endogenous change in pre-colonial conditions. His reformulation, however, critically restricts the model's applicability to mythopraxis of a specific sort, viz. the historical actions of divine heroes in societies structured along Dumontian lines of 'hierarchy' as supposedly exemplified in Fiji and Polynesia generally. This article examines certain implications of this new structural history - particularly Sahlins's revision of the 'structure of the conjuncture' notion - by analyzing a case of relatively late historical contact and change involving exogenous Europeans as well as Melanesians (i,e. the later phases of the so-called Yalimovements of post-World War II Papua New Guinea). Here, neither 'heroic history' nor 'hierarchy' as Sahlins has incorporated them into his new model are evident. What is apparent instead is a dialectical interplay of articulated messages and enacted missions on the part of a complex and shifting multiplicity of both expatriate as well as indigenous constituencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article ""War mementos and the souls of missing soldiers: returning effects of the battlefield dead."