Leaving the Magic Out: Knowledge and Effect in Different Places

In 2010, Porer Nombo and I launched a book about indigenous Papua New Guinean plant knowledge to a large audience at a university near to his village on the north coast of that country. Members of the audience commented that the book made a record of important practices. But they asked if those practices were dependent on secret magic to be effective? What gave us the right to include such secrets? Or, if there was in fact something fundamental missing from the book (magical formulae to activate the processes described), then what was the use of publishing the book? Thinking through their questions suggested the need to analyse what ‘knowledge’ is in different places, and why plants might be effective in some, but not others. In this paper I attempt an explanation that does not rely on a ‘social’ explanation of magic but instead suggest that what we call ‘magic’ are mechanisms whereby a gardener (or healer, or hunter) positions an action, or a thing in relation to other things. I liken the way myth works in these systems to the way intellectual property law provides a comparable ‘mythic’ structure that locates effect in the places that have developed ‘knowledge economies’ and I conclude by asking; if places embody their history and politics, and generate different understandings of effect, then what are the implications of calling Porer's practices with regard to plants, ‘knowledge’?     

Knowing and the truth: Three histories of Daugo Island,Papua New Guinea

Courts of law in Melanesian countries, particularly in the aftermath of the colonial period, have attempted to accommodate ‘custom’. In Papua New Guinea they commonly hear land claims under terms of reference that acknowledge the wide variety of customs among the many ethno‐linguistic groups comprising the nation. A corollary of this liberalism is that, in theory, they admit ‘traditional evidence’ including legends and myths. Yet as courts of law they are required to apply some criteria of proof and to search for the ‘truth’ by examining the ‘facts’. A long‐running land case from Papua New Guinea and its aftermath raises interesting questions about what happens when oral history encounters these legal imperatives, and may help us appreciate why Melanesians often do not regard a court's decision as final.     

Recognising and Translating Knowledge: Navigating the Political,Epistemological, Legal and Ontological

What does it mean to call something ‘knowledge’ today? What does this recognition or translation require? And what does it entrain? This introduction makes a novel synthesis of contributions to the Special Issue and advances observations regarding the ‘mythic’ qualities of intellectual property law, the precipitation of ‘nature’, and the importance of attending to what is lost when things and practices are also called ‘knowledge’. The papers cohere around a timely set of observations and critiques: critiques of the way the knowledge economy makes demands and defines expectations about value; of how intellectual property law lies behind and shapes exclusions, inclusions, and inequalities; of the ‘mythic’ status of assumptions informing laws about ownership; and the implicit hierarchy contained within types of knowledge as understood through the categories of western epistemology. By taking up effect rather than veracity and certainty, contributors leave the definition of knowledge to ethnographic subjects. That is, they attend to where and how things come to be called knowledge, and for what reasons, noticing how equivalences across practices, made for the purpose of creating the possibility of exchange value (and thus of encouraging circulation) does its work at the expense of multiple aspects, values, and relations that are also discernable in social processes that produce ‘knowledge’.     

Looking beyond history: the optics of German anthropology and the critique of humanism

Late nineteenth-century German anthropology had to compete for intellectual legitimacy with the established academic humanities (Geisteswissenschaften), above all history. Whereas humanists interpreted literary documents to create narratives about great civilizations, anthropologists represented and viewed objects, such as skulls or artifacts, to create what they regarded as natural scientific knowledge about so-called ‘natural peoples’—colonized societies of Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas. Anthropologists thus invoked a venerable tradition that presented looking at objects as a more certain source of knowledge than reading texts. Visual representations, especially of the colonized, not only allowed anthropologists allegedly objective insight into humanity but also put them in direct contact with popular audiences of ethnographic spectacles, exotic photography, and even pornographic images. Anthropologists thus sought to create a peculiar kind of anthropological vision that both differentiated them from humanists as ‘objective’ natural scientists but also distinguished them from the leering ‘Schaulust’ that they believed characterized popular consumption of exotic images. To do so they invented technologies of visual representation that eschewed the subject position figured by linear perspective. These novel optics dispensed with the leering subject posited by popular spectacles and the knowing subject posited by humanism and created an anti-humanist form of knowledge.     

Stonhet and Yelotop: Body Images,Physical Markers and Definitions of Ethnic Boundaries in Papua New Guinea

The Wampar of Papua New Guinea are an ethnic group with contested boundaries and a strong ethnic identity and consciousness. Since their first contact with White missionaries, government officials and anthropologists, body images have changed and become more important. ‘Foreign’ migrants from other PNG provinces are now coming in great numbers into Wampar territory, where they find wealthy Wampar make good marriage partners. From peaceful relations with ‘foreigners’ in the 1960s and 1970s, the situation has changed to the extent that Wampar now have plans for driving men from other ethnic groups out of their territory. Within two generations, ideas of changeable cultural otherness have developed into stereotypes of unchangeable bodily differences. In this paper, I describe (1) changes in the perception of foreigners, and in the definition of ‘foreigner’ itself, (2) body images of the Wampar, and (3) conditions for these changes.     

Troubled landscapes,troubling anthropology: co‐presence,necessity, and the making of ethnographic knowledge

If ‘co‐presence is a condition of [anthropological] inquiry’ (Fabian), what sort of knowledge does it produce? I explore this question through an ethnography of a ‘troubled landscape’ in Malaysian Borneo: a lush, hilly region that has been the site of a dam construction and resettlement project since the late 2000s. My article uses the notion of co‐presence as both a lens through which to explore the predicaments of the four small communities affected by the scheme and a reflexive device that underscores the embeddedness of the ethnographic encounter in a larger relational field – one characterized as much by chance and necessity as it is by anthropologists’ intellectual agendas. In the process, I seek to trouble some of the methodological and ethical issues posed by anthropology's recent ‘ontological turn’, notably the long‐standing questions of what it means to ‘take seriously’ and how ethnography and the ethnographer are implicated in this project.     

Animism,fetishism, and objectivism as strategies for knowing (or not knowing) the world

Animistic or ‘relational’ ontologies encountered in non-Western (i.e. premodern) settings pose a challenge to Western (i.e. modern) knowledge production, as they violate fundamentalassumptions of Cartesian science. Naturalscientists who have tried seriously to incorporate subject-subject relations into their intellectual practice (e.g. Uexküll, Bateson) have inexorably been relegated to the margins. Surrounded by philosophers and sociologists of science (e.g. Latour) announcing the end of Cartesian objectivism, however,late modern or ‘post-modern’ anthropologists discussing animistic understandings of nature will be excused for taking them more seriously than their predecessors. It is incumbent on them to analytically sort out what epistemological options there are, and to ask why pre-modern, modern, and post-modern people will tend to deal with culture/nature or subject/object hybridity in such different ways. Animism, fetishism, and objectivism can be understood as alternative responses to universal semiotic anxieties about where or how to draw boundaries between persons and things.     

Making the Baruya great again: From glorified great men to modern suffering subjects?

This paper explores avenues for prestige‐making now available to and championed by the Baruya, the archetypal ‘Great Man’ people of Papua New Guinea, who I recently studied following previous work by Maurice Godelier. Amid critiques by Robbins and Ortner of anthropologists’ drive to document and empathise with “suffering subjects”, I suggest that being ‘left behind’ and ‘forgotten’ is an important part of Baruya social life that reinterprets previous ways of ‘making great men.’ Baruya exposure to material and institutional modernity remains very limited. Local rhetorics of being ‘last place’ (las ples) are both concomitant and discordant with Baruya assumptions and assertions of being ‘the greatest people’ of their region. Unable to revive traditional contexts for producing great men through warriorship, shamanism, cassowary hunting, and salt‐making, Baruya turn to the very modernity they cannot quite reach for their own pursuit of masculinity and prestige—which paradoxically now lies within domains also open to women. Desirous to both establish continuity with their glorified past and to depart from it, Baruya's local modernity itself constrains their newly‐shaped desire for prestige—and dramatically changes gender relations in the process. Though the concrete impossibility to ‘be great’ reinforces Baruya perceptions of enduring what we might call a ‘suffering slot’, the larger issue is how concrete experiences sediment into socio‐cultural change over time. This process is informed by a tension between a quest for modernity and its larger failure, resulting in a drive to reignite longer standing values of morality, spirituality, and ultimately, greatmanship.     

Mines and Monsters: A Dialogue on Development in Western Province,Papua New Guinea

This article analyses an internal debate between Gogodala villagers, Western Province, Papua New Guinea, in which they explore the concept of development through a dialogue that revolves around ela gi or ‘way of life’. The analysis focuses on two developmental projects: the Ok Tedi gold and copper mine, which affects eight Gogodala villages on the lower Fly River, and a test oil drill carried out among northern Gogodala villages in 1995. I propose that it is through ela gi, a lifestyle that encompasses an evangelical Christianity as well as the actions of the first ancestors and is based on a bodily experience of the environment, that community development is envisaged and debated. Whilst the oil drill in the north is discussed in terms of approval, villagers on the Fly River to the south are increasingly concerned about changes to their lifestyle and landscape. They explore this ambivalence through a discussion of the movements and moods of ancestrally‐derived ‘monsters’ or ugu lopala, creatures who patrol the waterways of both north and south villages. At the same time, Gogodala from both communities are articulating what the transition from ‘living on sago’ to a lifestyle based on money might mean. This dialogue foregrounds an ongoing debate about the roles that the environment, village practices, the ancestral past and Christianity play in the constitution of the Gogodala way of life, and how these factors may initiate a certain kind of development.     

Reflecting on Loss in Papua New Guinea

This article takes up the conundrum of conducting anthropological fieldwork with people who claim that they have ‘lost their culture,’ as is the case with Suau people in the Massim region of Papua New Guinea. But rather than claiming culture loss as a process of dispossession, Suau claim it as a consequence of their own attempts to engage with colonial interests. Suau appear to have responded to missionization and their close proximity to the colonial-era capital by jettisoning many of the practices characteristic of Massim societies, now identified as ‘kastom.’ The rejection of kastom in order to facilitate their relations with Europeans during colonialism, followed by the mourning for kastom after independence, both invite consideration of a kind of reflexivity that requires action based on the presumed perspective of another.     

How Malinowski sailed the Midnight Sun: the academic conference as ethnographic performance

Anthropology's scope is broader than its public, often limited to other anthropologists, while those who share their knowledge in the field with the ethnographer are too often cut off from anthropological debates about that knowledge. The anthropology conference, seen as research practice, proves successful in readmitting ethnographic subjects into anthropological dialogues. A symposium held in 2015 in Alotau, Papua New Guinea, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Malinowski's arrival in the Massim region, demonstrates how Massim peoples transcend anthropologists’ discursive presentations by using images, objects, and performances, diluting, along the way, anthropology's hierarchical control.     

In the shadow of industry: a study of culturization in Papua New Guinea

The activities of extractive industry have recently been framed by a language of corporate social responsibility that relies on a system of legibility and objectification. This process reifies ‘cultural units’, abstracting them from the rules of kinship, migration, and exchange that ensure social and economic security. I refer to this process and the ideology of ‘development’ that accompanies it as culturization and examine it in the context of oil extraction in Papua New Guinea's Kutubu region. Drawing on debates on the indigenization and politicization of ‘culture’, I present culturization as a process that relies on rules of inheritance and property to impose a structure of difference in contexts of extractive industry that ignores the intricacies of sociality that ultimately give life meaning. The aim of the paper is to both illustrate the consequences of this process and consider cognate ideas of ‘culture’ vis‐à‐vis ‘sociality’ to emphasize their mutual theoretical importance to contemporary anthropological inquiry.     

Interior Landscapes and External Worlds: the Return of Grand Theory in Anthropology1

This paper argues that the retreat from ‘theory’ characteristic of the postmodernist turn in anthropology has not had the impact on the ethics and politics of disciplinary practice that was hoped for. One reason for this is the problematic relationship between cultural relativism and identity politics which has paralysed the critical project in the discipline and prevented a more radical interrogation of two fundamental questions: ‘what is anthropology?' and ‘who is the anthropologist?'. Discussions in anthropological writing on hybridity and postcoloniality have more often highlighted the hybrid nature of `informants' than that of ‘anthropologists’. Feminist, native and minority writing in the discipline are areas where these questions have been seriously addressed through debates on positionality and location. However, the impact of these discussions on the politics of knowledge in the discipline are rarely recognised by ‘mainstrean anthropology’. One particularly noticeable lacuna is the fact that so little attention is paid to disciplinary education and its impact on theorising. Anthropology, rather than turning away from theory, should spend more time ‘anthropologising’ the concepts of ‘value’, ‘relativism’, ‘humanism’ and ‘comparison’ which underlie disciplinary theorising. The paper concludes by arguing for a return to theory in anthropology accompanied by a critical politics.     

“With AIDS I am happier than I have ever been before”

In her 2016 article Sherry Ortner discusses what she calls the rise of ‘dark anthropology’: that is, ethnographic work that analyses situations of domination, dispossession, and violence. She, like Joel Robbins ( 2013 ), posits as a counterpoint the emergence of ‘anthropologies of the good,’ which emphasise care and ethics. In this paper I put these two anthropological projects into generative tension through an analysis of HIV‐positive women's lives in Papua New Guinea. In the first part of the paper I demonstrate the ways in which resource extraction has created vulnerabilities to HIV—in part through the coerced marriages of women to powerful landowners. In the second, I discuss ways in which the antiretroviral era has made possible unexpected forms of kindness towards HIV‐positive women. I end the paper with a discussion of what HIV‐positive women mean when they claim that they are happier now than in their pre‐diagnosis lives.     

History as Resource: Moral Reckonings with Place and with the Wartime Past in Oro Province,Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT

Located in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, Higaturu Station is a place marked by multiple intersections of violence. Originally established as an Australian colonial headquarters, in 1943 it was the site of execution of 21 local Orokaiva men convicted – by the Australian administration – of treason during the Second World War. Eight years after the executions, the nearby Mount Lamington volcano erupted, killing thousands and devastating Higaturu. Today the place remains uninhabited but laden with memory and meaning, a site of ambivalent moral reckonings both with the colonial past and with the postcolonial present. These moral reckonings, in turn, intersect with peoples’ experiences of, and hope for, ‘development’. In Oro Province, history is becoming a resource – not unlike gold, or the oil palm plantations that extend across the landscape – which might attract outsiders, and with them forms of wealth and possibilities for realising the good life. Accordingly, Higaturu landowners work to attract outsiders to the site of the eruption and the hangings. At the same time, however, they worry that the outsiders they attract – including anthropologists – will exploit and profit from their history in the ways that so many outsiders have profited from the Province's other resources. Commercial considerations inform these hopes and worries, but the mobilisation of history-as-resource also speaks to other concerns, including about the relationships of insiders and outsiders across time, and the proper attributions of guilt, responsibility, and entitlement within colonial and postcolonial landscapes of remembrance.     

An Oceanic revolution? Stella and the construction of new femininities in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific

In August 2012, a new magazine for women was released in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Entitled Stella, the magazine provides an ideal opportunity to analyse shifting constructions of gender among educated, employed women in PNG and elsewhere in the Pacific. Drawing on interviews, surveys and readers’ letters, this article discusses Papua New Guinean women who, because they display ‘modern attributes’, are maligned and discredited as ‘inauthentic’. It then goes on to document the ways in which Stella is enabling such women to assert themselves anew. Arguing that the publication of Stella marks the arrival into the public sphere of a group hitherto consigned to the margins of Pacific societies on the basis that they represent an ‘inauthentic minority’, the article makes an important contribution to scholarly discussion about the emergence of new femininities in PNG and the Pacific.     

The Limits of Authenticity in Vietnamese Consumer Markets

In this article, I address the saliency of the concept of "authenticity" in contexts of international law and anthropological inquiry. Using my research findings in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam, I show that although Vietnamese shoppers distinguish between what they term real and fake goods, they do not share with foreign corporations and international trade organizations a preoccupation with product and brand authenticity. To make this point, I describe four types of goods—model goods, mimic goods, real goods, and fake goods—employed by shoppers in HCMC, and discuss why they have little in common with notions of "authenticity" and "ownership" inherent in international standards of intellectual property. I argue that these conceptual differences in the commercial sphere challenge claims about the universal applicability of intellectual property rights laws and also encourage anthropologists to ask whether authenticity is always a useful tool of cross-cultural understanding.     

A Partial View of Contemporary Anthropology

This address considers ethnographically a range of sites and practices central to sustaining the intellectual, pedagogical, professional, and public life of anthropology and related disciplines: research funding, human subjects review, scholarly publishing, program and personnel assessment, and intellectual property among them. The talk points to current practices of knowledge production and circulation in the United States and to the increasingly complex intersections among scholarly knowledge, managerialist language and practice, and private capital, intellectual and otherwise. It is meant to encourage serious ethnographic examination of the contexts within which anthropologists work, consideration of the potential consequences of these contemporary changes, and creative thought about the kinds of collegial and collective action that might be pursued to help sustain what we find to be of real value in the discipline and in our professional practice.     

Primitivist tourism and anthropological research: awkward relations★

Many anthropologists dislike the tourism depicted in the film Cannibal tours (1988), which values visited people for their supposed embodiment of an archaic mode of life, isolated from capitalist modernity. Here I approach such tourism through how its participants relate to anthropology, based on research into encounters between tourists and Korowai of Indonesian Papua. I juxtapose three patterns. First, Korowai sometimes assimilate me to ‘tourist’ or ‘tour guide’. Second, tourists often embrace ‘anthropology’ as an adjunct to their primitivist goals. Third, certain tourists investigate their own primitivism, in ways that parallel my research on that topic. This diversity of alignments of tourist, anthropologist, and Korowai calls for an analytic strategy not of seeking out the ultimate basic relations between these character-types, but of understanding categorization as a practice of its own, through which categorizers grapple with broader historical conditions.     

Afterword: Dark Anthropology in Papua New Guinea?

Ranging from colonial modernism to postcolonial disappointment, the papers in this collection explore the possibilities of Dark Anthropology and an Anthropology of the Good in Papua New Guinea. With these two prospects in mind, I consider what these papers tell us about the situations of rural people on the peripheries of large resource projects and those in ‘Last Places’ bypassed by development and the State. In all of these cases, difficult predicaments entail hardship or suffering, but are also met with responses seeking to realise varying versions of the good. This, in turn, prompts further questions about which and whose good are at issue amid a plurality of values. I conclude by suggesting that the ensemble of papers offers a retrospective on local versions of modernity as possibility contends with experience.