Totem and Transaction: the Objectification of ‘Tradition’ Among North Mekeo

Abstract

Most recent treatments of Melanesian post‐contact change have presumed that objectifications of ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ have intensified and proliferated in response to the forces of colonialism and the penetration of the nation‐state. Harrison (2000) has recently argued, however, that in pre‐colonial times too Melanesians characteristically objectified their cultural practices and identities as ‘possessions’ that could be readily exchanged or transacted. Supposedly, the key difference between the two eras has accorded with different formulations of ‘property’: ‘private property’ and the logic of ‘possessive individualism’ in the post‐contact era; and ‘trading and gift‐exchange systems’ or ‘prestige economies’ in pre‐contact times. In this article I examine Harrison's portrayal of Melanesian cultural practices as ‘possessions’ and the notions of ‘property’ that he sees as 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. I argue from the perspective of the New Melanesian Ethnography that Harrison's view of pre‐contact prestige economies and trade and gift exchange systems retains several misleading a priori assumptions about ‘commodity exchange’ and, illustrating the potential of the New Melanesian Ethnography for historical applications, that he overemphasizes the extent to which post‐contact changes in cultural objectification have involved individualised and commodified forms of property. Consequently, in the case of North Mekeo, both the continuities and the changes between pre‐ and post‐contact cultural objectifications may have proceeded differently from the ways Harrison has outlined for Melanesia generally.

Sharing the Earth, Dividing the Land : Land and territory in the Austronesian world

“…Interestingly, North Mekeo can be seen here to qualify as a coastal Melanesian instance of the 'fluid ontologies' characteristic of non-Austronesian groups in the Highlands of PNG Stewart and Strathern 2001) and the 'flow of life' which has been reported widely for Austronesian-speaking societies of South-East Asia, particularly Indonesia . In this context, I focus on the implications of processes and transactions involving ngaka in accordance with other writings concerning 'partible personhood', sociality and agency among Mekeo specifically and in Melanesia generally (Mosko 1985(Mosko , 1992(Mosko , 1995(Mosko , 1998b(Mosko , 2001a(Mosko , 2002Strathern 1988;Wagner 1986Wagner , 1991. In short, the critical element of interpersonal exchange and elicitation of which North Mekeo people and social relations are composed and decomposed is the substance, ngaka acquired originally from resources and beings of the territorial world, incorporated into the bodies and relations of human beings and, on death, returned to the ground in human burials.…”

“…It is, I believe, inherent in contexts of landownership that there is no one-to-one correspondence of a single group of owners with respect to a single parcel of land owned. And thirdly, to speak of the relation of people to land in simple terms of 'property' and 'ownership' seriously distorts the character of how villagers conceptualise their ties to land and, thereby, how they see themselves and their social relations (see Mosko 2002). This aspect of the problem invokes the distinctive sense of Melanesian personhood, agency and sociality on which I will focus later in this chapter.…”

“…Moreover, to the extent that one's life is dependent on numerous prior exchanges and ingestions of ngaka, every person is constituted of the personal contributions of other people. Here you can detect the way in which my and other Melanesianists' discussions of personal partibility enters into the flow of ngaka vital essence throughout human life (Mosko 1985(Mosko , 1992(Mosko , 1995(Mosko , 1998a(Mosko , 2001a(Mosko , 2001b(Mosko , 2002Strathern 1988;Damon 1983;Battaglia 1986;Wagner 1986Wagner , 1991Munn 1986;Foster 1995).…”

“…However, as I have described about North Mekeo culture earlier (Mosko 1985), space and time, society and the body are conceived as homologous and interconnected. Moreover, in recent publications (Mosko 1992(Mosko , 1997(Mosko , 1998a(Mosko , 2001a(Mosko , 2000b(Mosko , 2002, I have been investigating additional related dimensions of North Mekeo sociality, particularly the dynamics of personhood, chiefly agency and socio-cultural change, which may now shed considerable new light on North Mekeo notions of territoriality. I thus begin within some of the parameters of my original accounts of North Mekeo culture, social organisation and embodiment.…”

Counterparts: Clothing, Value and the Sites of Otherness in Panapompom Ethnographic Encounters

“…This has been as true of authors who attempt historical analyses of colonial and post-colonial relations (Bashkow 2006;Fabian 1983;Thomas 1991), as of those focusing on social change in the present (Robbins 2004;Robbins and Wardlow 2005). There is an excellent and extensive literature on the adoption and modification of Western and mission clothing styles in the Pacific and beyond (Colchester 2003;Küchler and Were 2005;Mosko 2002Mosko , 2007) that works in this vein, examining how Pacific people have worked to appropriate and 'indigenise' colonial clothing. This is a project aimed at showing that colonial values and capitalist economies do not overcome indigenous value systems (documented, for example, in Englund and Leach 2000;Gell 1993;Kasaipwalova 1974;Kuehling 2006;O'Hanlon 1989;Strathern 1979), but become part of them (Moore 2004).…”