What’s the matter with technology? Long (and short) yams, materialisation and technology in Nyamikum village, Maprik district, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Things are not just consumable, they are made so. They acquire their ‘materiality’ not only through engagements with them as finished products, but also through processes that make them material, i.e. technical activities. This field of study in anthropology, rejected by dominant trends because of its deterministic connotations, is a useful way to explore processes of materialisation and to investigate the ‘inbuilt’ relationality of things and activities. This paper focuses on yam gardening in Nyamikum, an Abelam village of the East Sepik. Once harvested, long (and short) yams emerge not solely as phallic symbols, but also as artefacts, representations, living beings, ancestors, artworks, valuables and, mostly, food. Starting observations at the beginning of the operational sequences (‘chaînes opératoire’, Lemonnier 1992) within gardening techniques, a combination of gestures, body, materials, energy, tools, knowledge and behaviours takes us across domains of experience (embodiments, transformations, sociality, narratives) to illuminate how yams are made into ‘relational’ entities. They demonstrate that techniques create a web that materialises social and cultural values, condensing networks of relations into things. As the results of these (known or imagined) processes, things can demonstrate the material validities of representational—or ideological—components of technological phenomena and may be used to generate sociality.

Untangling Social, Ritual and Cosmological Aspects of Fishhook Manufacture in the Middle Mesolithic Coastal Communities of NE Skagerrak

“…Through this way of learning, performing a technique is made automatic. The embodied, non‐verbal body practices outlined by Marcel Mauss (: 77–96), and underlying Bourdieu's theory of practice (: 67–79) are socialization processes simultaneously affecting the body, the person and the artefact manipulated: ‘…daily engagements with the material world—itself created by sociotechnical interactions with the environment—also form physical occasions of re‐enactment of social values’ (Coupaye, : 96).…”

“…Resulting from technological transformations, things can encapsulate representational or ideological components and can be used to generate sociality. Things acquire meaning through technological processes and through people's engagement with them as finished products (Coupaye, : 2). Lemonnier () emphasizes how the manufacture of certain everyday objects may act as a stage for rendering visible the social relations within a group.…”

“…Techniques are also fundamentally connected with wider world‐views (White, : 119; Helms, ; Coupaye, ; Warren, : 24). According to Descola (: 3), practice is an organic totality in which material and conceptual aspects are closely interwoven.…”

“…Previous studies of bone technology and fishhooks are either interpretations along functional lines, where bone objects are related to site function and economy (Åhrberg, ), or macro‐scale approaches, aimed at identifying regional technological traditions (techno‐complexes) by the use of chaîne opératoires (David, ; Bergsvik and David, ). In the following, technologie culturelle , or cultural technology, will be applied as a method for untangling the social, ritual and cosmological aspects of fishhook manufacture (Lemonnier, , ; Coupaye, and b). Technological anthropologist Pierre Lemonnier () argues that the manufacture of simple objects and use of everyday technologies may be as meaningful as the manufacture of ritual objects and ritualized actions in mediating relationships.…”

Technique, power, transformation: views from Brazilian anthropology

“…In the Francophone environment, for example, technology may signify the study or reflection on technique (Sigaut, 1994: 422;Latour, 2010: 21). This has implications for anthropology, as Coupaye (2009) indicated, which is connected to the tradition inspired by Mauss's reflections on the topic (Mauss, 2006a).…”