Part and Whole Numbers: an ‘Enumerative’ Reinterpretation of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits and its Subjects.

ABSTRACT From the starting point that concepts of number can contain within them a representation of a society's overall cosmology, reinforcing and strengthening its reality in logical terms through practice (a process I call enumeration), this paper charts the meeting of two systems of enumeration. As such systems are constantly changing, we concentrate on a particular point in time and space: the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (CAETS) in 1898. Here a nineteenth century anthropology obsessed with reinforcing its position as science through the mathematicalisation of its methods met a Melanesian enumerative system bound to materiality and pattern. The conflict between intentionally abstractive and intensely material enumerative systems generated perplexing results which throw their underlying cosmologies into greater relief.     

The Gender of the Cosmos: Totemism,Society and Embodiment in the Sepik River

This article contributes to recent research on the foundations of society in Melanesia, both in terms of local representation and actual social practice, as well as body imagery and gender. I have three interrelated objectives. First, I present new data on the symbolism and politics of Eastern Iatmul cosmology and totemism (Sepik River, Papua New Guinea). Second, I engage Harrison's distinction between magical and material, or realist and nominalist, polities in Melanesia. Eastern Iatmul society is represented by totemic names and categories. Yet society also requires human agents to embody named entities: men rarely assert the existence of cosmological categories that are divorced entirely from the realm of human action. This is a key difference between Eastern Iatmul and other Sepik societies such as Manambu. Finally, I argue that there is a symbolic homology between the gendered human body, the body politic and the cosmos, an important perspective that has been lacking in Melanesian comparative studies. Totemism for Eastern Iatmul is largely a realm of male ritual-politics. Nevertheless, an idiom of maternal fertility and reproduction is salient in the local cosmology. For this reason, the gender of the cosmos, to invoke Marilyn Strathern, is androgynous.     

THE FORGOTTEN WOMEN: A HISTORY OF MIGRANT LABOUR AND GENDER RELATIONS IN VANUATU

Writing on the labour trade focuses on the question of whether Melanesian labourers recruited to work in Australia and Fiji were kidnapped slaves, or willing volunteers. This debate about victims versus actors tends however to be constructed from the viewpoint of the male recruit. The small minority of Melanesian women who were recruited are typically seen as motivated to go because of love or sexual relations with men, and are sometimes portrayed as ‘prostitutes‘. Through an examination of some primary sources, secondary interpretative histories and the oral history of one region of Vanuatu, this paper queries this image of women in the labour trade. It suggests moreover, that the labour trade must be seen as having dramatic effects on relations between women and men in Vanuatu's villages.     

Cleaning up after the Celtic Tiger: scalar 'fixes' in the political ecology of Tiger economies

This paper explores intersections between political economy and nature in the so-called Tiger economies that have risen to prominence since the 1960s. Whilst Tiger states are in many ways emblematic of the extremes of late capitalism, they are nevertheless characterized by socio-natural environments that are distinctive, both in terms of the political and economic interests that have underpinned them and their rates of production. Whilst produced under a distinctive set of capitalist social relations, the dialectical reading offered herein chooses to foreground the agency that socio-nature itself possesses in relation to prevalent class interests. This agency is conceptualized in terms of a series of cultural wars over transformed nature. Using a theoretically provocative case study that examines the politics of waste management in Ireland, the paper argues that in reflecting upon the role of such culture wars in the constitution of dominant social relations in Tiger states, the concepts of scalar strategies and struggles over scale may prove useful. Whilst social contests over the scaling of governance have tended thus far to focus upon the dialectical relations between scale and political economy, the paper argues that ecological projects too are fundamentally produced by and implicated in the structuration of scale. In calling for dialogue between political ecological studies and recent work in geography that has sought to theorize scale as a social process, the paper hopes to contribute towards the development of a political ecology of Tiger states.     

Teachers All: Samoan, Fijian, and Queensland Melanesian Missionaries in Papua, 1884–1914

Pacific Islands mission teachers were powerful agents of culture change in Oceania, and the Christianity they taught is part of the ideological and constitutional under-pinnings of several independent Pacific Island states. Their fullest impact was felt in the period between the 1880s and 1914, when vast distances were being crossed and diverse populations reached by evangelists from half a dozen Pacific nationalities. Below the common religious motivations professed by the Islands teachers there were sharp contrasts in expectations and behaviour. This paper compares the Samoan, Fijian, and Queensland Melanesian missionaries in Papua, a colony where Islanders were concentrated in larger numbers than elsewhere. The Samoans are given the greater balance of analysis in the paper, because the 187 male Samoans outnumbered both the Fijians (110 males) and Queensland Melanesians (46), and because the Samoans' expectations diverged more sharply from those of their Euro-pean colleagues than was the case with their Fijian and Queensland Melanesian contemporaries.     

Divergence,Sensitivity, and Nonequilibrium in Ecosystems

Contemporary theoretical debate in ecology and biogeography is often focused on equilibrium vs. nonequilibrium behavior in ecosystems and on the nature and source of ecosystem dynamics. It is suggested that these debates be recast in terms of the way ecosystems develop and respond to disturbances, rather than in terms of concepts often imported from mathematics, physics, and other fields. Using nonlinear dynamical systems theory, it is shown that key theoretical implications can be cast in terms of geoecologically significant phenomenologies such as divergent evolution, sensitivity to initial conditions and small disturbances, historical contingency, and path dependence. Examples show these phenomena are widely observed in ecosystems. Ecological and biogeographical theory can be problematized from within geography and ecology rather than fuzzy, abstract concepts such as equilibrium, self‐organization, “balance of nature,” or chaos. Complexity, sensitivity, variability, nonsteady states, and other concepts often associated with nonequilibrium or complexity‐theory frameworks have manifestations that are evident in observable ecological phenomena, in addition to theory and models.     

Neither ‘New Melanesian History’ nor ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’: Recovering Emplaced Matrilineages in Southeast Solomon Islands

ABSTRACT For two decades, Melanesianists have sought to reconcile what Robert Foster (1995) termed the ‘New Melanesian History’ and the ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’. The former describes historically oriented studies that critique representations of Melanesian custom as recent objectifications of strategically positioned discourses and practices. The latter describes culturally oriented, particularist studies that characterize Melanesian sociality as an undifferentiated plane of being without integral a priori units; on every scale, human agency must individuate persons and collectivities by means of ‘fraction’, ‘de‐conception’, and ‘decomposition’. In this article I present data from Solomon Islands that resist analysis in terms of an unqualified both/and synthesis of these orientations. Specifically, I argue that articulations of matrilineal connections to land among the Arosi of Makira are neither merely postcolonial reifications of custom nor historically conditioned ‘depluralizations’ from an always pre‐constituted social pleroma. Through historically situated case studies, I show how Arosi land disputes both reproduce and revalue matrilineally defined categories, each understood as the humanized continuation of an autonomous primordial essence. Recognition of the continuing importance of these categories among Arosi highlights what the New Melanesian Ethnography has obscured: that some Melanesians confront a historically transforming problem of how pre‐existent parts fit together to make up social totalities.     

ALGONQUIN NOTIONS OF JURISDICTION: INSERTING INDIGENOUS VOICES INTO LEGAL SPACES

ABSTRACT. Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal notions of geography, nature and space sometimes compete, and these differences can create barriers to joint environmental problem-solving. This paper examines the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation and Allies (AAFNA) and the strategies they used in juridical and legislative settings to make their voices heard. In the Tay River Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal (2000–2002), AAFNA attempted to introduced their knowledge of the environmental deterioration which would be caused by a Permit To Take Water issued to a multinational corporation by the Ontario Ministry of Environment. The paper is divided into two parts: first, it describes the concepts of Algonquin knowledge, jurisdiction and responsibility; second, it explores the strategies used to integrate their perspective into legal proceedings constructed by the Canadian government. This case reveals how some Algonquin people conceive of space and responsibility in deeply ecological, rather than narrowly juridical, terms. It establishes that their broad concepts of knowledge, land and jurisdiction are incompatible with existing Euro-Canadian divisions of legal responsibility and ecological knowledge, but at the same time can serve as the means by which they challenge the current structure of Aboriginal and Canadian relations.     

Fenced In: Intimacy and Mobility in Highlands Papua New Guinea

This paper is organised around the analysis of an ‘event’; a truck trip from Kwima, a Maring speaking settlement in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, to Banz in the Wahgi Valley and an evening spent on the road. The event forms a standpoint from which to assess the impact of the decline of civic space, and faltering legacy of colonial governmentality, in the Jimi since 1980. I describe the emergence of new forms of mobility based around the nexus between local forms of business and trucks. In particular I focus on new and anxious forms of masculine inside relationships, understood as a transformation of a habitus of intimacy, round which such mobility is built. I argue that this transformation should be understood in terms of the dialectical relationship between business as an expansive profit oriented project on the one hand, and its anchoring in clan defined space on the other. At the same time the event provides a vantage point to reflect on the nature of long‐term fieldwork, the methodological significance of the subjectivity of the ethnographer, and the nature of ethnographic error.     

The Environmental History of the Holocaust

ABSTRACT

The introduction conceptualizes environmental history of the Holocaust as a subdiscipline of Holocaust studies. The authors approach this emerging field of research through the context of environmental humanities with its current interest in the Anthropocene, soil science, forensics, multispecies collectives, and explorations of relations between ecocides and genocides. Proposed approach considers post-Holocaust spaces and landscapes as specific ecosystems and examines relations between its actors (human and non-human) in order to show the Holocaust’s spatial markers and long-terms effects. The article outlines existing literature on the subject, identifies the central research problems and questions, and discusses sources and methods. The authors demonstrate that the environmental history of the Holocaust applies a hybrid methodology that uses methods from various disciplines with the aim of creating new theories and interpretive categories and thus should be considered complementary to existing approaches in Holocaust studies. The authors follow the methodological principles of grounded theory in generating new concepts and seeking multidisciplinary methods for explaining nature’s role in the Holocaust and how Holocaust has changed nature. The authors claim that environmental history of the Holocaust broadens Holocaust studies as a field of research and opens up new questions concerning relations between nature and extermination in order to provide a more holistic perspective for exploring the relationship between culture and nature, genocide and ecocide. The approach proposed here shows Holocaust and post-Holocaust landscapes in terms of ecological/natural heritage, which might influence the way these spaces are commemorated, conserved and preserved, as well as used for tourist purposes.     

Octavia Hill Women Housing Managers in South Africa: femininity and urban government

Women trained in a system of housing management developed by Octavia Hill in Victorian England were employed in South Africa's Coloured and European townships from the mid-1930s. They were also involved in training South African women in this tradition which emphasized the mutual responsibilities of landlords and tenants and rested upon the formation of trusting relationships or friendships between women housing managers and the tenants. Octavia Hill's followers worked hard to make a place for women in the field of housing management and claimed that their femininity gave them special expertise in this area, especially in terms of training housewives in domestic skills and in building up the relations of trust required by Octavia Hill's system. This paper describes the implementation of this system of management in South Africa and considers the implications of the role of women in housing management for our thinking about the gendered character of the state. My main argument is that rather than being a precedent for the value of incorporating femininity and women into the state, Octavia Hill's management tradition had already incorporated both historically masculine and historically feminine practices. In so far as she and her followers (and perhaps other female reformers) played a role in shaping the nature of the state, then it could be argued the state reflected a mediation of masculinity and femininity rather than a dominant masculinity and a subordinated or segregated femininity.     

Piot,Personhood, Place and Mobility in Lihir,Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This paper is an exploration of the nature of personhood through the medium of the concept of piot in the Lihir islands, Papua New Guinea. Piot is an embodied experience in response to the movement of others in space. When people leave or arrive at a place and spend the night, others in the area feel unwell. Piot is thus one aspect of the relations between persons. I suggest that ideas of relational personhood are inadequate to fully comprehend piot, and, following LiPuma (1998) and Clay (1986) rather than Strathern (1988), argue that persons in Lihir are more than just relational beings who always act with others in mind. Piot is predicated on the dual themes of fixed sociality and mobility that are important in Lihir as elsewhere in Melanesia (cf Eves 1998; Patterson 2002). Through piot, persons comment on and sanction the movement of others, yet this mobility still occurs.     

The recollection of times past: Memory and event in Huichol narrative

Huichol cosmology, in general with the intellectual productions of other mesoamerican groups, has been presented as an anarchic hetrogeneity of deities and folk heros whose deeds are executed in an indeterminate and constantly changing landscape.

It is argued that sacred narratives, far from being the productions of caprice, structure the relations between divine personages and events by providing a classificatory matrix which partitions the universe into moral spaces. The value of an event or the significance of a deity is given by its spatial position.

Furthermore this scheme is extended to incorporate pre‐conquest and post‐conquest epochs into the same moral configurations and thereby provide a paradigm on which inter ethnic relations in the area are predicated.

The vectors of this order of orders provide the ligaments on which the structure of events is apprehended and the referents of memory are dependent.     

Changes in children's nature-based experiences near home: from spontaneous play to adult-controlled,planned and organised activities

A qualitative case study from Brumunddalen, Norway, indicates that children's use of nature areas near their homes have changed substantially from being spontaneous and self-initiated to being part of planned, organised and adult-controlled activities. This study explores the association between changes in outdoor play and wider patterns of change in childhood today, as increasing amounts of play time is spent in institutions and organised activities, or occupied by computer and internet usage. The paper discusses these effects in terms of social relations as well as children's identity formation. The subject was investigated through adults' memories of their own childhood and their observations of children's practices.     

Beyond assimilation and refusal: a Warlpiri perspective on the politics of recognition

This paper takes up the concept of recognition as an ever-present structuring arrangement in relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. Recognition, in both positive and negative guises, is understood here to foreclose the terms of those relations. For Warlpiri people of Central Australia who have achieved positive recognition and the attendant confirmation of legal rights in land and native title, the contradictions and frustrations of recognition continue to be multiple. Looking back across the eight decades since Warlpiri were first recognised in particular ways by settler-colonists, the paper explores a series of encounters where transformation is visible but ultimately undermined. The paper explores these issues by way of the observations of one remarkable cross-cultural innovator and his quest to ‘be free to the world’. In tracing this work of interpretation and its strategic application to the field of intercultural relations the paper argues that what is being pursued should not be mistaken for assimilation, nor the refusal of recognition, but rather a mode of reciprocal engagement that carries with it significant transformative potential.     

In Search of Regional Industrial Culture: The Role of Labour Organisations in Old Industrial Regions

This paper examines the ways in which the institutions of organised labour contribute to the formulation of regional industrial culture. We argue that industrial culture is fundamental to an understanding of uneven regional development. This industrial culture is dynamic, both product and constituent of negotiated social activities that involve the traditions and capacities of labour as an actor in its own right. We address the question of precisely how these connections between economy and culture are made. This is done through a detailed case study of the way in which one labour organisation—the national steel labour union in the UK, the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (ISTC)—has both shaped and been influenced by the industrial culture of Teesside in northeast England. There, we argue, nationally led centrist labour politics came together with paternalistic capital-labour relations and localistic forms of self-identification to create a distinctive regional industrial culture. We focus in particular upon four processes: the social construction of work in the steel industry; relations with other steel regions within the UK; fragmentation in collective bargaining; and the ISTC's recent reorientation towards community unionism. We conclude that much remains to be done given the powerful legacies from decades of innate conservatism, but that it is now at least possible to begin to address important questions about the future direction of the local economy. Thinking in terms of the contingent interaction between cultural and economic attributes, centrally incorporating labour, is useful because it opens up the concepts of adaptability and institutional blockage to wider interpretations.     

CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL METABOLISM

The emergence of culture and cultural evolution is the result of an evolutionary process, evident also in non‐human species. What is specifically human is the dominance of cultural evolution. This does not mean that cultural evolution has replaced organic evolution, but rather that both have merged into one coevolutionary complex. Through niche construction, organic modern humans are the product of cultural evolution. This cannot be explained by adaptation to natural environment or by sexual selection. Cultural evolution with its coevolved organic traits did not so much enhance competence towards the natural environment as it did competence to develop and maintain cooperation. In the process, culture became a “system” with its own imperatives and integrating forces, differentiating into several autopoietic subsystems: the symbolic‐cognitive subsystem, the economic subsystem and the political subsystem. There are however social‐metabolic constraints that put limits on their evolutionary degrees of freedom. Culture's autopoietic reach has adaptive boundaries. The concept of social metabolism attempts to capture the unity of “persons” in a physical‐biological sense and “culture” in a symbolic sense, the decisive point being that culture must be understood as an autopoietic system sui generis. The social‐metabolic system of relations and interactions between nature, human population and culture is inherently coevolutionary. The history of social metabolism is the history of the coevolution of two autopoietic systems – an open and blind non‐orthogenetic evolutionary process.     

Shit Beautiful: Tambu and Kina Revisited

The concept of inalienability as discussed by Annette Weiner (1992) seems to privilege Polynesia over Melanesia in terms of a more ‘evolved’ logic of object possession. Two instantiations of material culture from the Wiru and Tolai people, pearlshells and coils of shell-money respectively, are compared and assessed for their inclusion into the category of “inalienable possessions.” The conclusion argues against fitting Melanesian artefacts into a developmental continuum of inalienability, and signals the need for a more contextual and aesthetic reading of material culture in comparative projects.     

Local consumption cultures in a globalizing world

Focusing on the resilience of distinctive local consumption cultures, this paper challenges some of the more sweeping claims that have been advanced in the name of 'globalization'. Thinking about a 'globalizing' rather than a fully 'globalized' world encourages us to examine the deeply contested nature of the concept and to explore the geographically uneven nature of recent economic, political and cultural transformations. This paper approaches globalization as a site of struggle rather than as an established fact, emphasizing the need for empirically grounded studies of the impact of 'globalization' on consumer cultures in different geographical contexts. The paper examines the way that producers have 'customized' their products for different markets (drawing on evidence from China and South Africa). It then reviews case study evidence from three contrasting consumption cultures: consumption and 'public culture' in India, 'consumer nationalism' in China, and 'artful consumption' in Russia. The paper concludes by identifying some current debates and outlining some directions for future research, including a re-emphasis on consumption and material culture; an exploration of consumption as social practice; the delineation of commodity-specific consumption cultures; and some reflections on the political, ethical and methodological issues that are being raised in contemporary consumption research.