‘Operation Restore Public Hope’: Youth and the Magic of Modernity in Vanuatu

ABSTRACT This paper explores the measures known as ‘Operation Restore Public Hope,’ which were authorized during the State of Emergency in January 1998 in Port Vila, Vanuatu, after rioting and looting erupted over the alleged government mismanagement of the mandatory workers' savings fund. The excessive police violence associated with these ‘clean‐up measures’, I argue, undermined the state's claim ‘to restore public hope’ and illuminated the changing relationship between kastomary leaders and the state as well as their competing strategies to define and maintain social order. The extraordinary events of the State of Emergency point to the confluence of sorcery practices and police violence; underline the contested nature of everyday life, and draw attention to the disciplining of young bodies in new urban spaces. Exploring the deployment of a sorcery technique to counter police violence highlights the landscapes of modern power in Vanuatu where magical and state practices coexist with regimes of violence.     

The Legacy of Planter Jean My: Analysis of Two Private Colonial Homes in Southern Melanesia

This paper discusses two private houses built by New Hebrides planter Jean Marot dit My, one on Santo Island, northern Vanuatu, and another in Nouméa, New Caledonia. The former is relatively well known in Vanuatu, as it is assumed to be the inspiration behind the octagonally shaped mansion of the character Emile de Becque, a French planter in James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific. Mr My’s houses are linked to French Art Deco style and are here compared to one another. Through the study of their similarities and differences, and of their interiors, the integration of Art Deco style and design can be demonstrated. While they represent two very different ways of life, they show the inspiration, aspirations and trajectory of a colonial French family in southern Melanesia. Hopefully, this research will help promote the protection of both houses, through emphasising the importance of their historical and literary connections.     

Christianity and Cultural Reconfigurations in South West Pentecost.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the cultural impact of the introduction and evolution of Christianity in south west Pentecost, Vanuatu from the late 19th century to the 21st century. In particular it offers an explanation for the success and sustainability of Christianity due to the willingness of local individuals and communities to seize the new world view; and their welcome of Christianity's capacity to provide principles for appropriate social behaviour, opportunities for individual spiritual salvation, and the potential for temporal achievement. It acknowledges novel conduits to power and prestige emerging from socio‐cultural reconfigurations consequential to the tensions between Christianity and kastom in the 20th century, and scrutinizes the manner in which Christians in the 21st century have capitalised on kastom in their response to the pressures and demands of globalisation.     

Moving Words: Christian Language and the Modern World

Within the anthropology of Christianity, much attention has been paid to the convergence of Christianity with modern understandings of language. In this essay, I review scholarship that traces the historical connections between modern and Christian views of language, particularly in British colonial attacks on Hindu language practices, and I examine two recent ethnographies that offer different vantage points on the variety of ways in which contemporary Christians use language in a self-consciously modern way.     

HISTORY,ANTHROPOLOGY, COLONIALISM,AND THE STUDY OF INDIA

Autobiography of an Archive is a collection of essays by Nicholas B. Dirks written since 1991, preceded by an autobiographical introduction. This review article discusses the collection in relation to Dirks's overall scholarship and the wider intellectual field in which history, anthropology, and colonialism intersect in the study of India. Dirks has written three books: The Hollow Crown (1987), an “ethnohistory” of a “little kingdom” in south India; Castes of Mind (2001), about colonialism, anthropology, and caste in India; and The Scandal of Empire (2006), which discusses the foundations of British imperial sovereignty. In The Hollow Crown and other writings, Dirks significantly contributed to the debate about the “rapprochement” between anthropology and history, which was prominent in the 1980s. But in the 1990s, Dirks thought, the rapprochement ground to a halt; the relationship between anthropology and colonialism then came to the fore, and Castes of Mind, as well as some of these essays, were influential critical studies of colonial anthropology. In recent essays, Dirks has examined the “politics of knowledge” and the postwar development of South Asian area studies in the United States. This article argues that although the relationship between anthropology and history is now rarely debated, historical anthropology has continued to develop since the 1980s. Moreover, anthropologists in general now recognize that history matters, and that colonialism crucially shaped modern society and culture in India, and other former colonial territories. Many of Dirks's conclusions about, for example, Indian kingdoms and caste in colonial discourse, have been criticized by other scholars. Nonetheless, anthropological writing, especially on India, is no longer unhistorical, as it once often was, and Dirks's scholarship has played a valuable part in bringing about this change.     

TOWARDS SHARED OWNERSHIP: PROPERTY,GEOGRAPHY, AND TREATY MAKING IN BRITISH COLUMBIA

In British Columbia, Canada's westernmost province, unresolved Aboriginal claims to land remain highly contentious. Since the early 1990s, a unique treaty negotiation process has sought to resolve questions about land ownership and establish a new relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Crown. After almost two decades, the limitations of this treaty process are increasingly evident and answers to the land question remain elusive. This article examines this treaty‐making process through a property lens, focusing on how particular models of property are privileged by and produced through this approach to treaty. I argue that the treaty process, as currently structured, works to entrench dominant Western forms of property across Aboriginal territories in a highly separate and unequal manner, and as such, serves to reinscribe asymmetrical relations of power between Aboriginal peoples and the Crown. To a considerable extent, this asymmetrical approach to property making explains the lack of progress towards treaties. The final part of the article explores alternative approaches to treaty proposed by Aboriginal groups. I argue that these proposals, which reflect Aboriginal understandings of property, offer a new and more promising direction for treaty making. In particular, the emphasis on sharing lands and resources, as well as the wealth generated from these, provides a path to reconcile competing property interests and to build a new and more respectful relationship between the Crown and Aboriginal peoples. I suggest that the difficulties of treaty making in British Columbia reflect broader challenges associated with land restitution and reconciliation in settler colonies.     

Giving Up Homicide: Korowai Experience of Witches and Police (West Papua)

This paper examines the recent historical conjuncture of two regimes of violence in the lives of Korowai of West Papua: the endogenous violence of witches and witch execution, and the exogenous violence of Indonesian police. I argue that Korowai speakers' witchcraft beliefs and former practices of witch execution followed a culturally distinctive logic of shock and redemptive transaction, according to which violence could be generative of more positive qualities of relationship. By contrast, Indonesian police appear to Korowai as a qualitatively new kind of violent agent, with whom it is impossible to transact in any direct, potentially redemptive manner. In this situation, fear of police is the main reason Korowai say they have stopped executing witches. I also argue, however, that police violence appears to have had an additive local life beyond the scope of direct police involvement in local affairs. Reports, threats, figurative evocations, and emulative enactments of police violence are all now actively taken up by Korowai in their own projects of making a social world. Korowai reception of police violence has been profoundly mediated and shaped by local sociocultural principles. In this respect, the current intercultural dialogue of and about violence is one in which local and state agency have been complexly co‐constitutive.     

Afterword

ABSTRACT

In approaching history as a site of scholarly analysis and activist praxis, the papers in this volume open up new ways to think ethnographic and archival methods together. This afterword considers how these activist ethnographic representations work as part of the ethical and analytic commitments of contemporary anthropology more broadly. I ask what possibilities are opened when we as scholars think with other people’s struggles. Such dialogic encounter is a way in which activist anthropologies create possibilities for new imaginative frontiers and shared projects.     

Bridging anthropology and its archives: an analysis from the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives

Much has been written about the need to open up archives as part of the decolonial turn and decolonizing methodologies. What does this look like in practice for anthropology? Despite increasing interest in archives and ‘the archival turn’ among anthropologists, our study at the National Anthropological Archives (NAA) found that anthropologists who use archives in their work lack familiarity with organizational principles and histories that would help them navigate and gain access to these records, as well as critique them. Beyond reporting this recent research, we posit that the disconnect between archives and anthropology is not isolated to the NAA or the US, but is pervasive in the discipline. In sharing this work, we hope to inspire other similar institutional moves and to promote archival education and scholarly engagement in anthropology and its training programmes.     

Negotiating Materiality: International and Local Museum Practices at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre and National Museum

In this paper, we examine the idiosyncratic ways in which the Vanuatu Cultural Centre has incorporated global museum technologies into highly localised systems of object management. The convergence of understandings of subject‐object relations, and indeed of materiality, highlights the effects of museum practices of objectification on local practice as well as the effects of local agenda on museum practice. In constructing a holistic analysis of the current work of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, we examine practices of display and exhibition in the context of the archive and storeroom, and grass‐roots research; moving away from the emphasis on visuality and exhibition found in many museum studies, to an approach that locates display as but one form of objectification within wider social practice. We challenge some analytic models that view Melanesia and Euro‐America as zones that organise subject‐object relations dichotomously, highlighting instead the mutual contingency of relationships between persons and things between cultural contexts and the effects of the international exchanges of museum practice on the development of these relations.     

Childhoods in Shifting Analytical Spaces: Cross-Cultural,Biocultural, and Human Ecological Perspectives

In this article I discuss the variation and possible connections among human ecological, biosocial, and cross-cultural approaches to the anthropology of childhoods. On the basis of this comparison I consider recent analytical innovations in theorizing children's enculturation and socialization, and new research possibilities related to childcare and relatedness. Finally, I address the dimension of power in the study of children as active participants in socialization within their life worlds. Heterogeneity characterizes current childhood studies.     

THE TIME OF THE SELF AND THE TIME OF THE OTHER

What is time? This essay offers an attempt to think again about this oldest of philosophical questions by engaging David Hoy's recent book, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, which proposes a “history of time‐consciousness” in twentieth‐century European philosophy. Hoy's book traces the turn‐of‐the‐century debate between Husserl and Bergson about the different senses of time across the various configurations of hermeneutics, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and feminist theory. For him, what is at stake in such a project is to distinguish between the scientific‐objective “time of the universe” and the phenomenology of human temporality, “the time of our lives.” Hoy's approach is to organize his book around the three tenses of time—past/present/future—and to view objective‐scientific time as derived from the more primordial forms of temporalizing lived experience that occur in our interpretation of time. In my reading of Hoy's work, I attempt to explore how “time” (lived, experiential, phenomenological) can be read not in terms of “consciousness” (Hoy's thematic), but in terms of the self's relationship with an Other. That is, my aim is less to establish a continental tradition about time‐consciousness, understood through the methods of genealogy, phenomenology, or critical theory, than it is to situate the problem of time in terms of an ethics of the Other. In simple terms, I read Hoy's project as too bound up with an egological interpretation of consciousness. By reflecting on time through the relationship to the Other rather than as a mode of the self's own “time‐consciousness,” I attempt to think through the ethical consequences for understanding temporality and its connection to justice.     

Demographic growth and the “cultural factor” in ireland: rethinking the relationship between structure and event

The structure/event dichotomy has been a bone of contention in anthropology for many decades. The so‐called “synchronic paradigms” such as functionalism and structuralism saw “structure” (defined in various ways) as the object of anthropological analysis, whereas “events” were left to historians. Recent trends in anthropological thought are eager to dismiss the ahistoricity of traditional approaches as they attempt to include the diachronic perspective within anthropological research. Very often, this re‐historization of anthropology has entailed the criticism of the structure/event dichotomy. By using data from Irish demographic history, in this article I postulate the need to recover this dichotomy as a fundamental component of the anthropological approach to human affairs.     

Mothers/Fighters/Citizens: Violence and Disillusionment in Post‐War El Salvador

This article explores post‐war El Salvador as characterised by disillusionment in the nation's neoliberal rebuilding project. A key part of my argument is that this disillusion‐ment is gendered. Specifically, I focus on a spectrum of gendered experiences and responses to social and inter‐personal violence in El Salvador's recent history. Is there a relationship between wartime political violence, continued processes of exclusion (i.e. education, healthcare, housing), and post‐war waves of domestic violence, youth violence and ‘random’ violence? While some scholars posit questions regarding Salvadoran toler‐ance to violence through time, I tackle this question by focusing on emerging criticisms of El Salvador's post‐war reconciliation. I privilege a focus on the everyday and people's ambiguities as they deal with political change and a neoliberal economy that marginalises the rural sector. In particular, I argue for placing many rural women's stories of gender‐based violence, their assertions of an embodied vulnerability and daily insecurity, within a political economic understanding of the contradictions of El Salvador's peace and nation‐building project. Through a series of ethnographic examples based on seventeen months of research in a former warzone, I suggest that a daily and gendered violence is rendered invisible. My aim is to theorise a range of women's and men's losses and to impart the urgency of their narratives that problematise assumptions of what constitutes pain, sorrow and the challenges of war‐torn life. This is an attempt to write outside privileged texts that ask subaltern women to speak in a collective voice and articulate their past loss and future hopes. In doing so, I discuss methodology and historicise my own fraught positioning as an international witness/researcher at a very particular moment of El Salvador's transition to democracy.     

“Neptune to the Common-wealth of England” (1652): the “Republican Britannia” and the continuity of interests

ABSTRACT

In the seventeenth century, John Kerrigan reminds us, “models of empire did not always turn on monarchy”. In this essay, I trace a vision of “Neptune’s empire” shared by royalists and republicans, binding English national interest to British overseas expansion. I take as my text a poem entitled “Neptune to the Common-wealth of England”, prefixed to Marchamont Nedham’s 1652 English translation of Mare Clausum (1635), John Selden’s response to Mare Liberum (1609) by Hugo Grotius. This minor work is read alongside some equally obscure and more familiar texts in order to point up the ways in which it speaks to persistent cultural and political interests. I trace the afterlife of this verse, its critical reception and its unique status as a fragment that exemplifies the crossover between colonial republic and imperial monarchy at a crucial moment in British history, a moment that, with Brexit, remains resonant.     

Assessing the Effects of the Grundrisse in Anglophone Geography and Anthropology

Abstract: Selections of the Grundrisse were translated into English beginning in 1964; a full translation did not appear until 1973. Anglophone Marxian social science has changed dramatically since then; this article attempts to assess the role of the Grundrisse in these changes, focusing specifically on anthropology and geography. In geography the effects are most apparent in the work of David Harvey, who was among the earliest Anglophone social scientists to undertake a full reinterpretation of Marx in the light of the Grundrisse. I identify four insights that can be seen in Harvey's writings and elsewhere in recent human geography, but whose relation to the Grundrisse is not often acknowledged. In anthropology, the effects of the Grundrisse are perhaps even more pronounced but also more complex and obscure; nonetheless, a similar, and similarly under‐acknowledged, influence can be discerned, especially in historical anthropology and recent studies of value. I suggest that the Grundrisse's translation into English has facilitated a convergence of anthropology and geography, and that critical ethnography in this vein is needed to grapple with the financialization of everything, in which commodification is only a preliminary step.     

Style in New Ireland Art and Culture: Grasping the Native's Point of View

A review of definitions of style and studies of particular people suggest that while many studies of art discuss iconography, social relationships, structure, identity, form, function, and so on, few discuss style; and fewer discuss style as world view, ethos, values, or gestalt. In this paper, I report some findings of field work in the arts and cultures of New Ireland and New Hanover in support of research in cultural anthropology on style in this larger sense. I will provide some documentation for ‘the Native's point of view’ on this subject, which affirms its importance in any study of culture.     

Introduction

This introduction will consider how these four papers mark new boundaries of an expanding anthropological project both in their theoretical aspirations and their empirical reach. While the papers address quite different questions, each is relevant to the contemporary relationship between anthropology, indigenous people and the Australian nation. To highlight that relevance I will draw on elements of anthropology's history using some of Stanner's observations in the 1950s. In the last section I discuss some contemporary conditions and criticisms of anthropology.     

KOSELLECK,ARENDT, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

This essay is the first attempt to compare Reinhart Koselleck's Historik with Hannah Arendt's political anthropology and her critique of the modern concept of history. Koselleck is well‐known for his work on conceptual history as well as for his theory of historical time(s). It is my contention that these different projects are bound together by Koselleck's Historik, that is, his theory of possible histories. This can be shown through an examination of his writings from Critique and Crisis to his final essays on historical anthropology, most of which have not yet been translated into English. Conversely, Arendt's political theory has in recent years been the subject of numerous interpretations that do not take into account her views about history. By comparing the anthropological categories found in Koselleck's Historik with Arendt's political anthropology, I identify similar intellectual lineages in them (Heidegger, Löwith, Schmitt) as well as shared political sentiments, in particular the anti‐totalitarian impulse of the postwar era. More importantly, Koselleck's theory of the preconditions of possible histories and Arendt's theory of the preconditions of the political, I argue, transcend these lineages and sentiments by providing essential categories for the analysis of historical experience.