Development at the Edge of Difference: Rethinking Capital and Market Relations from Lugu Lake,Southwest China

This paper rethinks the relationships between capitalist development in indigenous places and the fabric of local differences and specificities. It first develops a critical appraisal of the celebration of ethnic identities, local agency and indigenous knowledge in existing literatures. It suggests that, based on such insights, we can further envision the possibility of questioning and problematising the ontology and concept of the capitalist economy. Above all, this paper is interested in non-capitalist factors percolating into capitalist economies and creating fissures in their logical and ontological coherence. It examines how capitalist economies depend on local specificities to achieve particular configurations. We elucidate this argument with a case study of indigenous development in Lugu Lake, Southwest China, which is inhabited by the ethnic Mosuo people. Through the dual lenses of land and labour, we pay special attention to the transition from grassroots development initiatives to heavy dependence on exogenous capital and entrepreneurs.     

‘Which Way?’ Big Man,Road Man,Chief: Bernard Narokobi's Multifaceted Leadership Career

ABSTRACT

Among the topics that Bernard Narokobi addresses in his numerous writings is the place of traditional Melanesian leadership styles in a modern Papua New Guinea. This article explores Narokobi's leadership status to show how far-reaching and multifaceted his leadership career was: he was at once a traditional Melanesian bigman, a chief, and a modern public figure. The actions he took in these roles were for him a matter of the highest principle, something that at times had severe political consequences. Because in Melanesia the scope of the ritual that takes place upon an individual's death is an index of their status, an analysis of the mortuary rituals undertaken upon Narokobi's death provides insight into the significance of his leadership at every level from his clan up to the national level of Papua New Guinean society.     

West Papua,Indonesia and the Melanesian Spearhead Group: competing logics in regional and international politics

The idea of a shared Melanesian identity has been consolidated over the last three decades or so through the most important subregional organisation in the South-West Pacific—the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG). The solidarity of this group has been strained over various issues from time to time, but none is as fraught as the Indonesian occupation of what is commonly known as West Papua, whose indigenous Papuan people are ethnically Melanesian. In addition to recounting the Indonesian takeover of West Papua in the context of the dynamics of decolonisation, the Cold War and early regional development, the article examines the emergence of Melanesian identity and the MSG, before considering more recent developments. These focus on a recent bid by West Papuans for MSG membership, key aspects of Indonesia's role in the Melanesian subregion, and the extent to which these developments highlight competing logics in regional and international politics.     

Artisan dynamics in the age of colonialism: the social history of Moroccan Jewish goldsmiths in the inter-war period

The article highlights the social history of Jewish goldsmiths in French Morocco between the two World Wars, a period in which the global capitalist system challenged their historical monopoly over production and commerce. Continued external intervention (Moroccan commercial treaties with European capitalist markets), direct competition (the import of cheap industrial products and an influx of entrepreneurs), the mechanisation of local manufacturing, the encouragement of individualism resulting in the breakdown of Jewish social cohesion and the taking over of political institutions by France (the Makhzen) and its local agent (the Muhtaseb) had all eroded the Jewish monopoly of the precious-metals industry and created an unexpected atmosphere of strong economic, political and judicial pressures on Jewish goldsmiths. In order to explore the struggle and survival of Jewish goldsmiths in the new economic order, the article addresses the following key questions: (1) What was the influence of various forces, both external and internal, on the Jewish goldsmiths' industry?; (2) How did the artisans respond to and cope with these new economic conditions?; and (3) Why did the Protectorate revert back from liberal economic policy to that of local producers' protection?     

从稻盛哲学看传统文化对企业家的现代意义

对于企业文化的建设,很多人主张以西方的现代管理模式为基础。这种观点忽视了传统文化对经营者的现代意义。本文以日本著名企业家稻盛和夫为例,从传统的商业模式、日本传统文化、中国传统文化三个方面论述传统文化对于经营者提高心性、管理企业的意义。同时,本文建议,中国当代的企业家要避免在经商与做人两个方面都忽视传统的错误倾向。     

From the Grassroots: Bernard Narokobi and the Making of Papua New Guinea's Constitution

ABSTRACT

Bernard Narokobi's concept of the Melanesian Way was influenced by a variety of factors, including his own childhood in the village, his religion, and the understandings of the people around him. He also drew inspiration from his exposure to the views and opinions of the many Papua New Guineans who contributed to the work of the Constitutional Planning Committee (CPC) between 1972 and 1975 when he served as a consultant to the committee. He shared the belief in a specifically ‘Melanesian’ way of social organization and cosmological understanding with the others who took part in the CPC's work, most prominently its de facto chairman, Father John Momis. With Momis he drew on the people's contributions to formulate PNG's National Goals and Directive Principles, which, at least in part, embody Narokobi's understanding of what it is to be Melanesian.     

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

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.     

Politicized Ecology: Local Responses to Mining in Papua New Guinea

Our paper draws on research in two sites where large goldmining projects are located — Misima and Lihir islands in Papua New Guinea. We examine the socio‐economic context in which criticisms of environmental degradation arise. We discuss the social and political meanings embedded in local demands for compensation for environmental damage, drawing attention to the disparities between local Melanesian conceptions of the environment and global, Western ideas that inform international environmentalist criticisms of mining. We dispute the ‘romantic primitivism’ of some environmentalist discourse, using the work of ethno‐ecologists and case studies of specific incidents on these islands, contesting the view that there is a natural conservationist ethic in Melanesia. The image of the ‘noble primitive ecologist’ that some environmentalists appeal to, would in most circumstances be rejected by Melanesians as racist and paternalistic, but is embraced as a strategy in conflicts with mining companies and when making legal claims for compensation. Alliances formed between landowners, environmentalists and western lawyers against mining companies such as BHP and Rio Tinto are based more on shared political ends than on the epistemological consistency of their perceptions of environmental damage from mining. Local Melanesian communities claim sovereignty over all resources and their compensation claims for environmental degradation constitute a new form of resource rent.     

Village Inventions: Historical Variations Upon a Regional Theme in Uiaku,Papua New Guinea

Anthropologists have come to realize that even the most ‘traditional’ Melanesian practices and ideologies may be historically shaped by the people's experiences within encompassing regional systems. This article examines the reshaping of local understandings of the village among the Maisin people of Oro Province over the past century. I distinguish three contexts within which Maisin notions of the village have been formed: colonial models of village government imposed before the Second World War; Christian village cooperatives in the post-war colonial period; and village meetings in the 1980s. The paper shows that the idea of the village has a complex evolution, shaped within overlapping dialogues between villagers and significant outsiders and between elder and younger village leaders who have had differing experiences of the outside world and the place of their own community within it.     

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.     

Codrington,Keesing, and Central Melanesian mana: Two Historic Trajectories of Polynesian Cultural Dissemination

Much has been said about mana since Robert Henry Codrington's 1891 exegesis based mainly on ethnography from the Banks Islands in northern Vanuatu. In Polynesian contexts, mana has been regarded as a cultural common denominator, with comparatively minor differences within the vast Polynesian cultural area. In Melanesian scholarship, however, consistent with the general emphasis on cultural diversity within the region, it remains a matter of considerable debate whether there is much to gain from approaching mana with generalising ambitions. In his seminal contributions to the discussion, Roger Keesing insists that Codrington mistook mana for a noun and consequently derailed scholarship on Melanesian mana. But Codrington's work is mainly based in the language of the island of Mota, where Codrington spent several years during his almost three‐decade long tenure as a pioneer linguist and missionary with the Anglican Melanesian Mission. And in the Mota language, mana is nominalised. In this article, I argue that this is attributable to regular visits from the Polynesian outlier Tikopia in pre‐Christian times, intensified by the proclivity of the Maori‐speaking first leaders of the Melanesian Mission to identify concepts that were phonemically familiar in their search for adequate translations of theological notions related to spiritual agency. When the language of Mota was chosen as the lingua franca of the Melanesian Mission in the 1860s, the Banks Islands' version of mana, soon explicitly associated with the powers of the Christian God, was disseminated through large parts of the south and central Solomon Islands and northern Vanuatu – including Tikopia. This has provided the islands exposed to Anglicanism with relatively new notions of agency and efficacy and created some common cultural denominators.     

Narokobi’s Melanesian Philosophy in the Papua New Guinean Legal System

ABSTRACT

Bernard Narokobi dedicated his career as a law reformer, jurist and parliamentarian to making Papua New Guinea’s legal system a catalyst for a distinctively Melanesian philosophy. This philosophy, ‘the Melanesian Way’, emphasized Papua New Guineans’ embeddedness within their local social worlds, including spirits and the natural environment. The legal foundation for the Melanesian Way was set down in the National Goals and Directive Principles and Basic Social Obligations, which are stated in the Preamble to the Constitution of Papua New Guinea. These make the ideals of social justice, participatory democracy, national sovereignty and sustainable development a legal aspiration and an impetus for formally recognizing the social forms that Papua New Guinean people themselves experience as providing order in their lives. Legislation that Narokobi promoted over the course of his career offered practical mechanisms for operationalizing these ideals in accordance with their original constitutional foundation.     

Trade Union Internationalism in the Age of Seattle

It is widely recognised within and around the labour movement that labour (as wage work, as class identity, in the trade union form, as a partner in industrial relations, as a radical-democratic social movement, as a part of civil society) is in profound crisis. Even more is this the case for labour as an international movement at a time in which the old international capitalist order is being challenged by the new capitalist disorder. Recovery requires a critique of traditional labour internationalism, reconceptualisation, new kinds of analysis and a new dialogue and dialectic between interested parties. Presented here in turn are the following: (1) a critique of the union internationalism of the national/industrial/colonial era; (2) a reconceptualisation of unionism and labour internationalism appropriate to a globalised/networked/informatised capitalist era; (3) the millennial dialogue on labour and globalisation; and (4) the role of communication, culture and the new information and communication technology. The conclusion stresses the centrality of networking, communication and dialogue to the creation of a new labour internationalism. An extended resource list on international unionism is attached.     

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.     

Cows and capitalism: humans,animals and machines in West German barns, 1950–80

ABSTRACT

From the beginning of the 1950s, milking machines increasingly replaced former agricultural workers in West German stables who now preferred better-paid jobs in the industrial sector. The investment necessary for the milking machines led to new ideas about economic thinking and production-optimization, which changed the interplay among human, animal and technology. Within less than two decades, cattle farming in the Federal Republic of Germany changed from an animal-lacking, devastated economic branch of manual labour to a mechanized profit-oriented industry, which produced more than was demanded. This essay challenges the prevailing historical interpretation in which the industrialization of farming has been described as one of the last stages of capitalism’s penetration of society. Central aspects of capitalism remained unfulfilled: there was neither a free market nor individual autonomy of entrepreneurs, and wage labour literally vanished within the barns. A close-up view of the practices at the place of action reveals an arbitrary mixture of efficiency and care that made the industrialization of animal farming differ from the traditional narrative of capitalistic expansion. When animals are the resources to be utilized, capitalist economic activity reaches its limits at the point where the animals’ vital processes begin to malfunction. By bringing together human-animal studies with economic history, this article offers new insights into the role of animals as living beings in history as well as into the expansion of capitalism in an economic sector that continued to operate according to its own rules.     

CULTURE AS TRANSFORMED DISORDER: COSMOLOGICAL EVOCATIONS AMONG THE MARING

Melanesian cosmologies typically lack clearly articulated formulation and an explicit exergetical tradition. Symbolic relations often remain implicit, with indeterminate, rather than fixed or static relations between categories. Through the use of ethnographic data on the Maring of the Papua New Guinea Highlands the paper argues that ‘cosmology’ should be analysed in terms of essentially subjective and contextually variable evocations, rather than in terms of definitive propositions. Further, it is argued that cosmologies are not revealed exclusively in the religious or ritual domain. Accordingly, data employed in the analysis are drawn from the interconnected Maring realms of knowledge of mythology, zoological lore and taxonomy, and conceptions of the spirit world. Highly general and multivocal concepts dealing with nature and culture provide pervasive themes in Maring and other Melanesian cosmologies. Analysis centres on the interplay between these concepts, arguing against any fixed and hierarchical relationship. Rather, the paper advocates an analytic approach which conceives a set of relationships between nature and culture being generative of others, such that the relationship between elements of a cosmology may be viewed contextually as being in harmony or antiphony, transcending structuralist idioms of correspondence and opposition.     

Legislating the Melanesian Way: Bernard Narokobi and the Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea

Abstract

A common criticism of Bernard Narokobi is that his vision of the ‘Melanesian Way’ was vague and imprecise. This article argues against this claim by describing the activities Narokobi undertook as the head of the Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea (1975–8). Using the example of his suggested revision of adultery laws, this article shows that Narokobi realized his abstract vision of the Melanesian Way in the most concrete and specific way possible: by attempting to reform the law. Much of Narokobi's legal reform work was unsuccessful, but a full understanding of his philosophy can only be achieved by reading his legal work alongside his published writings like The Melanesian Way.     

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.     

The Dynamic Brain Drain of Entrepreneurs in Peripheral Regions

Using a theoretical model, this paper analyses the evolution of gaps in entrepreneurial activity between the core regions of a country and the periphery. Using data from Israel, the results of the model indicate that endogenous decisions made by entrepreneurs increase the gap in entrepreneurship between the regions, creating a dynamic in which the gap grows continuously. When the model allows for movement between the regions, we find that the most talented entrepreneurs migrate from the periphery to the core region, leading to a brain drain of entrepreneurs from the periphery. Implications of the findings and recommendations based on them are also discussed. The paper contributes to the existing literature by analysing entrepreneurs as individuals, not as one unified group. Doing so facilitates a better understanding of the dynamic process that contributes to the growing gaps between core regions and the periphery.     

Policy Entrepreneurs,Legislators, and Agenda Setting: Information and Influence

Policy entrepreneurs are thought to be instrumental in agenda change, yet we lack knowledge of how legislators perceive their role in the agenda formation process. Using data from a national survey of state legislators, we examine whether entrepreneurs shape the legislative agenda on disaster preparedness and relief, which types of entrepreneurs are most influential, and what strategies they use in their interactions with legislators. The results indicate that legislators who report contact with policy entrepreneurs are more likely to have introduced related legislation, evidence of the important link between entrepreneurs and policy change. While entrepreneurs utilize a variety of different strategies, the analysis reveals policymakers are particularly receptive to entrepreneurs who provide new and reliable information. This finding suggests the influence of entrepreneurs lies not only in their ability to define problems and build coalitions, but also in their distinctive ability to provide information to elected officials, an important role that has largely been overlooked by existing literature.