Securing Modernity: Towards an Ethnography of Power in Contemporary Melanesia

ABSTRACT Contemporary public discourses, which depict Melanesian nation states as weak or as having failed, serve to legitimize the imposition of external, neo‐paternal, regulatory structures on former colonies. Such discourses problematise the numerous local experiments that combine custom, state structures and religion so as to create modern Melanesian ways of governing. Starting with the colonial policy of indirect rule, Melanesia has had a long history of experiments that have sought to tie together different regimes of power in relays, which are meant to remediate, supplement and strengthen state structures. Today, those relays are pathologised as dysfunctional precisely because they can be used to subvert, contest and divert state programs. Current political problems arising from growing ethnic and economic divisions are producing new conflicts, new moral languages for figuring evil, and new tactics and technologies of power. Many of these new experiments seek to reconnect the nation state with the moral authority, pastoral regimes, and individualizing practices of Christianity.     

全球资本主义:三次重大转型——对于经济—社会关系的社会—哲学解读

从19世纪起,资本主义社会向工业时代过渡,经济、文化与价值观等各方面都发生了转变,这些转变为经济与社会的关系问题提供了研究基础。19世纪至今的资本主义可以划分为三个发展阶段,即自由资本主义阶段、有组织的资本主义阶段和非西方式的民主经济阶段。可将一个阶段向另一个阶段的过渡称为大转型。每一次转型都是资本主义现代性类型出现危机的结果,而新的现代性类型是通过寻找新的社会价值和社会组织关系来形成的。分析资本主义三次大转型的经济、社会根源,可以清晰地洞察资本主义的过去、现在和未来。同时,三次大转型的新理论框架为预测全球资本主义的未来发展方向提供了理论基础。     

Objects of Memory: The Ethnography and Archaeology of Heirlooms

With the emergence of chiefdoms, a new ideology of inherited social difference had to be created and sustained over time. One way that inherited social inequalities may have been constructed, legitimated, and maintained is through the transmission of heirlooms or artifacts that objectified a collective ancestral past. Archaeologists have generally viewed heirlooms as anomalies or complications in the archaeological record. In this paper, however, I argue that, if identified, heirlooms have the potential to provide a richer and finer-grained understanding of the human past, in general, and to aid in the determination of hereditary rank, in particular. I discuss and compare the ethnographic evidence for heirloom use in bands, tribes, and chiefdoms, and, based on this evidence, I suggest criteria by which heirlooms might be identified in the archaeological record. Some examples of possible heirlooms from the archaeological literature are also presented. Finally, an evolutionary model for the circulation and disposal of heirlooms is proposed.     

The Teaching of Ethnography in Higher Schools and of Elements of Ethnography in Middle Schools

Apparently encouraged by Il'yichev's speech, Anuchin uses the forum of a philosophy journal to urge more work on synthesis in geography. He visualizes the geography of the future as a science that would seek to uncover what he calls the “parameters” of the geographic environment and would seek to establish the precise limits within which man might alter the environment without causing undesirable after-effects.     

Ethnography of ideology

Altorki, Soraya. Women in Saudi Arabia: Ideology and Behavior Among the Elite. New York: Columbia University Press. 1986. xii + 183 pp. including glossary, bibliography, and index. $30.00 cloth.

Caplan, Patricia. Class and Gender in India: Women and Their Organizations in a South Indian City. New York: Tavistock Publications. 1985. xiii + 258 pp. including glossary, references, name index, and subject index. $35.00 cloth; $16.95 paper.

Rosendahl, Mona. Conflict and Compliance: Class Consciousness Among Swedish Workers. Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology. 1985. × + 203 pp. including illustrations, appendices, notes, glossary, references, and index, n.p.     

Historical Ethnography of Tahiti

Douglas L. Oliver. Ancient Tahitian Society: Volume 1, Ethnography; Volume 2, Social Relations; Volume 3, The Rise of the Pomares. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1975. xv + 1419 pp. Illustrations, figures, maps, bibliography, and indices. $55.00.     

Please Destabilize Ethnography Now: Against Anthropological Showbiz-as-Usual

Gregg, Susan Ailing. Foragers and Farmers: Population Interaction and Agricultural Expansion in Prehistoric Europe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. xx + 275 pp. including index and bibliography. $24.95 cloth, $9.95 paper.

Hastorf, Christine A., and Virginia S. Popper. Current Paleoethnobotany: Analytical Methods and Cultural Interpretations of Archaeological Plant Remains. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. xii + 236 pp. including chapter references and index. $24.95 cloth, $9.95 paper.

Pearsall, Deborah M. Paleoethnobotany: a Handbook of Procedures. San Diego: Academic Press, 1989. xii + 470 pp. including chapter references and index. $59.95.     

An Ethnography of Teaching Archaeology

The purpose of this article is threefold. First, it refers to the ethics and logos of my courses in archaeology of the Near East and Israel attended by both Jewish and Arab students whose spatialisation of history and memory is different. The courses cover two periods: a—from prehistory to about 1,000 B.C; b—Christian and Muslim eras. Although these courses put much emphasis on Israel, the major sites of the Near East are well represented. Second, this article delineates some problems in the epistemology of Israeli archaeology, especially the slender consideration given to recent postmodern attitudes. Third, this article maps out an alternative way of teaching archaeology in contested regions such as Israel where different communities have their own mappings of the past. This alternative way provides the students with tools to evaluate the creation of knowledge about the past, and to reflect on their own social and relative positions in Israeli society. Dedicated to my teacher and friend, the late Prof. Moshe Kochavi