Preface

This collection developed out of a growing frustration with the way anthropologists have thought and written about Melanesian societies.

In the Introduction I lay out that frustration in academic language and with proper regard for academic form. But underneath what I say there, motivating my arguments, has been a growing sense that what many were writing about Melanesia did not resemble, describe, or even really refer to what I saw in my own fieldwork, on Ponam Island, in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, together with a growing sense that what I saw there may not have been all that unusual.

What did I see? I saw a society that was firmly situated in the late twentieth century, a set of people who were not at all the inward-facing and isolated villagers who seem to populate the societies presented in so much Melanesian ethnography. Certainly Ponams were fit subjects for conventional ethnographic presentation. They had elaborate kinship organization, extensive ceremonial exchange, clouds of ancestral spirits, and all the rest. But to present them this way would have been to stress the separation between me and them, between Western society and village life, and to ignore the institutions, practices, habits, beliefs, and constraints that contradicted that separation, that made them not alien people in an alien place and time but that made them something more prosaic: another set of people living in the world.

This reaction to the partiality of conventional anthropological description is not one that I could have predicted, for that partiality did not really become apparent until I thought anthropologically about Ponam Island, and hence until I had to try to reconcile what I confronted with what I had read about Melanesian societies. Of course I was aware of the anthropological oral tradition of villagers disappointed with the researcher whose conventional camera did not produce photographs in the 30 seconds to which they

were accustomed and whose recording equipment was not of sufficiently high fidelity. Of course I knew that villagers near urban areas had become urban villagers and those from further afield had experience as migrant workers and as temporary urban residents. But I was also aware—rightly or wrongly—that these were overlays, a thin frosting on a cake that was traditional. After all, the man who was a circular migrant was only in town long enough to save the money that would allow him to go back to the village, carry out a fully traditional exchange, and take up a fully traditional life. Real Melanesia and the real issues in Melanesian anthropology lay not in the towns but in the hinterlands, and real research meant focusing on the latter and ignoring the former.

It was this presumption whose existence, force, and partiality became apparent when I tried to fit life on Ponam Island into Melanesian ethnography.

Between 1980 and 1986 I taught anthropology and sociology at the University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby, the capital of the country. While I was there I had the chance to talk to a number of the anthropologists passing through town on their way to and from their field sites. Many of these were doctoral students, less sure of what they were there to find, and several of them seemed to experience the disorientation that I had once had. Clearly my experience was not unique.

In early 1987, having just returned to the United States, Achsah Carrier and I went to the annual meeting of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania, held in Monterey, California. It seemed the right circumstance to sound out other Melanesian anthropologists systematically about their experience. Reactions ranged from bewilderment to enthusiasm, but enough were enthusiastic, or at least willing to listen, that I decided to try to persuade people to contribute to a collection dealing with the issue.

This is the result.

Certainly the points made in it, both in my own Introduction and in the various papers, are not original. There is a long tradition of concern about the tendency of anthropologists to treat village societies as though they were locked in a timeless, traditional present, though this concern has become more insistent in the past few years. So perhaps this collection is best considered as a reminder, rather than as a novel statement.

Is the reminder necessary? The answer varies. Some say that Melanesian anthropology has already abandoned the orientations against which this collection is directed. Yes and no. Some Melanesian anthropologists may have done so, but it remains the case that many important books and articles, written by important scholars and published by important academic presses and journals, continue to portray a timeless, traditional Melanesia. To the degree that the core of the discipline continues with this orientation, then to the same degree is the reminder necessary.

Acknowledgments

I must acknowledge first my debt to Martha Macintyre. At the meeting in Monterey she encouraged me to develop what was an incoherent idea into a real project. After the meeting, she spread her enthusiasm among her colleagues in Australia, who form the core of this collection.

I am grateful also to Roger Keesing and Margaret Jolly. They agreed to do what may be the most onerous job arising from collections, writing the conclusion. They could not begin until the collection was complete, which meant until the editor and other contributors were anxious to finish the project and get it off to the publisher.

As well, I am grateful to Achsah Carrier. She encouraged me when I was discussing this project in Monterey. She listened to and commented on various parts of the Introduction while I was writing it in London at the time when she was awaiting the viva voce for her doctorate. Her own research on Ponam Island, on which I was an inevitable and fortunate collaborator, was an important source of many of the ideas in the Introduction and my own contribution.

Finally, I have a long-standing debt to Joel Kahn. His concern to see and describe Minangkabau society as it is linked to and shaped by the outside world in the present, like his concern to trace the history of those links and influences, inspired my own work in ways he could not have guessed. This is as good a place as any to acknowledge that debt.

J. G. C.