MELANESIAN ODYSSEYS
Negotiating the Self, Narrative, and Modernity
Lisette Josephides
ISBN 978-1-84545-525-5 Hb $90.00/£53.00 Published (Summer 2008)
eISBN 978-0-85745-055-5
ISBN 978-1-84545-706-8 Pb $29.95/£17.50 Published (January 2010)
eISBN 978-0-85745-425-6
“…a bold attempt to reshape ethnographic approaches to Melanesia.” · JRAI
"The effect is refreshing. The book is written with an immediacy of feeling for place and time and persons... It is a real pleasure to read, its theoretical impetus shot through with insights and aphorisms that can only have come from long reflected-upon ethnographic wisdom. This engaging book will be much debated, and deserves to be." · Marilyn Strathern in The Australian Journal of Anthropology
"...convincing and empathetic, rich in detail, and clearly based on a lifetime of fieldwork and friendship." · Pacific Affairs
In a series of epic self-narratives ranging from traditional cultural embodiments to picaresque adventures, Christian epiphanies and a host of interactive strategies and techniques for living, Kewa Highlanders (PNG) attempt to shape and control their selves and their relentlessly changing world. This lively account transcends ethnographic particularity and offers a wide-reaching perspective on the nature of being human. Inverting the analytic logic of her previous work, which sought to uncover what social structures concealed, Josephides focuses instead on the cultural understandings that people make explicit in their actions and speech. Using approaches from philosophy and anthropology, she examines elicitation (how people create their selves and their worlds in the act of making explicit) and mimesis (how anthropologists produce ethnographies), to arrive at an unexpected conclusion: that knowledge of self and other alike derives from self-externalization rather than self-introspection.
Lisette Josephides is Professor of Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast, following many years of fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and teaching positions at the University of Papua New Guinea, the London School of Economics and the University of Minnesota.
LC: DU740.42 .J65 2008
BL: YC.2009.a.2195
BISAC: SOC002000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/GeneralContents
List of Illustrations
Dramatis Personae
Preface
Overtures, Ethnographic and Theoretical
Chapter 1. The Aesthetics of Fieldwork among the Kewa
The Style and Tone of Kewa Life
Bickering, Bantering and Coming to Blows
Place, Movement and Residential Mobility
Daily Life Scrambling into the Field: Mining the Field and Eliciting Minefields
Chapter 2. Self Strategies: Ascription, Interlocution, Elicitation
The Person/Self/Individual
An Archaeology of the Self Ascription: Distinguishing, Co-creating and Merging Self and Other
A Modern History of the Self: Interlocution and Its Denial
The Everyday Self: Language and Communication at Issue
What Speech Does: Communication as Capability Strategies
Elicitation, Explicitness, Rehearsed and Rehearsing Talk and Action
Conclusion
PART I: NARRATIVES
Chapter 3. Narrating the Self I: Moral Constructions of the Self as Paradigmatic Accounts
Theories of Narrative
Narrative and Paradigmatic Thought
Ethics, Morality and the Self in Paradigmatic Accounts
The Storytellers (Wapa, Ragunanu, Pupula, Yakiranu, Payanu) Kewa
Pre-contact Practices and Persons: A Narrative of Many Growing up
Of Courtship and Marriage
Of Magic and Gardens Spirit Houses
Pig Kills Warfare and Pacification
Conclusions: Moral Constructions of the Self as Paradigmatic Accounts
Chapter 4. Narrating the Self II: Metanarratives of Culture, Self, and Change
The Storytellers (Rumbame, Alirapu, Mayanu, Mapi)
Rumbame’s Story
Alirapu’s Story
Mayanu’s Story (Excerpt)
Mapi’s Story
Mapi: Visionary and Dreamer
Four Features Revisited and Expanded
Creating Moral Personhood
Constructing Coherent Selves
Constructing Critical Metanarratives
Facing Modernity and Christianity
Conclusion
Chapter 5. Narrating the Self III: The Heroic, the Epic and the Picaresque in a Changed World
The Storytellers (Hapkas, Papola, Rimbu, Lari)
The Stories: Third Set Hapkas’s (Nasupeli’s) Story
Papola’s Story
Rimbu’s Story
Lari’s Story
Seizing the New World: Narrative, Consciousness and Communication
The Heroic, the Epic, the Picaresque and the Symbolic
Narrative as Form of Consciousness and Organization of Experience
Experience and Consciousness
Morality Narratives as Communication
PART II: PORTRAITS (Several Weddings, Some Divorces and Three Funerals)
Chapter 6. Portraits and Minimal Narratives: Elicitations of Social Reality
Portraits, Stories and Minimal Narratives
Elicitation and Explicitness
Language, Talk and Action
Norms and Claims: Rehearsed and Rehearsing
Talk and Action
Conclusion
Chapter 7. Love and All That: Negotiating Marriage and Marital Life
Courtship Problems with Bride Price
Irregular Unions
Polygyny and Conflict
Ainu and Yako
Giame and Yadi
Lari and Rimbu
Liame, Rosa and Kiru
Rarapalu, Karupiri, Foti and Waliya
Negotiating Marriage and Marital Life
Love and All That
Chapter 8. The Politics of Death
Who’s the Big Man of Us All?
Rake’s Death
Duties to Persons, Rights in Persons: Wapa’s Death
Out with the Old, in with the New: Payanu’s Death
Death and Recurring Conflict: Conclusion
Chapter 9. Mimesis, Ethnography and Knowledge
Stories, Ethnography, Theory
Mimesis as a Way of Knowing
Ethnography as Difference, Locality and Chronicle
Cultural Region and the Tyranny of Theoretical Regionalism
Ethnography as Chronicle of Cultural History/History of Consciousness
References
Index