Canberra: ANU E Press, 2011. vii, 317 pp. (Illus., maps.) A$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-921-86245-8.
David Lipset and Paul Roscoe have edited a handsomely produced commemorative volume to honour their Sepik colleague, Don Tuzin, who died in 2007 at the age of 61. Tuzin, whose teaching career was in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, San Diego, had a distinguished research career based on his two field trips among the Arapesh speakers of one of Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) largest villages, Ilahita, located in the East Sepik Province. His four books about the villagers, The Ilahita Arapesh: Dimensions of Unity, (1976); The Voice of the Tambaran: Truth and Illusion in Ilahita Arapesh Religion (1980); The Cassowary’s Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society, (1997); and Social Complexity in the Making: A Case Study Among the Arapesh of New Guinea, (2001), were each a significant contribution to the anthropological canon.
The fourteen contributors to the volume, all either Tuzin’s colleagues and friends or former graduate students, have written articles that emanate from one of his many intellectual interests. Regarding Tuzin’s interests, the editors note that “driven by methodological individualism and a strong commitment to comparativism, he focused on social control, dreams, politics and art, cannibalism, food symbolism, the psychodynamics of masculinity, the origins of religion, sexuality and childhood”(1). The editors’ introduction includes an incisive account of Tuzin’s cultural background and career and a commentary on the organization and contents of the book. The articles are organized into four rather awkward sections but, concerning Tuzin’s myriad interests and the occasional contributors’ oblique connection to his work, I can appreciate the editor’s planning challenge. As usual for a festschrift, the articles vary greatly in organization and style. Several of the articles, e.g., Roscoe, Lipset, and Gregor, while extolling Tuzin’s research, examine aspects of his work and offer different interpretations or explanations.
Section 1 is titled, “History, Masculinity and Melanesia,” with articles by Paul Roscoe, Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin, David Lipset and Bruce M. Knauft. My comments regarding the papers in this section, as in the others, are by necessity brief and, unfortunately, cannot convey the theoretical and ethnographic complexities that make the book a compelling read, at least for a fellow New Guineaist. Roscoe, who worked among the Boikin, also located in the East Sepik Province, takes exception to Tuzin’s explanation for the formation of Ilahita’s large population. While Tuzin posits a prehistoric migrational hypothesis to explain its size, Roscoe makes a strong case for its enormity due to natural population growth because of its desirable ecological condition.
Tuzin’s third book is a dramatic exposition of the collapse of Ilahita’s culturally dominant male initiation cult and its negative impact on male-female relations. Hauser-Schäublin worked among the neighbouring Abelam who similarly abandoned their hegemonic male initiation cult. She creatively implements the detailed analogy of an ordinary Abelam string bag to understand this radical cultural transformation. Lipset’s fieldwork is with the Murik Lakes people, another East Sepik Province, located near the mouth of the great Sepik River. Using Jacques Lacan’s concept of the phallus as a symbol of symbols, Lipset examines the fate of ritual masculinity among the Murik people in terms of the Gaingiin male age-graded society and its improvised cultural changes in contrast to wholesale cult abandonment. Knauft’s paper centres on PNG’s Highlands and his work with the Gebusi of the Western Province. Taking a broad view of the cultural meaning of masculinity through time, he finds that its permutations are unpredictable, noting that the Gebusi, who relinquished their male initiation, longhouse and traditional dancing, have revived them.
The authors in section 2, “Culture, the Agent and Tuzin’s Methodological Individualism,” are Kevin Birth, Don Gardner, Stephen C. Leavitt and Joel Robbins. Birth, a Caribbeanist with fieldwork in Trinidad and Tuzin’s former student, examines the “uncanny” in Tuzin’s work as informed by the ideas of Charles Morris, Giambbattista Vico and Susanne Langer, and its important ontological and epistemological implications. Like Birth, Gardner is interested in the scholarly ideas that helped shape Tuzin’s research, especially Karl Popper’s “methodological individualism,” that Tuzin acquired from his Australian National University professor, Derek Freeman, a life-long friend. (It is a testament to Tuzin’s interpersonal skills that it was Margaret Mead, not Freeman, who wrote the introduction to his first book.) Leavitt, another of Tuzin’s graduate students, did fieldwork with the Bumbita Arapesh, a group bordering the Ilahita Arapesh. Leavitt uses his data from a male informant recalling childhood experiences to explicate Tuzin’s view that culture arises from the possibilities of individual action and subjectivity. Robbins, using data from his fieldwork with the Urapmin of PNG’s West Sepik Province, contrasts his holist approach to the study of society to Tuzin’s methodological individualism.
“Comparativism, Psychoanalysis and the Subject” locates the papers in section 3 authored by Michele Stephen, Karen J. Brison, Thomas A. Gregor and Gilbert Herdt. Stephen advances Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic importance of the mother image in personal development and adjustment. She uses her fieldwork in Bali to amplify her views with an extensive analysis of the performed monsters, Barong and Rangda. Brison, another former Tuzin graduate student, later worked in Fiji where she compared play in rural and urban school children, the focus of the present essay, and their take on hierarchy and equality. Gregor’s paper plumbs the problem of the ritualized cruelties inflicted on young male initiates that Tuzin characterized as “cultural addictions.” Gregor takes exception to this view, citing the “ego-dystonic nature of the cults” and the “moral ambivalence” of some members that can facilitate their collapse. Herdt studied the ritualized male homosexual initiation cult among the Sambia in PNG’s Eastern Highlands Province. His paper is concerned with the men’s secrecy in their “harnessing of sexual speech” and the related notions of both Freud and Foucault.
Section 4, “Style,” contains essays by Alexander H. Bolyanatz and Diane Losche. Bolyanatz, who did graduate research in New Ireland under Tuzin’s supervision, focuses his paper on Tuzin’s gracious and courteous style as a fieldworker, then reflects on his own fieldwork style and the handling of doubtful cultural disclosures. The final paper is by Losche, who worked in the Abelam-speaking village of Apangai a few miles from Ilahita. She compares the rhetorical styles of Tuzin and Margaret Mead, showing how each adopted a magisterial and authoritative voice in an initial cultural account only to shift to a more nuanced and uncertain voice in a later work about the same people.
The editors conclude with Tuzin’s complete bibliography. In this otherwise exemplary 317-page volume, it is notably missing an index and, inexcusably, identifying notes on the fourteen contributors.
William E. Mitchell
University of Vermont, Burlington, USA
pp. 658-660