Person, Space and Memory in the Contemporary Pacific, v. 4. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013. xiv, 274 pp. (Illus., figures, map.) US$95.00. ISBN 978-0-85745-919-0.
In contemporary Melanesian ethnography, we read of cultural answers to the challenges posed by various guises of modernity. This trend is not exactly novel. Cargo cults, after all, were once a hot topic of research. Today, studies of nation making, commodity chains of coffee, Christianities, prisons, conservation and mining comprise an analytical landscape which makes it seem that the local is less and less defined by autonomous, indigenous value systems. Anita von Poser has written a new ethnography from a different angle: it concerns how pre-capitalist cultural value may be viewed as relatively uninfluenced by modernity. The centre of Foodways and Empathy is thus doggedly local, almost to an extent that might be seen as contrarian (or perhaps antiquarian): it is a study of a single locality within Bosmun, a large and well-known village on the Lower Ramu River, inland from the North Coast of Papua New Guinea.
von Poser made several research trips to Bosmun during the first decade of the current century, which began on behalf of her doctoral dissertation. Her book’s main goal is to explain the great effort Bosmun women and men give over to evaluating each other’s moral worth, and the pre-capitalist, local-level narratives, symbols and processes with which they do so. Foodways and Empathy is basically about what it means to be good in Bosmun. That is to say, it is about how people present themselves to and see others as ethical persons in a small-scale, kinship-based community.
The central trope in Bosmun culture for being good consists of two dispositions and one activity: the first is to want to be generous with food, specifically sago, and the second is to be empathetic to the appetites of close and collateral kin. The Bosmun associate the latter attitude with the eye, which should keep a close watch on others and infer their feeling-states nonverbally, feeling-states they locate in the stomach and its hunger for food. Reciprocally, Bosmun folk expect to be observed. Others will be watching out for one’s needs and wants; spectatorship and evaluation of the other being a point of local pride.
In four long, but ethnographically rich, chapters, von Poser reports on meanings, practices and contexts of food exchange in Bosmun culture, many of which have been described in nearby Lower Ramu/Lower Sepik/Schouten Island societies. von Poser discusses Bosmun cosmology and its main culture-heroes (Sendam) and heroines (Nzaria) who created parts of the landscape and introduced food-related values. She discusses food in relation to concepts of “face” as well as in the contexts of courtship, marriage, animism and ritual. But most significant are the constructions of sago, whose production should occur in a distinctly moral ethos, whose preparation should be done in a social and stress-free setting, and whose distribution should be associated with regard for the other. The Bosmun refrain from eating sago they themselves have planted. Plate-carrying women constantly cross the village space at mealtimes as households dispatch sago-based meals to neighbours with whom they share kinship (van Poser calls this “food shifting” and at one point compares the “food generous” women’s bearing to the carriage of beautiful models on a catwalk). Modernity briefly enters into her narrative to the extent that it is held in disgust as a site of greed, laziness and tinned fish.
There is much of importance in, and much to admire about, Foodways and Empathy. It fills an important empirical gap in Lower Ramu studies, for one. Its ethnography is detailed and von Poser’s analytical stance is frank and straightforward, for another. And, for a third, it dwells on an intriguing modality of the social in Melanesia about which one hears little.
Yet several problems stand out, the most important of which is the ethnographic absence of a pivotal, crucial figure. von Poser argues that food and spectatorship are the main forms of empathy in Bosmun culture and sheds light on their significance in the many settings mentioned above. Food is acutely and exquisitely social in Bosmun, as it is everywhere else, and therefore analysis of its constructions must ultimately refer to the manner and practice of the exemplary other, the original foodgiver, in human life. What culturally particular kind of nurture does she practice? Is it unconditional? Is it abundant? Is it at all inconsistent? How is it problematic? How is it managed among siblings and the father? However, nowhere in von Poser’s book do we find data and analysis about the practices of mothers, the absence of which is particularly anomalous, given the great extent to which her research was primarily done with women.
The second shortcoming I see with this book is with its comparative methodology, or rather its lack of a comparative methodology. von Poser must be credited with reading widely in the Melanesian literature and for marshalling it now and again in order to clarify Bosmun data. But there are puzzling moments. For example, she asserts that gender relations there are “uniquely” complementary by contrast to a highlands group that she cites. However, gender in the Sepik and the Schouten Islands, the very region of study, has been repeatedly described in precisely these terms. A last issue: this book deposits modernity into footnotes and confines it to a final few pages. von Poser has persuaded me that food exchange is highly moral in Bosmun society, but the implicit claim that it can be analyzed independently of capitalism in static terms that exclusively draw from myth, social structure and customary personhood, is a bit much.
Foodways and Empathy makes a helpful contribution to regional scholarship as well as to studies of food as a cultural construction and to psychological anthropologists interested in person perception from a cross-cultural viewpoint. von Poser’s book offers up a fascinating, keenly observed account of the ways in which Bosmun people view and assess one another’s hunger. I look forward to reading more from her about how they may manage to do so in the future.
David Lipset
University of Minnesota, Twin-Cities, USA
pp. 910-912