Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2018. xiii, 253 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-1099-5.
Harvests, Feasts, and Graves explores a familiar scenario. The Auhelawa people live in small hamlets strung out along the southern coast of Duau (Normanby Island) in Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. Far from roads or shipping routes, they rely largely on subsistence gardening and mutual support through matri-kin and a strong ethic of reciprocity most dramatically realized through formal exchanges in feasts and funerals. At the same time, Auhelawa have long accepted Christianity, depended upon money and the commodities money buys, and conceived of themselves as citizens of the nation-state. Like other rural Papua New Guineans, they struggle with the underlying moral and ontological contradictions between “custom,” Christianity, and the cash economy. Scholars often frame this situation in terms of narratives of modernity or as a clash between opposed indigenous and Western orientations—that is to say, as a clash of cultures. Schram argues that such constructions distort the ways Papua New Guineans actually conceive of their situation. Rather than a contest between cultural codes, Auhelawa consciousness is best understood as “post-cultural”: “a position from which the credibility of symbolic codes … is questioned” (212) even as people draw upon them to create contingent “practical models of social process” (213).
Schram constructs his analysis around “different sites at which the Auhelawa people produce knowledge of themselves by piecing together images, artifacts, and narratives” (10). He opens with a discussion of the centrality of matrilineality, Auhelawa land tenure, customary practices around death, and historic memory signified in grave sites. In chapter 2, Schram explores the concept of respect and practice of reciprocity as frameworks by which Auhelawa make the social order visible and evaluate each other’s behaviour, particularly in the context of feasting. The next two chapters move into less familiar territory. Despite seemingly having an abundance of food, Auhelawa complain about food scarcity and growing poverty. Increasingly reliance on money produces an equivalent angst about selfishness and the undermining of community solidarity. In a sophisticated analysis, Schram illustrates how women’s traditional responsibility for cultivating and storing yams serves as a kind of prism through which change is perceived and negotiated. The introduction of new crops and reliance upon money partially eclipse the centrality of yams; this in turn implies an undermining of motherhood and obligations to one’s matrilineage. Women counter such anxieties by likening their success at selling crops to the gathering of yams and appealing to the collective ethic of giving to the church. Auhelawa yam storage houses, in short, have become a key location for conceptualizing and coping with change.
Mortuary practices provide a second key location: the church. In chapter 5, Schram details the Auhelawa reception of Christianity. Rather than seeing Christianity as replacing the old order, as missionaries intended, the people conceived church membership as “a separate, parallel domain of social behavior governed by the one mind of the congregation as opposed to the selfishness of everyday life” (22). The ideal of “one mind” specifically comes into play at the time of death. As elsewhere in the Massim region, death rituals serve to close debts and reaffirm the endurance of matrilineages. They incur huge organizational and material obligations. Auhelawa can lessen or bypass such obligations by appealing to the “one mind” of Christian solidarity as an alternative model of unity. Auhelawa conceive of custom and Christianity as incompatible alternatives. Yet they are deeply entangled in practice, both informing the ways in which Auhelawa construct and evaluate successive mortuary ceremonies as locations that materialize current social relationships.
As an ethnography, Schram’s contribution is fascinating and insightful especially for students of Melanesian Christianity. The book’s theoretical ambitions are harder to assess. The ethnographic analysis is punctuated by often-extended discussions of anthropological theory covering a variety of subjects. Schram’s main concern centres on the ways anthropologists have conceived of cultural change in Melanesia, particularly models focused upon cultural personhood, conversion, and modernity. Such models capture part of the reality but tend to project anthropological preconceptions upon Melanesians and, worse, sometimes reify Melanesian models of social reality as the real thing. In the conclusion, Schram reviews two recent controversies occurring at the national level in Papua New Guinea to show that such debates are common and demonstrate a “post-cultural” consciousness—one that references particular positions, like custom and Christianity, yet regards neither as credible on its own.
There is a certain unacknowledged irony in Schram’s discussion of anthropological debates over topics like personhood, ontology, and modernity. Very much in Auhelawa style, these debates centre around a few points of reference conceived as alternatives—for instance, the conception of personhood as either “dividual” or “individual”; yet these alternatives, singly and together, rarely appear entirely credible and analyses regularly demonstrate them working in concert. Would it be appropriate then to describe anthropological consciousness as “post-cultural”? If so, the fact that such a diversity of debates (local, national, and scholarly) can be lumped together as post-cultural suggests that the concept is more descriptive than analytic. I felt in places that Schram’s analysis would benefit from attending not just to what Auhelawa consciousness builds upon, but also what it obscures. He writes convincingly, for instance, of the associations between women, money, and yam houses based on women’s involvement in local and regional vegetable markets. Yet surely much of the money entering the local economy, as elsewhere in the country, comes in the form of remittances from working relatives, male and female. Schram is silent about this. More strangely, in discussing respect, reciprocity, and kinship obligations, he says nothing about sorcery and witchcraft beliefs, although these are pervasive elsewhere in the province.
These caveats aside, Harvests, Feasts, and Graves is a rich, rewarding ethnography and stimulating contribution to current debates concerning the ways rural Papua New Guineans experience and make sense of their ongoing participation in wider institutional and discursive frameworks, particularly Christianity and capitalism.
John Barker
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada