ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology, Volume 12. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2021. xi, 228 pp. (Tables, figures, B&W photos.) US$130.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-80073-116-5.
The Suau coast, on the southeastern tip of New Guinea, holds an outsized place in the colonial history of Papua New Guinea. From the administrative post of Samarai Island, officials oversaw the rapid pacification of much of the eastern possession and the establishment of large copra plantations fed by migrant labour from the newly controlled areas. The missionary Charles Abel launched a remarkable experiment from the nearby island of Kwato to train Papua New Guineans technical skills that would allow them to compete on an even playing field (preferably cricket) with Whites. Milne Bay, directly north of Suau, was the site of a major victory by allies against Japanese invaders and subsequently a massive staging ground for American forces in World War II. Samarai has been slipping into ruin since the 1960s, after the administration shifted to Alotau on the mainland, and all that is left of Kwato is a small church. Yet the legacy of the colonial presence in Suau is marked in several ways: the Charles Abel Highway, a high school named after the famed Scottish missionary, James Chalmers; and perhaps most impactfully, the continuing political and economic influence of Abel’s descendants.
One of the several historical ironies Melissa Demian addresses in this brilliant ethnography is the fact that in large part because of these influences, anthropologists considered Suau “a place to pass through on the way to more interesting places” (39), notably the Trobriand Islands, made famous by the writings of Bronislaw Malinowski. In Memory of Times to Come in part sheds some light on an ethnographic void, but as importantly, does so by way of a critique of hoary anthropological conceptualizations and priorities that have silently encouraged neglect of places where local people appear to have abandoned their ancestral traditions. The Suau people, Demian notes, “have participated in every single phase of European religious, economic and political expansion into the Pacific; and they have not only accommodated it but also embraced it” (40), deliberately abandoning much of their ancestral traditions along the way. Yet this active accommodation was never fully reciprocated and in the postwar years the withdrawal of government services has left them in the same situation as most rural folk in Papua New Guinea, struggling to make a living with a rapidly growing population and limited economic opportunities. Rather than seeing their dilemma as one of a people “tapped by their own beguilement with modernity” (6), Demian’s move is to examine Suau everyday memory practices as a guide to how they have experienced and shaped their communities through time. In doing so, she reveals that the Suau have much more in common with their apparently more culturally conservative neighbours, and indeed rural Melanesian communities in general, than one might expect. And they have lessons for anthropologists as well.
Demian opens with an analysis of contemporary death practices. Although much diminished from the past, Suau mortuary rituals retain distinct customary elements and functions. Key among these is finishing a death by “clearing away relationships that threaten to trouble the living or cause them to be trapped in time,” not least as most deaths are believed to result from sorcery and witchcraft attacks (78). Death rituals thus create new relationships in no small part through the work of forgetting and abandoning the destructive events and actions of the past. In chapter 3, Demian extends this template back in time to speculate about the Suau’s reception of foreigners in the colonial period. The missionaries in particular perceived themselves as disruptors, a perception encouraged by the Suau’s rapid embrace of mission Christianity. Yet the Suau’s purpose was not simply to abandon the past; instead they “saw the new relations…as additive, by means of bridging the gap hospitality” (12), an act that ultimately was not reciprocated.
The following chapters extend the analysis of contemporary memory culture, particularly in regard to land disputes and related economic projects. The colonial government strongly encouraged villages to relocate from the mountains to the coast in the early twentieth century. As a consequence, the landscape is a repository of memory, “saturated with human actions and human intentionality” (134). As state presence has declined, oil palm plantations have spread in the valleys and coastal villages have increasingly needed to resource mountain lands for food gardens, thus court cases and mediation efforts over land ownership have become prevalent. Rather than erasing ancestral memory, the disputes enact it in discourses led by informed elder mediators connecting places to particular people and their past activities. Demian convincingly demonstrates that this creative process continues to give life to matrilineal descent, which many scholars in the past predicted would decline and vanish with “modernization.” Despite all that has been lost and forgotten, the past thus continues to disrupt and prod the present and the near future, whether in the form of sorcery talk or a more recent enthusiasm for culture shows in the context of Suau addressing current problems or new opportunities. “What the Suau people appear to be doing,” Demian concludes, “is backgrounding some relationships, seen as belonging to a particular version of the past or leading to nothing fruitful, while foregrounding others that appear to offer more potential, more liveliness, for the present and for the near future” (208).
This is an important and welcome book. Demian writes beautifully, moving seamlessly from vivid ethnographic description to acute theoretical and comparative analysis. Appropriately enough, In Memory of Times to Come is not without its own ironies. In places, Demian’s critiques of concepts such as “culture” and “modernity” verge into polemic. Yet rather like the Suau’s experience of sorcery, they break into the analysis as generalizations about “Suau,” “Massim,” and “Melanesians”—all anthropological constructs—or in terms of rural Papua New Guineans increasing experience of precarity, a signature trait of late capitalism. It is likely impossible to totally abandon let alone forget such concepts. They have their uses! Problems arise when such concepts become totalizing, obscuring our understanding of how signal events, like the arrival of a missionary, can have long repercussions not as singular influences but captured within a people’s sense of history and shifting experiences as they adjust and innovate, creating new histories.
John Barker
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver