Pacific Perspectives, v. 5. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015. x, 199 pp. (Figures, tables, map.) US$90.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-78238-781-7.
Some 1,500 Papua New Guineans hail from Mbuke, an eleven-island archipelago lying just south of Manus, an island Margaret Mead made famous through her book, New Lives for Old. Forty percent of Mbuke Islanders live elsewhere, many of whom have well-paying jobs in PNG urban centres and who remit a portion of their income to kinspeople living on the islands. In the past, seven exogamous patrilineal descent groups would exchange gifts upon intermarriage, the birth of children, and death. But nowadays such exchanges are rare, a change Rasmussen dates to the post-World War II period. Today, in fact, some, perhaps most, Mbuke Islanders consider such exchanges “a waste of resources” (27) because acquiring money for commodity consumption has become the new way of life. Rasmussen’s purpose is to chronicle the “new forms of value and personhood” (the book’s subtitle) emerging under these circumstances.
Rasmussen is at pains to argue that money is not necessarily a corrupting force, that when deployed toward moral and social ends, money helps make, sustain, and cause to “appear” social relationships. The clearest case for this is made with respect to something Mbuke Islanders call singaut (“sing out”), a Melanesian pidgin term that means to “sing out” in the sense of addressing and in this case beseeching assistance from someone. In singaut a person in need requests assistance from a person of means, who gives support out of pity and without any expectation of a return. Singaut transactions are therefore a matter of sharing, not of reciprocity. Today remittances comprise the most economically consequential mode of sharing, allowing homeland Mbuke Islanders to live in material comfort through the generosity of relatives living (typically) in urban centres and who have an income.
Singaut occurs within a relatively narrow social orbit. The motive for rendering assistance to someone who sings out is “the emotional and/or kinship bond between giver and receiver” (111), and “[t]here is a sense in which singaut operates in the domestic sphere more than the public sphere because it takes place between people who have at some point been part of the same household (parents, children and siblings)” (48). Singaut may well mark a contraction of the scope of sociality, therefore, from interlineage to intralineage and/or from interhousehold to intrahousehold. Still, singaut does perpetuate the relational personhood and the ethos of relationality so often commented upon by Papua New Guinea researchers. In this it contrasts sharply with “the person alone,” as Mbuke Islanders refer to anyone who fails to honour kinship obligations and respond to singaut requests (126). Such individuals are rare, despite pervasive monetization, because they fear being branded as “greedy” and “selfish.”
One of the most interesting aspects of Rasmussen’s sociology is his insistence that relationships are necessarily forged in and through the optics of sharing. In this he argues, along with Robbins and Rumsey (“Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds,” Anthropological Quarterly 8, no. 2: 407–420) that, insofar as a person’s mind and thus commitment cannot be known directly but must be revealed to others through actual transactions, relationships are also constituted, negotiated, and revised through sharing (56 and passim). Transactions are ways of “making appear” or rendering visible “the nature of social relations in dialectical (or reciprocal) negotiation with others. In this latter sense, social action makes visible one’s view (feelings or thoughts) . . .” (56 and passim ).
Rasmussen deploys the same argument with respect to a new level or arena of sociality, one that has yet to be lexicalized locally but that Rasmussen calls “community.” “Community” opposes both individualism and relationalism (as manifested today in singaut). The historical roots of this level lie in the Paliau Movement, which was begun after World War II and whose initiator and prophet hoped to unify villages, leaving behind the parochialisms of kinship and descent (127–128). “Mbuke was (and still is) one of the movement’s strongholds” (34), and the goal of unifying social wholes beyond the level of the lineage persists to the present day, when communities are “made to appear” through projects and activities such as building a communal canoe that are truly collective in their organization and spirit. Community-forging activities and events involve “a degree of totalization of social relations” (178), “a totalization of perspectives and relations” (178) of all participants in, and all observers of, an event or activity. Here Rasmussen returns to his theme of the ontological powers inherent in the optics of action and transaction. Communities exist only if they are seen to exist in the unified purpose of collective action. Thus produced, a community is not (as “society” is thought to be) an objective, “bounded totality” (179) but contingent and subject to disputes.
Rasmussen implies that singaut is a replacement for the ceremonial exchange of the past, indeed a “new” form of value and personhood. Yet much of Rasmussen’s reporting, especially regarding singaut, is reminiscent of the emphasis on mutual aid and exchange in New Guinea ethnographies written in the colonial era, raising the question of just how new singaut really is. Another interpretation might be that singaut constitutes a monetized perpetuation of the obligation to share with needy kith and kin, remissions being the mode of sharing that is most consistent with an economy predicated on migration and commodity consumption. In contrast to singaut, community and the anti-particularistic ethos that undergirds it do seem new but also quite fragile. No matter the interpretation, Rasmussen’s book is a valuable contribution to the burgeoning literature on personhood, sociality, and transaction in contemporary Papua New Guinea as this postcolonial nation experiences monetization, urbanization, migration, and mounting economic inequalities.
Aletta Biersack
University of Oregon, Eugene, USA
pp. 421-423