Person, Space and Memory in the Contemporary Pacific, v. 3. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011. xii, 262 pp. (Tables, maps, figures, photos.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-84545-775-4.
The legacy of a prominent ethnographic forebear is an especial burden for an anthropologist conducting fieldwork for a doctoral degree. Ian Hogbin looms large in Astrid Anderson’s monograph, which is based on her dissertation research on the island of Wogeo, off the north coast of Papua New Guinea. Hogbin conducted fieldwork on Wogeo in 1934 and 1948, and his two authoritative books about the island, The Island of Menstruating Men and The Leaders and the Led, had become part of the canon of Melanesian anthropology by the 1980s. Anderson conducted her research in the 1990s, not only on the same island but also based in the same village as Hogbin. She has negotiated the historical engagement well, approaching the inevitable interpretative differences with her predecessor diplomatically and nicely illustrating the degree to which he had become integral in the mythology of the Wogeo themselves.
Her book is divided into four parts. The first is a scene setter prefaced by an origin myth. It describes the island and its people and the important place of Hogbin in Wogeo’s recorded history and contemporary memories. The second discusses bodies, taboos and death, showing the degree to which bodily care is at the same time a nurturing of networks of relations. The male cult famously described by Hogbin is a memory nowadays, but Anderson revisits it to contextualise it with other bodily rituals, and her greater attention to gender aspects provides further insight into the subject of embodiment. The third part focuses on landscape, place, knowledge and leadership, taking the perspective that the social landscape and the geographical landscape are mutually constitutive. The final part draws these themes together in a group of chapters on “the way histories of people, places and kinship can be seen as arguments in an ongoing process of establishing a proper social landscape” (69), which the author calls the politics of belonging.
While more than half a century had passed between Hogbin’s era and Anderson’s fieldwork and much had changed on Wogeo, she has not made the book a study of exclusively “current” issues. Her ethnography draws on that of her predecessor, providing additional information and detail of her own, and deconstructing the contemporary view held by the Wogeo of their own past and kastom. The focal aspect for a reader familiar with Hogbin’s ethnography is the difference in analytic perspective. Hogbin was a functionalist (Radcliffe-Brown, Firth and Malinowski were his main influences) noted for his attention to precise representation. Anderson, for her part, invokes Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and cites Roy Wagner and Marilyn Strathern as inspirational theorists. Her application of Heidegger is actually limited and focussed on his discussion of “dwelling,” which has become popular in recent anthropology concerned with landscape and spatial socialization. Merleau-Ponty is briefly cited in relation to embodiment. The author (like a growing number of others in contemporary anthropology) regards the perspective served by these fragments of the two philosophers’ work as phenomenology. While this modish generalization is surely in need of interrogation, Heidegger’s discussion is well-used here in a series of examples towards the argument that dwelling and experience in the Wogeo landscape are a continuous creation and manifestation of a meaningful world.
The most discernible analytic influence throughout the book is Wagner, and it is his work on symbols that provides the real fuel for the author’s re-reading of Wogeo sociality.
Anderson brings the combined interpretative shifts exemplified by Wagner and Strathern to bear on kinship and relation. She consequently gives a more nuanced account of kinship and relation than Hogbin was able to and, in a particularly strong passage in the book’s last section, expands significantly on his observations on house construction. Here she really does bring together her titular themes of landscapes, relation and belonging, showing for example how the various parts of a house are imbued with meaning: she gives detailed descriptions of how individual rafters are connected to particular pieces of land as they embody histories of the land-holding people who hold rights in them.
Classic Melanesian ethnographies are nowadays often used as little more than an uncritiqued backdrop to contemporary anthropological research on topical development-related issues, as if there were nothing more of value to say about traditional sociality in rapidly changing societies. Worse, they are sometimes dismissed as irrelevant in the face of a concern with local engagement with global processes. In contrast, the reflexive potential of anthropology is demonstrated in this book, which revisits, enhances and improves on the insights of a previous good ethnographer at the same time as it offers new material from a contemporary fieldworker equipped with a different analytic toolkit.
Michael Goddard
Macquarie University, North Ryde, Australia
pp. 654-655