ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology, v. 7. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016. xviii, 244 pp. (Illustrations.) US$110.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-78533-171-8.
As Lindenbaum notes in her foreword to this collection, funerals remain the largest ceremonial events in the Pacific, and their staying power is at the heart of this book. The editors begin with the familiar idea that mortuary rites reproduce the moral community in the face of death’s disruption, but they add that these rites are privileged sites for negotiating the tension between reproduction and historical transformation. Local encounters with modernity are the topic of the dialogues of the title, drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of historical discourses where multiple voices are in play. Following this line of reasoning, the editors group the papers into two sets, one in which vernacular voices remain dominant in dialogue with modernity (“Tenacious Voices”), and another in which this is not so clear (“Equivocal Voices”).
Among the first set are the book’s only non-Melanesian papers, one from Micronesia, the other from Polynesia. Carucci’s poignant chapter shows how histories of Marshallese displacement pose recurring dilemmas about home and belonging that come to a head in deciding where the dead should be buried. Wilson and Sinclair examine women’s continuing roles as mediators in Maori funeral rites, a strand of continuity where changing customary elements coexist with Catholic observances. Here tenacity’s value is in the politics of indigeneity in a settler state. These papers put the Melanesian cases in perspective by showing how identity is problematized by differing colonial legacies.
More difficult are cases in which self-conscious assertion seems weak or ambiguous. For example, Dalton explores Rawa mortuary practice, where improvised shrines at Christian graves hint at a vernacular ethos of neediness surrounding death. These shrines, however, do double duty, staking land claims in the state’s language of entitlement, which is based on clans that did not previously exist. Lipset’s history of Murik personhood argues for a continuity of values alongside a century of church participation, during which men’s cults and other ritual forms were attenuated or discarded. His claim is that a robust Murik subjectivity is evident in responses to death, and that this subjectivity has outlasted a succession of modernities over time. In both cases the dialogue remains unsettled and seems to hinge on the changing relations between personal experience and ritual practice.
Lihir and Misima are both islands that became commercial mining sites, and Bainton and Macintyre compare how mortuary practices responded to the mining economy. Feasting and exchanges are standard components of Melanesian rites, and in both cases mining flooded communities with cash that fuelled rapidly expanding mortuary exchanges. On Lihir this efflorescence culminated in a self-conscious formulation of tradition as kalsa (“culture”) as a source of pride. Bainton reads this as an ideological commitment attempting to brake or stabilize dramatic change, rather than simply the subordination of the mining economy to local culture. This instance of tenacity, however, should be qualified in light of Macintyre’s Misima account. On Misima, as elsewhere, mines come and go, and flushes of cash in their mortuary exchanges were impossible to match in the hard times that followed. For these people, scaled-back burials with modest cement headstones followed an “exchange crash” that may well await Lihirians after the mine closes.
The collection’s second half tells of disruptions to or abandonment of traditional rites. Von Poser reconstructs Kayan mortuary practices in relation to male initiations, focusing on concepts of the person as emerging from and returning to the world of the ancestors. Pieced together through local recollections, this symmetry between funerals and initiations was premised on a cycling between life and death. Nowadays, however, these rites are largely supplanted by practices geared to Christian sensibilities: graves are covered by cement, the souls of the dead departing on a one-way journey to heaven.
Lutkehaus describes how the 2004 eruption of Manam’s volcano forced the island’s evacuation, disrupting ongoing ritual sequences. Relocated to mainland “care centres,” Manam islanders had no access to their gardens and bush resources for funeral feasts. By 2011 some returned to re-establish settlement on a new site, and their mortuary rites revived previously abandoned homestead burials rather than interment in now overgrown village cemeteries. Lutkehaus sees this as a rebuke to the state that failed to facilitate their return, with the paradoxical result that a modern innovation indexes pre-modern practice.
More far-reaching shifts seem evident in Silverman’s account of Iatmul rites. Traditional practices emphasize transience and fail to produce psychological closure. In response, families have begun to evoke permanence by memorializing the dead with carefully tended and roofed gravesites marked with concrete slabs, metal fences, plastic flowers, and placards. This amounts to a turning away from earlier values and, he argues, reflects an individuation of death and an increasing prominence of nuclear families over time.
I’ai mortuary practices were radically disrupted in the 1950s when the Tommy Kabu movement went out of its way to embrace Christian forms of burial in village cemeteries. Since then, changes in practices surrounding death reflect shifts in the moral community: deaths are increasingly attributed to sorcery driven by local rivalry, and many now prefer to bury kin near their homes. Bell sees these developments as consequences of competition over land rights in the cash economy, and one aspect of homestead burials is that aggrieved souls remain threateningly close to their village rivals.
Taken as a whole this collection balances a serious attempt to understand cultural change with enough ethnographic variety to satisfy anybody. The afterword highlights some recurring patterns: shifts from cyclical to linear temporalities, widespread enthusiasm for cement (longings for permanence, or modernity?), a move to homestead burial (shrinking the community to the family?), and debates about displacement and home. This, to my mind, vindicates the strategy of focusing on funerals as indices of what a moral community is taken to be. In a historical sense, funerals may well be not only endings, but beginnings.
Dan Jorgensen
University of Western Ontario, London, Canada