New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012. xxiv, 234 pp. (Figures, maps, illus.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-85745-301-3.
He pointed to a piece of driftwood. ‘You see, he said, ‘this one, too, comes and goes. Who knows where it came from? It got stuck here three days ago, that’s when I first saw it. Now it is stuck here. But who knows what will happen next?’ (10-11)
This engaging and beautifully written monograph shows how driftwood is entangled with the ontology and sociality of the inhabitants of Pororan Island, which is part of the autonomous province of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. Pororans’ particular mode of engaging in social relations is intimately connected to their preoccupation with fishing and their marine environment, hence Schneider’s characterization of Pororans’ sociality as a “saltwater sociality” (xxi-xxii). As the quote above indicates, in which a man comments on people’s unpredictable movements, Pororans are enormously interested in the movements of persons across the island and across the sea, both in their everyday lives as fishing people and on ritual occasions. In fact, they take their cues about the current state of social relations from observations of human movements. In addition to movements of people and driftwood, they take note of tides, fish and baskets of sweet potatoes that can stand in for absent grandchildren. Their particular saltwater sociality is framed against the stable, solid and immobile place of Buka mainland and its sociality, which is not focused on “going around” (roror) as on Pororan, but on “following roads.”
After an engaging preface (xiii-xxii), in which Schneider details her first personal encounters with the little island and people of Pororan and Buka in 2004, we are introduced to these places in the introduction (1-24). Here, Schneider also elucidates her ethnographic focus on movement and the four innovative methods she applied for studying movements: watching people and listening to people’s shifting locations in space; paying attention to verbs of movement as well as to related hand, arm and eye movements; moving with Pororans; and strategically deploying her own movements to elicit reactions. She argues that movement on Pororan “make the capacities of persons and their relational constitution apparent in particular forms” (20), hence movements as objectification.
Schneider starts her analysis with a chapter on fishing in order to “set the tone of open-ended inquiries with surprising outcomes for everything that follows” (21), which characterizes Pororan sociality, as exemplified by the quote above. The second chapter, “Kin on the Move,” details how Pororans watch, discuss and elicit movements; their vision of matrilineal kinship; their matrilineal group (pinaposa) and the importance of following the mother, or senior woman of their pinaposa. It also details the way men are “pulling” women into marriage and how fathers are important in “making grow” and “steering their wives” and children’s movements through house-building (69), although this could be diverted by mothers “going around.” Chapter 3, “Mobile Places,” focuses on places and the groups of people that inhabit them (80). It discusses ancestral settlement, colonial gathering and the importance, or rather non-importance, of stones on Pororan. This chapter foremost shows Pororans’ lack of interest in immobile places and “emplaced power” in relation to their mainland relatives and neighbours. Chapter 4 focuses on Pororans’ matrilineages (pinaposa) and how the tsunon’s (highranking man) “looking after the place” is at the same time “looking after” his pinaposa (107). Chapter 5 discusses marriage and mortuary rites and how elements within these performances indicate people’s strong interest in “indeterminate transformations” (161). Chapter 6 frames Pororans’ interests in keeping relations open-ended against national efforts of reviving kastom or custom (164). In being indifferent to kastom, Pororans claim the vitality of island life, as knowledge (and indeed the future) is, according to Pororans, inherently incomplete and open-ended (185). The concluding chapter sums up the main argument and successfully manages to relate the ethnographic data to various sets of anthropological literature and theories.
In short, Schneider provides us with wonderful new material from a region that has received relatively little ethnographic interest, especially in the recent “post-conflict” period. Her study is relevant to current Pacific Island studies and makes a contribution to longstanding debates about Melanesian sociality, while addressing themes such as matrilineal kinship, rank, gender and marriage and mortuary rites. Given its clarity, depth and scope: a must read for anthropology students.
Anna-Karina Hermkens
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
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