Person, Space, and Memory in the Contemporary Pacific, vol. 7. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018. 190 pp. (Figures.) US$120.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-78533-649-2.
In this dense study, Anita Galuschek examines “Western” and “Melanesian” concepts, perceptions, and practices of personhood largely through the lens of European philosophies of selfhood, recognition, and relationality. She pursues several concurrent agenda: an impressive critique, apart from any Melanesian component, of simplistic Western European concepts of the person as an atomistic “ego,” leading to a strict subject-object distinction and possessive individualism; a sympathetic discussion of how “Melanesian personhood” (that is, personhood as fundamentally and foundationally relational rather than egoistical) might positively inform such a discussion; and, much more tentatively, a philosophical analysis of Melanesian personhood itself.
Galuschek has a deep and extensive intellectual grasp of European philosophies of personhood and is an impressive philosopher in her own right. She is comfortable with the primary sources of the European philosophical canon on the subject, from Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, Ricœur, and Gadamer to contemporary Western European philosophers of personhood, recognition, relationality, empathy, and self. This extensive presentation of the continental philosophical tradition(s) on the subject makes the book a bit top-heavy compared to its explication of “Melanesian personhood.”
For the latter, Galuschek relies on secondary sources, starting with Maurice Leenhardt’s classical Do Kamo, on personhood in New Caledonia, first published in 1947, followed by the works of a range of modern anthropologists, most famously Marilyn Strathern and her concept of Melanesian personhood as “dividual.” As Galuschek explains, “The Melanesian perception of personhood assumes that we are ‘dividuals’ and thus holistically relational” (40). While some anthropologists have built on the concept of dividual personhood, proposing hybrid terms to convey how dividual personhood has been undercut by individualistic Christianity, the term still suggest dividedness over unity and does not easily convey the stark affirmation of Leenhardt that in New Caledonian personhood, “one is a fraction of two” and society is a “plenitude” of such relationships. Citing James Clifford on Leenhardt, Galuschek points out that for such personhood, “the human does not acquire primary experience through cognitive activities, but through the body” (40), in contrast to both Descartes and Husserl where the body is irrelevant. She goes on to say that forced separation is like tearing one’s own body in half.
Throughout the book, Galuschek wavers on whether Melanesian personhood is substantially different from Western personhood or whether the two are ultimately on a continuum between the individual and the social, with all personhoods having elements of each. She sympathetically quotes Melford Spiro, who complains that “these bipolar types [of personhood] are widely overdrawn” (33–34), and is open to Edward LiPuma’s restructuring of Western personhood in terms of both the individual and the dividual self (34).
I write this as one who has been deeply entangled with Pacific Islands friends for almost fifty years, living at one stretch for sixteen years in the Solomon Islands. Otherwise, I live in Canada. On each visit to Melanesia I am overwhelmed by the inclusion of my personhood into the personhood of others, including bodily (often, bodily before anything else). Friends are made quickly and stay friends for life. The sheer density and extent of relationships are often overwhelming and privacy non-existent. Social media has only expanded the range. And as a bishop concerned with reconciliation, I find the default position is reconciliation rather than separation, a centripetal rather than a centrifugal direction in relationships, even where there has been very serious conflict. Yes, people have egos and personalities, but they often have the capacity to set them aside for the sake of recognition and a return to the default position of social unity, even if justice is compromised. Sadly, in Canada, often the opposite is the case. Life is lonely. I make these personal comments only to reiterate that relational personhood as fundamental and foundational in the South Pacific is a real thing and not an artificial intellectual construct. Not even individualistic Protestantism has been able to destroy it. It is this reality that Galuschek is trying to address and she makes a very good effort. Aid donors and development workers ignore it at their own risk; logging companies, politicians, and human traffickers exploit it for their own ends.
I found Galuschek’s reluctance to use any philosophical reflection coming out of Western religious traditions puzzling. With regards to continental philosophy, she is strictly secular. Ironically, however, for Melanesian practices of personhood, she is often dependent on anthropologists working in Christian communities (Geoffrey White, Joel Robbins, Sabine Hess, and Mark Mosko, not to mention that Leenhardt was a Christian missionary) where “myth” (the term she must use for Christian faith) is often a motivating factor in personhood, for good or ill. In her discussion of the intersubjective “thou-orientation” posited by Shütz and Luckman (66), Martin Buber cries out for mention. Likewise, Aquinas and Catholic personalist philosophies receive no mention. Her references to the Christian tradition in the continental context are very brief and cryptic, begging for clarification or nuance. The exclusion of myth (whatever one thinks about its truth) from the continental discussion and its inclusion in the Melanesian one weakens the book.
Galuschek’s treatment of “Melanesian personhood” would be helped by a broader treatment of the subject, primarily by Oceanic peoples (the term “Melanesian” itself is now almost obsolete and often characterized as a colonial geographical construct) and secondarily by anthropologists of all the Pacific. The enormous diversity of Oceania must be taken seriously, and I suspect no single description of personhood fits all. For example, the emerging discipline of the anthropology of Christianity in the Pacific, which Galuschek taps into, risks universalizing the particular as it studies small, often unique, new Pentecostal churches to the exclusion of much less individualistic Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran ones. Here, Galuschek’s dismissive stance towards the Western European religious tradition will not be an advantage. Even so, this is a significant and ground-breaking book and deserves serious attention.
Terry M. Brown
University of Trinity College, Toronto, Canada