London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. xv, 290 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$85.00, ebook. ISBN 978-3-030-49352-3.
This book is another gift from Gillian Gillison and Papua New Guinea’s notorious Eastern Highlands, perhaps one of the strangest places on the ethnographers’ earth. You do not have to read far before you wonder whether Claude Lévi-Strauss or Roy Wagner would get the biggest thrill from the themes, twists, and turns that blow through Gillison’s account. Her duet with Freud’s Totem and Taboo and her play with the passions of incest and marriage follow along Lévi-Strauss’s First Notable interests, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Beacon Press, 1969)—Gillison capitalizes the words of generative or iconic persons, which that book is for this one. The fractalized vaginas, penises, flutes, bodies, menstrual huts (“flute houses”), trees, and the world itself (e.g. 177–178ff.), which Gimi empiricism scales as self-similar versions of everything significant, that is kinship relations, eulogize Wagner’s last decades. Yet, if the content of this book intensifies the idea that Eastern Highlands peoples are strange aberrations on the ethnographic map, then Gillison’s treatment doesn’t so much make Freud’s tale the paradigm for their lives—in fact, she rewrites his in a Gimi mold (chapter 8, “Conclusion: Totem and Taboo Revisited”)—as suggest Freud’s was just another myth resonating with Gimi contradictions. Freud wrote as a dichotomy between home and work came into force. It became imperative to get children, especially males but eventually females as well, away from the too-cultured clutches of Home. Den Mothers and Fathers, and Nature, would make them more suitably productive agents for the prestige forms then dominant—expansionist industry and warfare. Freud’s time invents “kinship” and we were taught, and taught, that They did something like incest whereas We did not. Hence Freud’s dipping into Anthropology, then conceived as exploring an anterior time in human history. The deceptions of that story have been revealed. Gillison’s presentation of Gimi insights on sociality remind us of Lévi-Strauss’s strictures on the fascination of “exotic custom” (Wild Thought, A New Translation of La Penéee sauvage, University of Chicago Press, 2020, 270).
Gillison’s book runs to eight chapters, two appendices and an index. The latter seems a bit diminished—authors discussed in the text, for example, are not listed. The opening introduction is an overture, all themes given short runs. Many are graphic—as is much of the book—concerning Gimi ideas about biological production. Male semen feeds fetuses in the vagina as it leaves the penis’s mouth, then enters the growing child through its mouth, its fontanelle. A “closed dyadic zone,” a phrase Gillison uses repeatedly, somewhat ambiguously referring to the mother/child relationship or the father/child relationship, becomes a leitmotif throughout the book. Readers averse to psychological interpretations will raise their guards with this framework, but Gillison’s exacting descriptions of Gimi understandings across many analytically distinguishable aspects of their lives leave these fears aside. Although not in a numerical sense, this book is dense ethnography. It began to speak to me with chapter 3’s “Portrait of Karapmene,” a Muchona-like person, an outsider who began recounting, and recording, her life with Gillison. That portrait’s dialogues lead to a “brother” and “sister,” “Goran” and “Kamale.” These are Gillison’s savants (230). The give and take between these people, including Gillison, are one of the book’s strengths. We realize the “psychological interpretations” are social facts. Perhaps too seamlessly, Gillison uses them to pass back and forth between Gimi mythology and remembered and witnessed ritual, using the two to “explain” one another. Why a widow was made to eat the corpse of her husband and why a long “penis” is shoved through the roof of a first menstruation house (figure 3.2, p. 117) come to make collective sense.
The book’s progression turns the sometimes unbearably odd and brutal beginning into moving and suggestive syntheses. Everywhere in Melanesia is different, yet with an appreciation of the Gimi world runs a wonder for how Gillison’s interpretations could be deployed elsewhere. This raises the question of slighted ideas. The author disparages “mystifying fictions about ‘the partible person’” (47) yet richly describes how the relations that model attempts to define manifest themselves through the complexity of an extraordinary social system. And while she brilliantly charts the separations that orient Gimi life, facilitating the substitution of this for that, she asserts that male-organized rituals transform Gimi sisters into “an exchangeable commodity” (150). If that were the case it would not be possible for sister-exchange to turn brothers-in-law into reciprocal mothers’ brothers to each other’s children because commodities—a social rather than a natural category—are not conceived to have intrinsic connections to one another (though of course they do). Gillison provocatively describes what she calls an I-thou relationship between mother and child, women and their horticultural products and the like. These go along with statements such as this: “‘Those who know the meaning of the myths,’ women remark, ‘know how to speak to their plants,’” or infants etc. (“tender, inventively intimate, playful, elliptical, rhythmically patterned, usually sung or chanted, and filled with spontaneous non-word verbalizations and caresses”) (256). Set up as if they were Gimi-unique, in fact this kind of action is found throughout a large region where life is about coaxing a lot out of a little or an indeterminant context: such is the care of real production. To paraphrase Mauss on Malinowski, Gillison overemphasizes the uniqueness of her data.
This book is in the genre of “psychological ethnography,” and among others Robert A. Paul is recognized in her acknowledgements. After not too many pages Vincent Crapanzano’s work came to my mind, especially Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (University of Chicago Press, 1980). Overtly eschewing sociological analysis—for some, reductionism—in place of in-depth description of complex persons in the complexities of their world, these kinds of books depict the richness and bewilderment of the human condition. Along with its important contribution to Pacific studies, this book moves to the head of that class.
Frederick H. Damon
University of Virginia, Charlottesville