ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology, v. 3. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013. xv, 256 pp. (Illus.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-85745-872-8.
In 1995, several months after the volcanic eruption that covered Rabaul in East New Britain, Papua New Guinea, I drove from the airport to the only remaining hotel, stunned at the desolate, monochrome landscape. The road had been cut through metres of ash and the once beautiful tropical township was deserted. The village of Matupit, located on a small island, was covered in ash. Several Tolai people I met assured me that it had gone forever. Keir Martin began his research there in 2002, by which time it had risen from the ashes, was again densely populated and the Matupi were once more demonstrating their legendary adaptability. This superb ethnography documents and analyzes the processes of change and people’s complex responses to them up to the mid-2000s.
Matupit and its inhabitants’ capacity for transformation have been the subjects of numerous anthropological studies since the 1960s, notably by A.L. and T.S. Epstein, who described the various ways that changes introduced by colonial administrations (particularly plantation agriculture and the cash economy) had resulted in dramatic shifts in social relations, land tenure and patterns of settlement. Martin’s research follows many of the same themes, but in a very different historical context. The eruption destroyed the village of Matupit, but almost all Matupi survived to participate in those activities associated with reconstruction, including relocation to the land set aside for them at Sikut, an area many kilometres from their village, inland from the new provincial capital, Kokopo. The land at Sikut, allotted to specific people by the provincial government to enable them to establish cash crops, is legally distinct from that held according to customary tenure. This difference, and the ways that people respond to and interpret their ownership, provides Martin with a central theme of the book, the relationships of land and people in a modern state system that retains customary land rights.
Martin engages with many of the classic topics of Melanesian anthropology: the relationship of people to land; reciprocity and the tensions inherent in exchange relationships; the ways that ritual exchanges are affected by the use of money; inter-generational conflicts; the contested definitions of custom or tradition and the means whereby men gain power and authority. His study locates contemporary Tolai in the global political economy, where the forces of neo-liberalism draw new lines between government and citizens and where new forms of sociality emerge. Martin’s examination of the ways that people have, in some instances, embraced government changes relating to land tenure provides an excellent example of the need for caution in the ways that anthropologists have characterized the Melanesian state as an alien, post-colonial enterprise that routinely ignores the interests of villagers. He shows how the transfer of customary land, when “strengthened through statutory declaration,” (69) actually suits the desires of Tolai. It effectively strengthens the status of that land as “customary,” thus enabling matrilineal descendents to claim it in future generations.
Inter-generational tensions, conflicts and changing outlooks loom large in this ethnography. The Tolai, like many people in Papua New Guinea, often remark and reflect on the changes that they have observed in their lifetime. Elders usually insist (like elders elsewhere in the world) that the younger generations have lost respect for them, have no knowledge of the ways that traditions should be maintained and have become individualistic and selfish. Martin explores these generational differences in ways that acknowledge the mixed emotional responses: regrets and censure, impatience and dismissal, sorrow and anger. But the strength of his discussion of generational tensions lies—particularly in his chapter on the decline of fish trap technology—in the ways he interweaves personal reactions to specific transformations with a broad analysis of the effects of commodification on social transactions and the obligation to reciprocate.
Martin takes on the difficult task of negotiating the divisions in current anthropological interpretations of the nature of socio-economic change in Melanesia. He points out that those who stress “cultural continuity that underlies surface changes” (177) are left in a bind—they effectively return their subjects to “the savage slot” of radical alterity. The emphasis on continuity effectively restores Melanesia to the status of “a discrete, separate and essentially ahistorical culture that is either destroyed by or survives the threat of Westernisation” (177). In his scrutiny of the range of reactions to changes, Martin offers a third way, which stresses not only the differences between people, but also the material grounds for variation. Here, as elsewhere in the book, he presents the ways that moral positions, especially those relating to ideals of mutuality, reciprocity and obligation to kin, derive from the fact that “traditional” and “modern” are coeval and in flux.
The title of this book encapsulates its major themes: the changing forms of leadership, male power and the moral responses they provoke. This provides the context for the author’s critique of the debate about possessive individualism and relational personhood. Once again he moves away from the antinomies of current anthropological debate and exposes the subtleties, contestations and circumstances that make notions of the Melanesian self, moral behaviour and adherence to “kastom” shift and combine. This is a groundbreaking ethnography: brilliantly conceived, clearly written and utterly convincing.
Martha Macintyre
The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia