Anthropology Matters: Scholarship on Demand, v.6. Wantage, UK: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2012. xi, 211 pp. (Maps, figures, illus.) US$110.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-907774-03-4.
The Vula’a (Hula) people are coastal fishers whose villages lie some 110 kilometres east of Papua New Guinea’s national capital, Port Moresby. The central topic around which this ethnography is organized is identity, conceived and analyzed in terms of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein (roughly, “being there” or existence) with a healthy dose of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s idea, via Maurice Leenhardt, of “mystical participation,” which conceptualizes a mode of thought in which people identify with other things in their environment to such an extent that the line between self and other fades or disappears (as in totemism).
Van Heekeren builds the case that Vula’a identity is an expression of being, considered an abstract Gestalt (my word choice) with its own perspective and action apparently beyond the merely human agent. At times the model seemed almost to attribute agency to this trans-human “being.” Doing so would, in my view, comes a bit too close to adopting a sort of mystical participation as an etic theoretical stance, rather than using it as a model of certain kinds of emic experience. In this latter, appropriate usage, Van Heekeren convincingly argues that her Vula’a informants make and inhabit a life world in which they sense their being in participation.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork and ethnohistoric reports that enable an admirably diachronic portrait, Vula’a individuals are shown to experience themselves in terms of interconnections with one another through such media as genealogy, storytelling, exchange, intermarriage, feeding, and singing. Their sense of existence interpenetrates and converges in people’s participation: in the wider world, through recognizing common substance with food and other living things; with ancestors, through common association with the places they established; and with contemporaries, through co-ownership of their historical and mythological stories, told to those with whom they are genealogically, though not necessarily biologically, connected. The shark warrior of the book’s title is an historical figure whose achievements are celebrated in this manner.
The introduction warns that the argument will not proceed in a linear manner; nevertheless, the topical foci of each of the eight chapters to follow provide admirable explorations of this phenomenological approach to identity in as many different areas. Chapter 1 introduces the people and their colourful history of migration and living in houses built over the sea and trading fish with land dwellers for vegetables. Chapter 2 provides an historical account of Kila Wari, the shark warrior, a nineteenth-century figure who distinguished himself in both fishing and battle. In this as in other chapters, past events are presented from multiple sources, in which the original versions are not smoothed into a composite, but rather the different perspectives remain discernable. This is fine historiography.
Chapter 3 concerns connections between genealogy and place, in which traced family relations, fictive as well as biological, are one means by which people identify as participating in a greater unitary being with putative ancestors, living relatives and village sites named for and traced to founding individuals. Taking a Schneiderian view that kinship does not exist since relations are not solely reckoned biologically, there is nevertheless a heavy use of genealogies and notions of primogeniture that imply that biological kinship is nevertheless a prototype on which the flexible business of feeling and justifying relatedness is carried on.
The fourth chapter considers history in a theoretical sense. Of value here is information on how Vula’a have adapted their own emic historical models in light of contact with Western emic ones inspired by the precepts of the academic discipline of history, focused on accuracy, dates, and linearity. Van Heekeren finds that these intrusions have not diminished the primary theme of Vula’a historical sensibilities, which is to establish the being of the teller and recorder of historical narratives through identification with the figures and events they describe.
Chapter 5 provides an intriguing perspective on theoretical models of Melanesian exchange customs that goes beyond the Strathernian notion of “dividual” persons and relationality to argue that exchange is an expression of being in such contexts. It all feels more holistic. “So although great achievements are attributed to singular persons, they are not to be understood as the gains of individuals. They are negotiated as a matter of shifting relationships between the living and the non-living world” (112). In this light, Van Heekeren develops an account of contemporary Christian life that is impressively erudite and subtly analyzed.
The sixth chapter concerns how food and eating manifest a being identity that extends beyond humans to the substances of which their bodies are made and in which they physically participate. “There is no escape from the ontological fact that there is a consubstantiation between humans and food” (135). Chapter 7 discusses the role of sound and singing in relation to religion, particularly as a Christian ritual undertaking that, at the insistence of missionaries a century ago, replaced dancing. The sense of broader identity and participation beyond oneself, that anyone who has sung with others knows, is productively analyzed in the phenomenological theoretical terms of the book.
Chapter 8 considers myth, convincingly arguing that rather than being primarily an account of past events, it is an ontological statement of continuing relevance, in which the teller expresses his or her being and participation with the circumstances it describes in the now. “That there is no substantial difference between subject and object is crucial to the mythic mode of being” (171). Van Heekeren’s approach suggests that the physical transformations common in myths “are possible because beings are of the same substance and share certain essences” (188). Such insights as this are among the most valuable of this rich work. The conclusion succinctly summarizes the argument, which represents a significant advance in the anthropology of identity.
Roger Ivar Lohmann
Trent University, Oshawa, Canada
pp. 973-975