Monographs in Anthropology. Acton, A.C.T.: ANU Press, 2017. xv, 347 pp. (Illustrations.) Free, eBook: https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/series/monographs-anthropology/tides-innovation-oceania. ISBN 978-1-760460-93-8.
The values of people, places, and material objects is unpredictable and, thus, cannot be conveyed as easy and pithy definitions. Ethnography, however, can provide stark illustrations of the creative processes of continuity and change that characterize the formation and transformation of values. In recent years there has been considerable growth in anthropological research focused on these themes. In this volume, Elisabetta Gnecchi-Ruscone and Anna Paini seek to illustrate the dynamic processes of valuing through ethnographic cases studied by anthropologists working with different Oceanic societies.
The polysemic nature of valuing clearly emerges as a common feature of different societies in Oceania. It appears to result from the interactions between societies and between humans, objects, and places. Valuing, however, cannot be reduced to a series of isolated features. Valuing is best understood as an open-ended interconnection of stories of the unexpected. Rather than comparisons, thus, Paini and Gnecchi-Ruscone establish interconnections between Pacific cultures, elaborating on the image of sea tides as a constant dynamic of innovation.
The volume structures these interconnections into two parts. First, “Mapping Materiality in Time and Place” examines how objects, persons, and ideas circulate in Oceania and, in the process, create their own meanings through these interactions. Second, “Value and Agency: Local Experiences in Expanded Narratives” illustrates the complexities arising from ethnographic accounts of the agency of local actors who seek to accommodate old and new, and the diversity of possible outcomes. The prologue opens the book, presenting the notion of Putting People First, a vision that “emphasizes the pivotal role of intersubjective relations at all levels of sociality for contemporary islanders” (23). The epilogue wraps the nine chapters up, insisting, again, on this notion of Putting People First as the pivotal contribution of anthropology to the study of value.
The study of value has notable antecedents in the works of, among others, Branisław Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, Karl Polanyi, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Sahlins. Gnecchi-Ruscone and Paini recall this anthropological genealogy in the introduction, and ask, “How can anthropology contribute to an overarching theory while maintaining its habitual peripheral position, from which stems its capacity of bringing into the picture the experience of other world views and thus offering alternative viewpoints?” (11). This volume provides an answer to this question that contemporary anthropologists interested in idiographic and nomothetic approaches to the study of value will appreciate.
For example, Marshall Sahlins’ chapter ‘puts people first’ in analysing the values associated to alterity and autochthony. Sahlins connects the specificity of Oceanic societies, such as Raymond Firth’s Tikopia, with the broader Austronesian context, and beyond, by means of an emphasis on contacts between different cultures. He writes: “If Tikopians were almost obsessively concerned with autochthony, they were equally interested in entering into relations with the vital forces, beings and things in the celestial realms beyond the horizon. For as Firth observed, the European presence greatly expanded this cosmography of the marvellous…” (40) “Cosmography of the marvellous” as a concept, can be used to connect anthropological studies of value while maintaining anthropology’s peripheral position as indicated by Gnecchi-Ruscone.
In contrast, Margaret Jolly’s chapter focuses on objects moving in Oceanic collections, rather than people. However, as she notes, objects incorporate values by means of their connections with people, embodiment of supernatural forces, and ancestors. In following the trajectories of Pacific objects moving between museums and galleries within and beyond Oceania, Jolly emphasizes the multiple dimensions in which these objects elicit their relationships with people. She focuses, then, on the differences established by two exhibitions in Honolulu and Canberra. Although the objects displayed were almost identical, they were framed differently according to different curatorial agendas. Rather than an overarching theory, Jolly offers an interpretive narrative of these movements that focuses particularly on the political and affective dimension.
The volume originates in the panel ‘‘‘Putting People First’: Intercultural Dialogue and Imagining the Future in Oceania” at the 2008 European Society of Oceanists conference in Verona. The panel addressed the lack of a comparative theory of value, and the possibility of studying values by fleshing out of interconnections and thematic similarities. “Without aiming at grand theory, [Gnecchi-Ruscone and Paini] maintain the importance of comparative work for its ability to bring to the fore both unique histories and commonalities” (11).
This kind of comparative work enables the identification of entanglements between the things that Oceanic societies value, the signs they use to indicate them, the moral standards by which they evaluate them, and the material worth that they attribute to them. Roberta Colombo Dougoud, for example, establishes this kind of connections in her chapter about Kanak engraved bamboos, where the stories expressed in the manufacture intersect with the anthropologist’s own “assumptions, hypotheses and interpretations” (125) and the framework of the exhibition where the bamboos were displayed.
These kind of analyses constitute instances of the polysemy that characterizes value as a concept and interpretive category. As such, they can be used to interrogate, analyze, and interpret aspects of society and culture, such as the relationship between people and things. But, for Gnecchi-Ruscone and Paini, the interpretation should always remain grounded in ethnographic accounts of a particular time and place. In the volume, place emerges as the third major theme along with objects and values. For example, Paini writes about the robe mission that Kanak women consider “as an expression of a deep-rooted sense of place, but at the same time also an expression of routedness, of a mobile interplay with other times, places and people” (172). As the effects of contemporary social phenomena influence Oceanic societies, this threefold set of thematic concepts turns out to be particularly useful.
Anthropologists looking for theoretical tools to interrogate and interpret these phenomena from a mid-level analytical perspective will find inspiration in the pages of this book. The fact that Tides of Innovation does not propose a new theory of value should not be considered a drawback. While such theories are yet to come, Gnecchi-Ruscone and Paini remind us that the conundrums of epistemology should not prevent us from theorizing value and, more, specifically, navigating the “tides of innovation” of contemporary Oceania.
Rodolfo Maggio
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
pp. 208-210