Dam Epilogue: The Textual Person

Angkaiyakmin notions of a person's efficacy circulating beyond themselves and combining with others is used in this chapter as a vantage point on anthropological interpretative artefacts, and the section argues that these contemporary aesthetics of anthropological knowledge-making produce interpretative forms after a particular understanding of subjectivity and personhood. The chapter specifically compares the capacities of Bolivip and anthropological knowledge-practices, and considers how each form of knowledge adheres to a powerful aesthetic that is taken for granted by the respective practitioners. Recognition and currency for artefacts – the capacity to animate analytic and social relations in others – is governed by exhibiting this demanding aesthetic form. The chapter then addresses the insights from Bolivip knowledge-practices to anthropological knowledge-practices: by adopting the vantage point of ‘the textual person’, the aesthetic principles through which anthropological knowledge is given form are outlined, and the means by which anthropologists circulate parts of themselves to others – their efficacy and ‘relations’ – are examined. The ‘textual person’ figure makes explicit the form of subjective relationality that informs anthropological interpretation.

miit

Fakam lies a day's walk from the more permanently used houses in Bolivip, and this occasional house was temporarily occupied through various comings and goings for many weeks whilst mature taro gardens were harvested and new gardens were cleared and planted. Bolivip divides the forest in several ways: by elevation between hot and cold places where most crops and pandanus are tended, and the high cloud forest; and by usage between primary forest, gardens, old garden sites, spirit sites, and house clearings. An entirely new variety of taro is found having spontaneously emerged amongst broken ground in some unfamiliar part of the forest. Kinim miit relations are sometimes imaged as a tree.

Cosmology in the Making: Barth, the Baktaman, and Secrecy

This chapter explores Barth's work among the Baktaman, and examines how the Min got into Anthropology and how Anthropology got into the Min. It opens with an image that affords a glimpse of influences on Barth's perception of the Baktaman. The chapter also presents an in-depth example of two-way combinations between social relationships, analytical relationships, and ethnography, such that they ultimately appear inseparably a combination of the others and yet appear at moments as if they are stand-alone ‘separates’. Barth's record provides a rare opportunity to track the impressions left behind by thinking carried away from experiences at the ends of other journeys, the impressions left behind by earlier conceptual work, and to witness their development in subsequent passages. After the effects on Barth's epistemology are outlined, the discussion backtracks to focus on the Baktaman monograph. The chapter also examines the consequences of Barth having in mind a structuralist opposition of isolated symbolic elements. It then addresses Barth's discussion of creative mechanisms during storage within the minds of individual ritual specialists. Barth's methodological landscape is made concrete such that the movement of ideas can be witnessed in the passage of senior men through the forest to attend an initiation.

Methodology After the Event: Weiner, Symbolic Obviation, and the Foi and Strathern, Gender of the Gift, and the Hagen moka

This chapter provides two ethnographic examples of anthropologists reflexively incorporating Melanesian aesthetics and energetics into their interpretations by making distinctive borrowings from Melanesian practices. In James F. Weiner's portrayal, Foi perceive the world as constituted by various forms of ‘a flow of vital energies, forces and relationships’. He suggests that men and women engage flow in distinctive ways. Foi takes human sociality, its ‘rules’, as ‘given’ or ‘innate’. Marilyn Strathern's The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia presents an original line of theoretical reasoning prompted by an ‘impasse in [the] comparative anthropology of Melanesia’. Mt Hagen is the ground by which The Gender of the Gift is figured. Strathern shares Ongka's awareness that exchanges are dependent upon producers: a husband with moka ambitions has to be an equally enthusiastic sweet-potato gardener, helping his wife to provide fodder for the pigs she will grow into prestigious gifts. An effect of The Gender of the Gift has been that much of what it has to teach has been incorporated by Melanesianists.

eip

Three young brothers were bouncing up and down on the wobbly verandah of their house in Bolivip, rejoicing the name of their newly acquired hunting dog. These boys had yet to be shown either the residential men's house or the yolam cult house, and remained wanang am alin (‘those of the women's house’). Taros grow head down, bottom up – but once harvested and severed, the corm's flat top is spoken of as the taro's ‘head’. They are planted offset at a slight angle. Walking through the old garden where his mother and grandmother were lifting taros, one of Recky's teenage rejoicers paused by a growing plant and described the taro leaf as a face, with ears, eyes, nose, and tongue. The now-successful gardener explained that the taram was shaped by Afek following and copying the image of her genitals. Listening to those taram mouth-harp songs of birds, women, and water, Recky's follower–owner father explained how the Feranmin man was following the same path that he himself used when out hunting marsupials with his dog. Angkaiyakmin knowledge it seems is necessarily the result of combined persons and takes the form of persons combined.

kuk

Some gardeners say that they think sorrowfully about their children whilst they work, of how they might one day return to the same place and remember their parent cutting trees and carrying a heavy net-bag of taros back to the village. Clearing a garden from primary forest is a larger task than clearing regrowth, yet people insist on the appetite-satisfying quality. Certain important trees should not be cut down, and remain as markers of previous garden sites and for hunting trips. Differences between the movements of more junior and more senior men are also evident in the yolam during the sum wok takamin rite. The events after the showing of mafum-ban are described. Mafum-ban intends two apparently alternate effects, preparing the young men for marriage by making them irresistibly handsome, and preparing them for fighting by making them devastatingly violent.

A Temperamental Ménage à Trois: Mead, Bateson, and Fortune and the Trafficking Between Social and Analytical Relations in Ethnography

This chapter describes the famous occasion when three anthropologists met up on the Sepik River in 1932/3 – and which infamously led to Margaret Mead eventually leaving Reo Fortune for Gregory Bateson. It also looks as much to the anthropologists as to their ethnographies to suggest that a view of one is available in the view of the other. The chapter furthermore presents an interest in how Stocking makes economy of exposition – just ‘one sentence’ – speak so much, and in what he does not need to say; whereas saying it any other way involves a long story to make the same point. Additionally, it intends to use the events instead to look at the commentary and contemporary practices in order to explore continuities in anthropological quasi-scientism sensitivities concerning the proximity between social relations, analytical relations, and ethnography. Mead's art is one of extraordinary clarity, giving hard edges to what it depicts. When the three anthropologists met up in Kankanamun, they did so acting with a number of others in mind. Blackberry Winter recalls as ‘compass points’.

Prologue: kim kurukuru taratara

The presented experimental ethnography of an exchange between two knowledge-making practices is the story of a man who tried to see properly. The existence of the ‘Min problem’ may not be widely recognized, but there are thoroughgoing consequences for anthropological knowledge in coming to terms with such a spectacular failure of analysis. Barth's rubric of ‘secrecy’ amongst the Baktaman has enjoyed an extended paradigmatic reign in the Min area, and remains unchallenged. This book specifically provides a solution to the ‘Min problem’. The analysis reveals a novel vantage point on the Min more widely, and uses this to afford a novel vantage point on Anthropology – and sets up an exchange between them. It also discusses the ethnographic field of connections, tensions, and causes constituting Bolivip by first setting the scene through a series of events in late 1994 and, second, by rehearsing an ethnographic moment that is adopted as a model for the methodological exchange. An overview of the chapters included in this book is given.