On academic Foucauldian-dramaturgy and modernity in Melanesia.

Mimica, Jadran

Let me make clear from the outset that in what follows I differentiate sharply between Foucault himself and the ways his ideas are applied by so many anthropologists--especially those writing about Melanesian life-worlds. As for Foucault himself, I find his writings limited within the compass of his own inquiry and by no means do I take him as an authority on the matters of power, epistemology, sexuality, the 'hermeneutics of the self', etc., in the context of the history of (principally Western) European life-worlds, their political configurations, and so on. The ethnographic applications of Foucault's formulations in the context of Melanesia that I am familiar with come from accomplished ethnographers and scholars (e.g., Clark 1997; Eves 2011; Jacka 2007; Knauft 1994; Lattas 1998; Lindstrom 1990; Wardlow 2006). (1) Nevertheless, as an interpretive endeavour, these writings exemplify primarily an ossification into a stock of what I call Foucauldian iconography and Foucault-dramatic cliches. These are deficient as conceptual frameworks for ethnographic and theoretical explorations of the dynamics of selfhood, inter/subjectivity, knowledge and power in human relations in different cultural life-worlds. For instance, Lattas' outstanding mastery of Foucault's ideas is evident in his unpublished PhD thesis, which is an original exploration of the penal system and public executions in the 19th century colonial life-world of New South Wales (Lattas 1987). His Melanesian explorations (e.g. 1998), although characterised by an acute exercise of critical mindfulness in his use of Foucault, nevertheless show the limitations of such a transplantation that the examples below illustrate in a rather stark manner.

A recent suitable example of this academic foucaultization of Melanesian life-worlds is Jacka's (2007) paper on the eastern Porgera (Ipili) in the Enga Province. From the late eighties this gold-rich area has, for that reason, undergone a so-called 'capital-intensive resource development' (e.g., Filer, 1999). Naturally, there has also been some collateral damage; the region is now ecologically-demographically-socio-culturally-economically-politically ransacked (Biersack, 2006), being the concomitant effect of this sort of 'intensive' development understood as a total civilising phenomenon. Drawing on both his own fieldwork and on a wealth of other ethnographies, (2) Jacka takes a Foucauldian look at, especially, a cast of the traditional cosmological lineaments of the Ipili life-world and the way these have been refracted and recast through the experience of Australian colonial governmental control, missionisation, and the more recent 'capital-intense' infusion of Western mineralogical appetites. He delimits this trajectory as 'Ipili modernity' (ibid. 41). Jacka then outlines, rather selectively, a cosmo-ontological complex of Ipili ritual practices focussed on the control of pollution and the procreative-heterosexual context of embodiment, which, as a microcosmos, is in synergetic relation to their sky-and-earth bound macrosmos (see Biersack 1987, 1991). Given their colonial and post-colonial trajectory of development, the entire Ipili micro-macro corporeal complex has undergone steady erosion and eventual demise. However, in Jacka's Foucault-dramatic rendition, the Ipili complex is recast as a 'disciplinarian practice' involving 'seclusionary practices', 'surveillance' and, for a good measure, 'panopticism' (p. 49). Thus:

Traditional Ipili society used two means for ensuring that disciplinary practices toward the body were being fulfilled. (...) Social judgement conferred primarily by elderly men and women on the attributes of a person's skin. Supple, glowing, healthy skin indicated that men and women were fulfilling their moral obligations of ritual protection after sex, menstruation, and parturition. These judgements were made especially at singsings ... In the absence of social evaluators of bodily discipline, another mechanism of panopticism was employed--the sun. In local cosmology, the sun is an 'omniscient, sighted subject' (Biersack, 1987:188). Socially odious acts, such as defecating on a trail or wanton destruction of flora and fauna, are said to be punished by the sun, causing a tree to fall on a person or having them slip and fall to their death or dismemberment. More generally, all activities are considered to occur under the watchfulness of the sun and many people mentioned the need to always engage appropriate behavior, even in the absence of other humans. (Jacka op cit. p. 49; emphasis JM).

In similar vein, the abandonment of the purificatory observances and concerns with pollution is rendered as 'the demise of disciplinary relationships among bodies, land and ancestors has resulted in contemporary discourses about bodies that are no longer under control' (p. 59; emphasis JM).

Biersack (1987, p. 186) is the primary source for this summary. It should be noted to begin with that the relevant passage, like the entire paper and her ethnography as a whole, provides a very different, explicitly 'aesthetic', perspective on the entire bodily-libidinal complex and the actual situation of what Jacka takes for granted can be reduced to 'surveillance'. As she writes:

The process of display and evaluation is highly formalized. In public dances, called mali (singsing in pidgin), married men, adolescent girls, and adolescent boys who have just returned from the forest don wigs, bird feathers, wild orchids, leaves, reeds, marsupial fur, snake skin, pearlshell, and oil, and they perform before an audience of judges who appraise the quality of each performer's appearance--large or small, beautiful or ugly? There are two kinds of mali or dance, the 'leg dance' and the 'beauty dance', and it is only the performers in the latter that are so evaluated. Pollution-related practices culminate in a beauty competition (see also Biersack 1998, 2004).

Regarding his formulaic Foucauldian (i.e., Benthamian) inflection of the sun in the Ipili cosmology, Jacka, however, omits to mention what Biersack (who at least at the time when she published her paper, gave no inkling of the Benthamian implications of Ipilian solarity (3)) actually writes about it:

'He (i.e., sun) sees and knows everything'. His vision is the source of light, and a common usage epithet for the sun is 'he who makes light' (waa piyane ko). Light in this usage is a metaphor for the knowledge the sun transmits to his human community that lives beneath him 'on the ground'. To human beings, the sun, 'gives', 'says giving', or 'drops' mana, knowledge; he enlightens them (ibid. 188; also p. 199; also Biersack 1991, 1996).

In short, the Ipili solar orb is primarily a gnostic agency rather than, as Jacka would have it, an oppressively watchful disciplinarian keeping his 'subjects' under 'surveillance'. (4) I wish to stress that this clarification is not intended as an either/or matter so that, as someone might argue, Biersack, as it were, failed to deal with the power implications of these Ipili notions and practices whereas Jacka's rendition provides a corrective. I have no issues with the reality of power in Ipili life-world but the way it is rendered intelligible. The point is that Jacka omits to reference Biersack's aesthetic-gnostic significations, which in no way exclude power dynamics, and chooses Foucauldian-dramaturgy, which misrepresents not only the dynamics of power but also of knowledge in the Ipili life-world.

Furthermore, the Ipili solar orb is one particular cultural-historical variant of the archetypal image of the 'all seeing eye' or 'God's eye' (figuring as such on the US $1.00 note) and it is an empirical matter as to whether the Ipili moral consciousness, male and female, may manifest concrete solar (or presently Christian Yahwean) qualities (oppressive or uplifting), possibly made manifest as such in dream-imagery or other modalities of self-experience. The issue here is that mode of agency that can be indexed by such a psychoanalytic gloss as the 'super-ego' (which is not to be equated with 'conscience') and would have to be explored empirically in reference to the specificities of the Ipili intersubjective field, its specific cultural objectifications as the externality of the world-space (sky^earth), and its subjective internalisation and transformation in the course of a life-time, from infancy to senescence. The actual intersubjective dynamics of the Ipili (Porgeran and Paiela) egoity, both interpersonal and intra-cosmic, their subjective experience of themselves and their sky earth bound cosmic existence is not given a shred of documentary evidence in any of the published ethnographies. As a comparative amplification of this point I refer to the Yagwoia-Angan of the montane interior of eastern Papua New Guinea (Mimica, 1981; 1988) where the sun and moon are Imacoqwa's (ouroboric cosmic androgyne) two eyes but it is the sun-eye whose ray-arrows can cause painful bodily conditions such as scabies and similar skin inflammations. (5) Here one gets an intimation of the more lethal looks emanating from the sun's celestial omnipresence. But even so, I would not interpret the Yagwoia experience of themselves as living in a cosmos constituted as a Foucauldian-Benthamian panoptical regime of surveillance and deployment of power. The basic reason is that, in terms of their constitutive cultural imaginary and institutional forms, the Yagwoia intersubjectivity as a field of power and the practices of societal control are not structured like a totalitarian prison-machine, which is the prototype of the Foucauldian-Benthamian panopticism. I will expand on this in the next case. Here it will suffice to say that not each and every manifestation of the 'all-seeing eye' and its concomitant implications for the dynamics of knowledge and power can be approached via an uncritical invocation of Foucault's rendition of the rise of the European 'Gefangnisskunde' (Prisonscience) and its impact on Western societies. Parenthetically, even the ancient Egyptians, who created for themselves the first territorial state known to humankind and lived in a universe featuring the solar (Re) and lunar (Horus) eyes (usually in the guise of female goddesses), (6) would not be rendered a hermeneutic service if submitted to a Foucault-dramaturgical makeover. On the other hand, a psycho-analytic and archetypal elucidation of Benthamian obsessional panopticism would be a constructive undertaking. The same can be extended to Foucault himself, a philosopher of human un-freedom.

Writing a few years earlier, the late Jeffrey Clark (1997) framed Huli (Southern Highlands) sexuality and their life-world (7) in wholesale Foucault-dramatic terms. Thus, 'Huli sexuality, while not created as a differentiated subject of study, did have connections with knowledge/power and the control of bodies. In particular it controlled young men, children, and women, not through punishment or incarceration but through concepts of pollution, and to some extent, surveillance' (Clark 1997:196; emphasis JM). Regarding their bachelor cult ibagiya (Frankel 1986:103-4; Glasse, 1965:42-3, 1979:15-18), long defunct, Clark states that it 'provided the institutional and ideological locus for interaction between men and women, particularly inscribing pervasive beliefs in the polluting power of women and their menstrual blood' (ibid. 191). And additionally, in a footnote: 'Ibagiya would have operated, in terms of its structure, location, and discourse, in a similar way to the panopticon described by Foucault (1979), (8) which "ideally", produced subjectivity, through the control of discourse and nondiscursive space. But I would lay more stress on agency in the production of discourse' (ibid. 314, ft.5).

Now in Foucault's own rendition of the 'political anatomy' of the Ancient Regime states of the Western Europe (i.e., England, France, Germany) the panopticon figured as a component of the 'technologies' of power that, as he so zealously argued, effected 'a historical transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society' (Foucault 1979:209). Hence, the would be 'Benthamite physics of power' became a generalised blueprint for 'swarming disciplinary mechanisms' and 'procedures' operative in prisons, army, workshops, hospitals, asylums, educational institutions, schools, police. Concerning the police, 'one is in the indefinite world of a supervision that seeks ideally to reach the most elementary particle, the most passing phenomenon of the social body' (ibid. 214). Such is the gist of Foucault's vision of the disciplinary omnipotence, which historically constituted the modern Western social forms. Echoing one of his sources (Julius), he surmises: 'We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism' (ibid. 217). But Clark, like so many other users of Faucault-dramaturgy, has no or little concern with the specificities of the socio-cultural and historical context of the discourses, governmental practices and their instituting imaginary that captivated Foucault and stimulated his vision of the modern social body and its 'political anatomy'. This much is suggested by a statement like Clark's that the Huli ibagiya, 'in terms of its structure, location, and discourse' 'would have operated in a similar way' to Foucault's description of the panopticon (op.cit.). The point is that these formulas are given in place of concrete descriptions and analysis. And they readily pass and circulate as such, providing a semblance of insight. Clark simply does not show in any concrete detail how the Huli ibagiya 'would have operated'. Moreover, it wouldn't have occurred to Clark to ask himself whether Foucault's description of the panopticon, when critically examined, can account for the historical realities and the power dynamics of those very societies that he wholesale characterised as 'disciplinarian' and 'punitive' (Foucault 1979, 2001).

But let me take Clarke by his words and ask: what could he possibly be referring to in Foucault's text by asserting the similarity of Huli ibagiya to Foucault's 'descriptions'? Let's briefly refer to Foucault's text: 'the Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad; in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen' (Foucault, 1979:201-02). Or, say: 'It is an important mechanism, it automatizes and disindividualizes power' (ibid. 202). Still more: 'The Panopticon is a marvellous machine, which, whatever one may wish to put it to, produces homogenous effects of power' (ibid. p. 202); and, also--'it can constitute a mixed mechanism in which relations of power (and of knowledge) may be precisely adjusted, in the smallest detail, to the processes that are to be supervised; it can establish a direct proportion between "surplus power" and "surplus production"' (p. 206). Still, a more sublime and devious machination is at work in the Panopticon: 'The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through these power relations' (pp. 206-07). And, to round up: 'This Panopticon, subtly arranged so that an observer may observe, at a glance, so many different individuals, also enables everyone to come and observe any of the observers. The seeing machine was once a sort of dark room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole' (ibid, p.207).

My point here is not so much to amplify the absurdity of Clark's uncritical invocation of what is, in fact, Foucault's own dramatization of Bentham's totalitarian phantasy. Rather, I want to highlight, qua this absurdity, that Clark, has very little to say about the past and present Huli society as a concrete field of inter-human (as mediated by ghosts, spirits, deities, and the Christian God) and, to be sure, authentically bodily and gendered Huli power relations and dynamics. What is spoken of as a Huli social body and, by implication, their supposed 'political anatomy', is a simulacrum of their Foucault-dramatic make-over. (9) Parenthetically, the Huli ethnographic corpus does contain some information indicative of that mode of archaic 'all-seeing' gaze (10), which is, in myriad ways, a manifestation of superego configurations, at once collective, intra-cosmically externalised, and individual. Thus, at the very end of his account of Huli religion, Glasse (1965:49), the first ethnographer of the Huli, suggestively writes, with an eye on Durkheim: (11) 'A man can escape his obligations in one parish by fleeing to another territory, but he cannot escape the omnipresent eye of Datagaliwabe'. He is described 'as a giant who, with legs astride, looks down upon all and punishes lying, stealing, adultery, murder, incest, breaches of exogamy and taboos relating to ritual. He also penalizes those who fail to avenge the deaths of kin slain in war. He has no concern, however, with the behaviour of unrelated persons. (...) Unlike the deities, Datagaliwabe cannot be propitiated or placated; no pigs are dedicated to his name, no rituals are performed for him and no prayers entreat his goodwill' (op.cit. 37; see also 48-49). Also--'He never acts capriciously, requires no sacrifices and is aloof from human influence. His sole concern is to punish kinship offences' (op.cit. 48). Frankel (1986), another ethnographer of the Huli, who worked among them a good twenty years after Glasse, writes: 'the concept of Datagaliwabe has become very important to modern Hubs, as his qualities dominate in the Huli conception of the Christian God. In former times it seems that Datagaliwabe offered little serious threat. (...) The influence of Christianity has introduced the concept of a universalistic morality. Like Datagaliwabe, God punishes breaches of the moral code directly. But the moral code in which he is interested covers many actions about which there were previously no universal prescriptions' (op.cit. 154). Need I emphasise that this kind of omnipresent eye of Datagaliwabe is not compatible with, or illuminated by, the invocation of a Benthamian panopticon-regime that so many anthropologists seem to have imbibed from Foucault.

Yet another good indicator that the use of Foucault's ouvre figures predominantly as an ossified discursive blueprint is a recent paper by Richard Eves (2011), a seasoned ethnographer of the Lelet Mandak of New Ireland. He avers that Tike Foucault himself, I am against the imposition of any grand theory without regard to culture or context' (p. 758) but has no second thoughts using Foucault's framework as 'the analytic toolbox' (ibid.). And right here is a cause for alarm: when ideas are approached as tools in a box, the realities of a human life-world can easily be misconstrued because of a reduced critical attitude, especially in regard to the contents of the box. Thus, Eves does not attempt to subject the Foucauldian 'toolbox' to a prior critical examination, (12) in my view especially necessary when it is also mediated by so many other users. (13) Rather, from the title (featuring the vintage Foucauldian 'technologies of governmentality in a Melanesian society'), via the abstract (stating that inspired by Pentecostal fervour Felet dreams 'now play a role in policing them') Eves configures Felet existence, past and present, into a handiwork of various 'technological' operations. So, the ethnographer narrates: 'Traditionally, the Felet have been disciplined mainly through the technologies of power ...' (op.cit. 760), and a 'deeply significant ethos of shame' (p. 761) is also rendered as an 'operation' (i.e., a technological machination). With the advent of the Pentecost, a fully blown 'technology of the self' became operational, effecting a 'subjectivization' of the Felet, who in fact are traditional egoities that have and experience themselves qua their souls. Eves, however, under the sway of Foucault's rendition of the early Christian fathers, martyrs, and monastic practices, focuses on the effects of the confessional technology and dream experiences, which he renders as 'the policing of the self' and 'self-policing' (p. 764). He doesn't say whether the Felet themselves verbalise their Pentecostal self-relation as a police exercise (for it is a matter of their 'discourse' about their Pentecostal practice) or think of themselves as being 'auto-policemen' and 'auto-policewomen', perhaps even regarding themselves as a spiritual progeny of the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary, the national government agency with the jurisdiction throughout Papua New Guinea. (14) This is not a laughing matter because in terms of the actual historical experience, the only experience of the real policing praxis that the Lelet and so many other peoples of the present day nation state of Papua New Guinea have had, was provided by the native policemen in the body of the Papuan Constabulary. Furthermore, few countries can boast to have had a special language of policing derived from the native soil, the famous Police Motu, which used to be a lingua franca throughout the territories of what was originally the British Papua. By the way, this would be a more authentic Foucauldian manner of casting the Felet in Foucault-dramatic terms: from the cultural-historically actual practice (of the real police operation in PNG) to the internalisation ('subjectivization') of the real policing 'disciplinary practices', turning the Felet into the 'self-policing subjects'.

This indigenous cultural-historical context aside, it seems clear enough to me that Eves' rendition of the policing effects of Pentecostal practices on the Lelet souls is not due to any real policing-disciplinary experiences but to his uncritical 'tool-box' participation in the bone-fide academic Foucault-dramatic discourse, which, to stay within this frame of discoursing, fails to 'interrogate' its conceptual validity perhaps because such an activity might undermine its aspirations to, shall I say, 'disciplinary sovereignty'. Be that as it may, what Eves' paper clearly attests to, in the mediation of what is otherwise an excellent ethnographic corpus (e.g., Eves, 1998), is the pervasive formulaic uniformity of the anthropological projection of Foucauldian-dramaturgy into so many Melanesian life-worlds and their intersubjectivities. For whatever these and their discursive 'tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations' (Foucault, 1981:101-2) may be, their constitutive modes are all an expression of 'technological' operations, 'regimes', 'surveillance', and 'disciplinary' intents whose determining prototype is a phantasy of an omnipotent 'policing agency'. To be sure, this sort of centricity is dispensable because in Foucault's phantasy of power 'Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere' (1981:93). In addition, his would-be nominalism allows for maximum vacuity: 'One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society' (ibid.; emphasis JM). This is music to the ears of so many users of the Foucauldian tool box for it can be 'strategically' used in academic discourse facilitating, as it does, the short-circuiting of the elucidation of concrete phenomenology and psychodynamics of power. And yet, it gives an impression of a fulsome comprehension of power. Thus, for instance, with the Master's imprimatur, Eves and Butt (2008: 13) submit: 'Power, after all, is a name we give to a "complex strategical situation in a particular society" (Foucault, 1981:93; emphasis JM)'. At least in the more ecstatic moments of his Nietzschean weltstimmung, Foucault himself would have probably refused to recognise as his own this toolbox style of discourse, which sterilizes all human will to and self-actualisation qua power, and assimilates all human existence and social forms and action to a universal Polizeiwissenschaft. (15)

This brief critical appraisal of Jacka's, Clark's and Eves' ethnographies merely purports to illustrate my overall view of the academic Foucault-dramaturgy and its formulaic-projective applications as, by and large, hermeneutically and conceptually distorting and uninformative. As the illustrative pieces, these papers are also symptomatic of the general atrophy of the current academic discourses signposted by such thematic labels as 'embodiment', 'modernity' and 'post-modernity'. (16) This is so because such civilisational-historical individualities as 'modernity' and 'post-modernity', as well as the notion of 'embodiment' and its dynamics, are used primarily as alluring tokens within current academic discourses. In particular, 'modernity' in this context figures as a projection by those who seem to fancy themselves as belonging to not just an altogether different epoch of thinking and being, but that they, as it were, are conceptually clear as to what 'modernity' and various other 'post'--epochal conditions are, specifically in relation to the historical matrix of the European and North Atlantic civilisational fields. In the context of the academic discourses no elaboration is offered as to whether, say, any Melanesians would, or do, assume these vintage European epochal self-characterisations. (17) Each of these is a civilisational-historical individuality, which, of late became, as a function of academic discourses, projected under the guise of the 'multiple modernities' world over. In academic writings, the upsurge of 'modernity' as a global condition is a projection determined by the Western epochal self-characterisation in terms of 'post-modernity'. It became popular with Lyotard's The Post-Modern Condition (1979), which stimulated the inflation of 'modernity' as a label for the global-planetary impact of the colonial-imperialist expansion of Europe since the end of the 15th century. During and until the end of the 20th century, this process has been discoursed about principally as 'socio-cultural change', 'development', 'modernization' (without 'modernity'); the colonised peoples had to deal with the conditions of colonisation rather than with their 'modernity'. (18) Despite these sorts of phrasings, the world-historical trajectory is one and the same. The would be 'postmodernity' is the intensification of and the consummation of Western 'modernity'--hypermodernity if you want; the would-be 'multiple modernities' are local refractions of one and the self-same world-system developed, master-minded and co-ordinated by, and in the course of, the development and expansion of the Western civilisation of capitalism (Allen 2001; Blouet 2001; Braudel 1981-84; Grafton 1992; Parker 1988; Stavrianos 1981). In all this one has to distinguish between the processes that have been reshaping the globe, the totalisation of the Western techno-military-monetary civilisation (supposedly everyone's object of desire), and the phantasies of these processes that fuel and shape so many academic writings (fabrications) on the phenomenon of 'globalisation'. Thus, every nook on this globe has its own 'modernity' even though the indigenous locals (upgraded to the status of 'glocals', the planetary citizens, as it were) might never suspect that that is what they specifically have become and what supposedly they are in the scheme of the world-historical epochal time and the history of Western Being, i.e., a particular academic framing of Western self-cosmoontologisation. To be sure, there is a world-historical lag in this exercise because the unsuspecting 'glocals' are 'modern' and they have been endowed with their 'modernity', while those who write about them as such are primarily 'post-modern' and living in 'postmodernity'.

As for the question of the 'embodiment' of these academic epochal fabrications in other life-worlds, apart from the genuine bodily accomplishments in Melanesia by Melanesians, the real issue is whether any of those who subscribe to these catchy renditions is demonstrably in mindful possession of a critically sustainable knowledge about and understanding of the subject-matter enunciated by such labels. As the thinkers of 'embodiment', 'modernity', 'post-modernity', and--especially because a purportedly historicist understanding is at issue --as the ethnographers that seemingly cultivate historicist sensibilities, the evidence presented in these sorts of writings is overwhelmingly negative as to their conceptual abilities to formulate credible historicist interpretations of human existence in Melanesia or elsewhere. If judged just by one representative collection (Bamford 2007) then such contributions are as good as anything else the contributors to that volume have already produced, for most of them indeed are the proven ethnographers of 'ritual, praxis, and social change in Melanesia'. Accordingly, through these contributions they have successfully reproduced themselves once again as the ethnographers of this region. In this perspective, if there is a locus of the 'embodied' epochal self-consciousness, at once 'modern', 'post-modern', or any other 'post'-epochal eponym that one may wish to attribute to it, then it surely is that of these and other 'critically modern' academicians engaged in what is primarily a Western megapolitan academic enterprise of textual post/modernisation of Melanesia. And this context a priori determines the inner and the outer horizons of the purpose and value of all such writings. The stock-in-trade labels and the manner of constructions of this would-be 'new wave' of ethnography leave no doubt that the Melanesian (and other planetary) life-worlds, regardless of what and how they were and are for themselves, keep abreast with the megapolitan Anglophone academic discourses. After the depletion of the latter, some new labels will become a preferred currency, and the 'glocals', through the self-exertion of their megapolitan academic ethnographers, will come to embody them as well.

DOI: 10.1002/ocea.5046

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Jadran Mimica

University of Sydney

NOTES

(1.) I could list a few more but because I do not intend to make any direct references to them I will omit them. I also omit Ariss, 1992, because he never did any Held research in Melanesia. His was an attempt to render New Guinea male initiations (with the focus on 'ritualized homosexuality') in Foucault-dramatic terms. Ariss kindly sent me his manuscript, 'The Politics of Ritualized Homosexuality in Papua New Guinea' (1987), before its revision for publication, and asked me for my comments (December 1987). In my reply I gave him my reasons as to why the New Guinea initiatory practices are not rendered intelligible by means of such Foucauldian formulations as a 'discipline of the body', 'the first science of the body', or a 'disciplinary science of self-regulation' (Ariss, 1987:3, 9, 11). These were the first intimations of a take on Foucault, which tends to render his work as a, to put it in the terms of one of his historical sources (Julius; in Foucault, 1979, 2001), 'Gefangnisskunde' (Prison-science) and, more generally, 'Pollzeiwissenschaft' (Science-of-Policing).

(2.) Gibbs. 1975, 1977; Gray, 1973, and numerous articles by Biersack, (especially) 1987, 1991, 1996. 1999, 2006.

(3.) Thus, in all of Biersack's ethnography that I have read, the one use of 'surveillance' that I spotted is when she discusses the proscription on sleeping that a menstruating woman is supposed to adhere to. In a footnote Biersack qualifies this: I must confess to not knowing whether this precaution is taken seriously. I suspect that if the wife lives alone, it is not. If she lives with a kinswoman of her husband, however, she is under surveillance; and her sleep may be interrupted if her in-law can keep herself awake' (Biersack 1987:193; emphasis JM). Another instance is 1991:244 where the reference is to the eye-hands co-ordination. As for a 'panoptic' characterisation, albeit without Benthamian insinuations, Biersack makes it in a much later paper (1999:76): 'All space and all time are equally exposed to the panoptic vision of his one eye, the solar orb (nai lene or "sun eye"), locating him extraterrestrially everywhere and everywhen but therefore nowhere and nowhen' (emphasis JM).

(4.) See especially Biersack. 1991:260-63, for her account of the big man's mediating function between the sun and mortal humanity, as well as for the identification between the big man (due to his superior gnostic capacity received from the sun) and the solar luminary.

(5.) Due to the Yagwoia understanding of the body as a micro-cosmic equivalent of the macrocosmic world-body, the luno-solar quiddity (envisaged as a differential thermal and luminescent fluidity) is also the quiddity of human bodily animation (i.e., soul; see Mimica 2003). The solar quiddity, in the marrow and brain, is specifically at work in the generation of the kune-umpne (thought-heat-steam, i.e., thought soul) whose basal power is manifest as the human speech. Thinking activity itself is equivalent to the sun's piercing luminous irradiation. It should be emphasised that the marrow is the source of semen (man) and milk (woman). Thus, the solar quiddity is at once semenal-lacteal (i.e., fertilising-nourishing) and illuminative-cognitive. A detailed elucidation of the quiddity of the sun and moon among the Yagwoia, is presented in a forthcoming work (Mimica n.d.).

(6.) For instance, in the myth of the Destruction of Humanity, Sekhmet, 'the powerful one', who is 'the Eye of Re', destroys his human subjects who have rebelled against him (Roberts 1997:10-11).

(7.) The Huli are close neighbours of the Ipili.

(8.) This must be the reference to the 1979 Peregrine edition of Discipline and Punish, which, in the collective bibliography of the volume in which Clark's paper appeared, is listed as the first English (Allen Lane) edition (1977).

(9.) This simulacrum is even more absurd in view of Clark's suggestion that it 'ideally' produced Huli 'subjectivity', whatever that might be, apart from a presumption that it is a priori understood in terms of the Foucault-dramatic discourse, say the 'hermeneutic of the subject', 'subjectivity and truth', and, not to be left out, 'the technologies of the self. Wardlow (2006), the most recent ethnographer of the Huli, refers to Clark's paper, duly oblivious to its panoptical claims, no doubt due to her, albeit more cautious, engagement with Foucauldian discourse. It goes to her credit that although 'disciplining' figures recurrently in her account of Huli intersubjectivity (e.g., pp. 3, 12, 143), it does not project all that much the veneer that this, hitherto a wholly valid concept, acquired in the Foucault-dramatic discourse.

(10.) Of which, as I already emphasized above, the Foucault-Benthamian panopticon is a most recent philosophical articulation, stimulated to a degree by Foucault's own narcissistic dynamics and fascination with S/M (Miller, 1993).

(11.) In this respect, a Durkheimian-Maussian aspect of Foucault's thinking should not be overlooked despite his emphasis on 'practices' rather than a society's ways of 'representing itself. The very image of motley 'technologies' (of the body, self, power, etc) resonates with Mauss' 'techniques of the body' and the essay on the 'Self. However, this in no wise deprives Foucault' philosophical style of its originality.

(12.) In Eves' reckoning 'The full import of Foucault's work has yet to be reckoned with in the discipline of anthropology,' (op.cit. p. 758).

(13.) The most notable is Ruth Marshall's (2009) Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria, framed very much in terms of the 'technology/regime of the self' dramaturgy. In Eves' bibliography (op.cit., 770-73), representing the general Foucauldian commentarial scholarship, the following can be listed: Barry, Osborne, and Rose, Mitchell Dean, Colin Gordon, Rose and Miller. Among so many anthropologists, the following few will suffice: Ellison (Ethiopia), Escobar (the entire Third World), Farqhur and Zhang, Greenhalgh and Winckler (China), Martha Kaplan (India), Steven Robins (South Africa).

(14.) Commenting on the Lelet's 'community-level government', an example of the external system of governmentality dictated by the PNG state (op.cit. 761), Eves details the composition of the 'Village Planning Committee', which also included the village policeman and the village magistrate (op.cit. ft.9:769). Parenthetically, the position of the village policeman (entirely separate from the Papuan Constabulary) was a component of the colonial system of local governance whose chief agents were the government appointed officials, luluai and tultul. In regard to the actualities of the functioning of the post-independence PNG State governmentality, my view is that this colonial creation will be misrepresented insofar as one would try, uncritically, to assimilate it into the miasma of the Foucault-dramatic discourse.

(15.) What strikes me about the way so many anthropologists use Foucault is that the Nietzchean inspiration of his thinking is conspicuously sanitized or altogether absent, which I see as symptomatic of their 'deeply inscribed' and well 'disciplined' good citizen subjectivities.

(16.) All three papers espouse these concepts. Jacka's paper is published in Bamford, 2007, a collection entitled Embodying Modernity and Post-Modernity: Ritual, Praxis, and Social Change in Melanesia (for a review, see Mimica 2007).

(17.) I have been carrying out field-work in PNG since 1977; I have come to know Papuan New Guineans, West Papuans and other Melanesians from all walks of life, including those who hold (or have held) ministerial portfolios or have PhDs in Anthropology but none of them cast his/her life-situation in reference to 'modernity' or 'post-modernity', be that 'local' or, as it were, 'glocal'.

(18.) One of the earliest formulations of the effects of the colonial situation on a small Pacific island life-world phrased as the 'experience of modernity' is Firth's Social Change in Tikopia (1956; especially Chapter 2). Perhaps if the book were re-issued now it might be so under the title Embodying Modernity in Tikopia.