Lines that Connect: Rethinking Pattern and Mind in the Pacific.
Mimica, Jadran
Lines that Connect: Rethinking Pattern and Mind in the Pacific.
By Graeme Were
Honolulu: University of Hawai'i
Press, 2010.
pp. x, 205, illustrations, b&w
photographs.
Price: US$38.00.
Although the subtitle may suggest that the book's scope is the
entire realm of the Pacific life-worlds, its principal ethnographic and
comparative domain is the island Melanesia with the focus on the Nalik
people of the northern New Ireland where the author did his doctoral
fieldwork. The primary kind of visual 'pattern' he explores is
their version of the well known kapkap necklace disc. The Nalik thereby
mediate the author's comparative engagements with a wider range of
objects, materials, and visual patterns within and beyond the Bismarck
Archipelago and Solomon Islands, the area of kapkap production and
spread. The most detailed extra-Melanesian engagement is with Tonga (Ch
7). On reflection, it is Were's previous Pacific Pattern (2005), a
lavishly illustrated Thames & Hudson book co-authored with Susanne
Kuchler, which is more congruent with the scope of the a real reference
contained in the title under review.
For me the principal strength and value of the book are the
author's discussion of his Nalik ethnography centred on the
cultural meanings and contexts of the kapkap necklace. This topic is
covered in four chapters (2,3,4,5) which constitute the core of the
book. For those unfamiliar with this object, it 'is a circular
shell ornament composed of a shiny disc made from rubbed-down clamshell
overlaid with a piece of turtle-shell fretwork into which intricate
designs have been incised' (p.29; and figure on the same page).
Were examined over 200 New Ireland specimens from museum collections and
thus has established a dense corpus of motifs subjected to an
informative formal analysis (pp. 50-56). For the Nalik 'everything
comes from within the kapkap' (p. 31) which is to say that it can
be characterised as a totalising life-form (given that it is an
artefact, my ambiguous characterisation is deliberate) which articulates
a complex of relations between knowledge, ancestral spirits,
institutional power (leadership), clanship, life-cycle, concrete space
and time, in short the fullness of life-and-death as they are in the
Nalik life-world and its historical vortex. Regarding the latter, two
chapters (3 and 4) on the place and fate of Christianity and,
especially, Baha'i faith in this Melanesian life-world are
particularly informative. Chapter (5), which deals with the 'logic
of pattern', has three excellent sections on the learning of
pattern (especially pp 111-124). Yet it is conceptually the weakest of
the four core chapters. specifically in the last two sections dealing
with Nalik numeracy and the mathematical underpinnings of pattern-making
(pp. 124-131). This reflects the conceptual flimsiness of the work as a
whole on which 1 will comment further below.
Chapter 6 moves away from the domain of traditional patterns by
examining the impact of clothing in Melanesia. The focus is on 'how
foreign patterns carried by cloth and clothing played an instrumental
role in engaging Pacific Islanders and helping them shape changing
social relations' (p. 135). Here, as elsewhere. Were draws on the
academic stereotype that I call (in dog Latin) homo strategicus
agentivus (strategic man). Thus, since various evidence shows that
'some Melanesians selectively sought printed garments of various
types' it would follow that '[i]f Melanesians were actually
operating strategically in assuming European modes of dress, then we can
challenge common colonial narratives that suppose Melanesians passively
adhered to missionary stipulation of dressing the body' (p. 136-7:
also p. 146). What can also be said is that regardless of how well
meaning this post-colonial formula may be, it is primarily a
retrospective construction fully consonant with the neo-liberal rhetoric
of the free acting individual, currently a popular self-image in
circulation especially in Anglophone academic discourses. As such. it is
ironic to read in the conclusion to this chapter that '[w]hat the
wearing of garments meant to Melanesians in the late nineteenth century
is not easy to gauge, but we can be certain that these meanings differed
somewhat from those inferred by Europeans' (p. 150). I can add to
this that we can be even more certain that the same applies to the
inferences about the subject-matter made by an early twenty-first
century European academic anthropologist.
In Chapter 7, the discussion moves, using as a vehicle
Kaeppler's work, into Tonga (Western Polynesia) where Were also did
field research. The centrepiece is 'the fibrous twists of the body
wraps that adorn Tongans' waists' through which the author
examines 'how string and pattern, in fibre warps, [are] linked to
ideas about individualised agency and the sustaining of social
relations' (p. 161). The discussion of the handicraft of crochet,
introduced by French nuns, is the highlight of this chapter (pp 168-72).
Finally, the short Chapter 8 (pp 177-180), concludes with a set of
pronouncements on 'the mathematical mind' and aspirations of
the book to elucidate the mathematical aspects of the instances of
pattern examined therein.
Looking upon the book as an intellectual project, it will be
fitting to conclude by reference to the introductory chapter (1).
'Pattern'. always in singular, figures as a
'relational' agency, 'a dynamic medium that provokes
connections among forms, thoughts, and practices, allowing for the
articulation of intersubjective ideas' (p. 3). Were sees his work
as 'a kind of comparative anthropology of pattern that explores its
production and significance m the Pacific and ultimately attempts to
challenge our current understandings of pattern m terms of dualisms
between style and culture, symbol systems, and iconographic
systems' (p. 3). A discussion of selected past and present authors
(among the latter, as attested to by the discussion in subsequent
chapters, most significant are Alfred Gell, Nicholas Thomas, and Barbara
Stafford) outlines the author's perspective on the problematic of
'pattern' and the thematic lines of his declared conceptual
'challenge'. From amongst many of these lines that connect so
many authors, works, themes, stock-in-trade phrases, ideas, images and
concepts, a few citations will illustrate the diversity of the
author's thematic compass. Referring to Gladys Reichard's
classic Melanesian Design, Were connects himself and her thus: '..
her formal analysis of the multitude of variations among similar
patterns exemplifies how pattern works as a kind of technology to create
a system of relatedness, an approach I aim to develop throughout this
book' (p. 9). Then, 'pattern in the Pacific, as elsewhere,
plays a vital role if a processes of memory and knowledge transmission,
and this book sets out to address these themes' (pp. 18-19).
Accordingly, 'it becomes evident that pattern is 'good to
think'--and this is examined through local counting systems and
mathematics curricula, where pattern is prominent' (p. 22). My
point is that the introductory chapter is a series of academic-style
commentaries on a range of themes within a strategically demarcated
field of interest but no attempt is made to articulate the author's
own conceptual position which, qua its thought-content and
distinctiveness as a work of thinking, would support a project
enunciated (in the title) as a 'rethinking', and in the text,
'a comparative anthropology' of "pattern and mind in the
Pacific". If anything, the purportedly conceptual dimension of the
book is consistently academically commentarial and the author's
style of discoursing can aptly be condensed in the following evaluation:
tracing lines+connections within the established discourses will surely
produce all sorts of patterns but they themselves may not become a body
of thought good enough to do the proposed work. In short, there is more
to thinking activity, knowledge and understanding than tracing
'lines that connect', regardless of the medium chosen to
materialise them, as it were. This said, the book does deserve a wide
readership and if the reading of it doesn't corroborate it as a
work of 're-thinking' then it might make the reader realise
that thinking with and through patterns and mind of the Pacific is an
ongoing task.
Jadran Mimica
University of Sydney
