Melanesian Odysseys: Negotiating the self, narrative and modernity.

Mimica, Jadran

Melanesian Odysseys: Negotiating the self, narrative and modernity.

By Lisette Josephides.

New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books 2008.

Pp 272 + illus

Price: Hardback US$90

Now available in paperback (2010) US$29.95

This is Josephides' second monographic treatment of the Kewa people of the Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. In the first monograph (Production of Inequality, 1985) she was concerned with the Kewa men's exploitation of women's labour and the image of the Kewa life-world was focally construed through the iconography of the Marxian political economy with a shade of Bourdieu-ian colouring. As the post-modern ideology redefined the parameters of anthropological thought Josephides duly began to adopt the concomitant verbal iconography. The stock-in-trade subtitle of this new ethnography leaves no doubt that the Kewa life-world, regardless of what and how it was and is for itself, keeps abreast with the Anglophone academic discourse. The effect is that the latter refracts and configures the representations of the former within the academic market place. The reader should advisably read both monographs concurrently as well as make use of other available ethnographic and linguistic sources (principally by Leroy, Franklin, Jebens, and Mary MacDonald) to concretise, deepen and diversify his/her ethnographic and linguistic perspective on the Kewa life-world. That is, s/he may wish to do so in so far as his/her interests are in the Kewa rather than any particular academic style of discoursing about them (or any other human life-world).

The book 'is an account of social strategies and techniques for living: how people negotiate social knowledge and make it explicit, in their talk and actions: how their own selves, their self understanding and self worth become implicated in this negotiation, and how they respond to the necessity for constant testing and renewal of selves, relations, and shared understandings of practices and values' (p. 20). Furthermore, Josephides explores 'how people in their talk, actions and interactions, make use of the "rehearsed talk" of their institutions, their traditional beliefs and practices--in short their "culture"--rather than how such institutions, beliefs and practices rule over them and determine their actions' (p. 21). This will suffice as a basic orientation to the book's subject-matter. For the present reviewer, the best of this enterprise is contained in the three chapters (3, 4, 5) of Part I (pp. 53-148) in which the autobiographical narratives of various Kewa men and women, exemplifying different generations, are presented. These life-accounts articulate a generational stratigraphy of the Kewa life-world and, concomitantly, its differential internal existential-temporal horizons determined by the changing contexts in which individual lives were and are being lived. Thus, following the life-accounts of the old Kewa who presented themselves as living 'paradigmatic Kewa lives', narratives of the middle-aged Kewa 'no longer take for granted a representative moral personhood but strive instead to construct it in a changing world' (p. 81). Then come the younger adults 'all involved in the new spheres of life: instead of wars, spirit houses, courting magic, they talk of road-building work, plantation labour, business and cash cropping, church and Christianity' (p. 112). There is much in this and the related material detailed in Part II (specifically chapters 7 and 8) which allows a critical reader to think about Kewa selfhood and its life-world regardless of the author's interpretive and theoretical disquisitions and commentaries that permeate this ethnography.

Regarding its theoretical and conceptual substance, what stands out is loquaciousness which unduly dilutes the conceptual potential of the ideas the author draws on. But to stick with her own theoretical idioms, the best is to extend on her brief advance (following Taussig) into the 'mimetic production of ethnography' (218-220). There is no shortage of authors whose ideas she doesn't cite, paraphrase, allude to, 'poach' (p. 110), 'take issue with' (p. 156), etc., producing purportedly a 'mimesis' of conceptual activity. As an orientation I will mention only a few of those who are more frequently referred to: thus, Roy Wagner, G. H. Mead, Charles Taylor, Ricoeur, Strawson, Marilyn Strathern, Carrithers, Nigel Rapport.

However, despite her wide-ranging discursive forays and engagements, I find it particularly disappointing that there is nothing on the ideas that the Kewa speakers may have concerning their speaking activity. Many New Guinea ethnographers from Malinowski on have recognised the centrality of the notion that 'talk' is action, and that throughout New Guinea speech is experienced as having object-like qualities. In ethnographies this is often suggested by such characterisations as, for example, the materiality of speech, and that words are like things or projectiles. Furthermore, the Kewa, no less than any other people, live themselves through their language as a quiddity of their egoic being. The inevitable changes that their language has undergone, especially through the impact of Tok Fisin, would merit some reflection, especially in an ethnography so involved with discourse and the narration of the self.

At no point does Josephides say anything about the Kewa (a Papuan) language (or for that matter, their use of Tok Pisin) as an organon of their speech. There is a rather brief excursus on 'language, talk, and action' (p. 156) in which first Chomsky and Duranti are invoked (the latter is quoted as the vehicle for her own view of language), then Bourdieu and Bloch. The premium is placed on the use of 'linguistic practices "to document and analyse the reproduction and transformation of persons, institutions, and communities across space and rime", and investigate the theoretical issues of "formation and negotiation of identity/self, narrativity". My method of data collection documents "temporally unfolding human encounters, with special attention to inherently fluid and moment-by-moment negotiated nature of identities, institutions, communities" (ibid)' (citing Duranti). Regardless of this invocation of 'inherent fluidity' and the supposedly ceaseless momentariness of negotiations, these nevertheless take place in the medium of Kewa and/or Tok Pisin (possibly some English) rather than in Esperanto or in Samoyed. Therefore no amount of 'inherent fluidity' and 'ambiguity in communicative practices' will dispense with the fact that the native speakers are equipped with the tool (their language) that they know how to use for 'negotiating' their precarious identity that seems to come into and go out of existence with every opening and closing of their mouths.

Accordingly it would be informative to have some understanding of what is the basic inner shape of this oral tool whereby the Kewa elicit their identities, whatever the quantal momentariness might be of the moments constitutive of this 'moment-by-moment' existential flow. And, since it appears that in their life-world everything is quantal-momentary and negotiable, then how is the inner form of their speech itself negotiated so that they, having generated enough of the syntactico-semantically intelligible (rather than mambo-jumbo) speech quanta, can go on to negotiate their more malecular (though no less fluid) selves.

The problems indicated in these remarks pertain also to Jospehides' principal theoretical stake, namely that her approach 'offers a glimpse of a theory of action based on action itself, not deduced from structures' (p. 216). I have to say, I can't see any such theory appearing in these pages despite all her eloquent endeavour any more than there might be a glimpse of some structures of the Kewa life-world. On the other hand, such a theory may well be negotiable with those readers adept in negotiating, moment-by-moment, a fluid mimesis of theoretical activity.

Jadran Mimica

The University of Sydney