Mangrove Man: Dialogics of Culture in the Sepik Estuary.

Mimica, Jadran

By David Lipset.

Cambridge Studies in Social and

Cultural Anthropology No. 106.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Pp xvii + 335; 32 b/w plates, maps, figures.

Price A$36.95 (paperback)

The principal value of this book is in the ethnographic details on the Murik embodiment, gender relations, kinship and social organisation, ceremonials, and the historical transformations of their cultural life-world. The ethnographic material derives from several fieldworks that the author had conducted, between 1981 and 1993, mostly together with his wife Kathleen Barlow. She figures in the dedication, acknowledgments, and in the main text which abounds with copious references to her insights into and the contributions to his knowledge of the Murik. Together with Barlow's and Kulick's publications, as well as early contributions in German by Father Schmidt, SVD, Lipset's book adds to a composite picture of the Murik and so in relation to the wider context of the Sepik and the northern PNG seaboard life-worlds. Accordingly, for the regional specialists as well as for other Melanesianists the book, as any ethnography, has an intrinsic value and interest because it is a product of a committed long-term and sys tematic fieldwork. Of fundamental importance is the Murik archetypal imagination articulated in terms of a bisexual matrix that is dominated by a polymorphic and overtly female bodily imago, the 'maternal scheme' in Lipset/Barlow terminology. Its centrality is evident in the overall structuration of the Murik intersubjective relations. Their social field can be characterised as the society of female and male Mothers and Sons. Murik masculinity, so it appears from Lipset's (and Barlow's) ethnography, has not achieved a self-affirmative and self-celebrating paternal formation on a par with or, indeed, superior to motherhood. There is nothing extraordinary about this situation; in all Melanesian life-worlds masculinity and femininity are formed within a bisexual matrix and in the 'shadow' of the primal maternal object even where fatherhood is a dominant social configuration. However, Lipset emphasises that the Murik are more gender-equal in contrast to the Papuan-speaking inlanders whose masculinity is epitomise d by the practice of 'deeply misogynist male cults' (p. 10). Given that the Murik maternal-feminine dependencies are the key element in their greater gender-equality the problem is to gain an accurate understanding of the constitutive dynamics of maleness and femaleness in this Sepik life-world. Lipset's and Barlow's work complements each other although neither of them appears to have carried out a thorough psychoanalytic exploration of both the Murik and of themselves. The latter would be a prerequisite because the Murik realities necessitate a deeper self-knowledge by the ethnographers and the need for a critical control of the inexhaustible human capacity for defensive idealisation of oneself and others. Lipset makes a limited use of psychoanalytic theory which, although insightful in parts, lacks a genuine empirical grounding in the concreteness of the Murik experience and the ethnographer's experience of the psychoanalytic process. In this sense Lipset's use of psychoanalysis is a superficial exercise bu t the realities which he deals with require a much deeper self-application and self-suspension driven by an uncompromisingly critical self-knowledge.

This leads me to reflect upon the general problem of choice of a theoretical-interpretive framework that an ethnographer makes. As it is, Lipset's choice frustrates and undercuts the ethnographic integrity of the Murik life-world. He has chosen Mikhail Bakhtin to be his male inspirational guide for the anthropological tour through the Murik universe. To the extent that Barlow makes a good-enough Beatrice for this task, given that she explored the Murik childhood and motherhood, Bakhtin is no match for the role of a Virgil or a St Bernard to guide Lipset towards his theoretical self-totalisation as an academic man who is interpreting the men and women of this sub-lunar equatorial stretch of the seaboard Sepik mud. To be sure Bakhtin is an interesting but a lame and limited thinker. His 'dialogism' in literary scholarship has to be critically elucidated within the twofold context of his own socio-cultural situation and personality dynamics, and in relation to the general trajectory of the European tradition of 'dialogical' humanism. In this perspective the originality and depth of Bakhtin's thought is not all that outstanding but it has a special interest because of its development and articulation in the context of the Stalinist Soviet Russia. On the other hand, when it comes to 'dialogism of any kind, not just Bakhtinian, in the current cacophony of academic discourses I find the critical claims for its superior distinctions over and against the 'monological' positions to be ideological. Indeed I am always struck by the narcissistic blindness with which so many recent adherents of 'dialogism', Lipset included, regard their dialogical and polyphonic virtues. This is further reinforced by the current academic climate whereby the choice of theoretical perspective in social sciences is virtually entirely determined by the exigencies of academic marketability of vogueish ideas relative to the institutional group surveillance of moral purity and ideological correctness. My impression is that many proponents of dialogi sm champion a view of human relatedness as bedazzled by the deceptive shine of the primordial maternal gaze and are inhibited from breaking out of that narcissistic pseudo-universe which sustains the illusion of a primarily edifying and happy dialogicality and plurivocality. Buber and Bakhtin, each in his own way, were imprisoned in such constellations although the latter evinces more readily their painful schizoid infrastructure. Underlying every edifying/happy dialalogics there is a plenitude of ossified master-slave circuitry, symbiotic dependencies, sado-masochistic veneration, and varieties of folie-a-deux.

In almost 300 pages of text Lipset's commentaries abound with Bakhtinian coloratura which frequently slides into middle class academic preciousness and pomposity but does very little to illuminate the Murik's intersubjectivity and interpersonal dynamics. It is symptomatic that one of Lipset's most frequent characterizations of things Murik is 'grotesque'. So, 'grotesque this' 'grotesque that'. But with all my appreciation of the human capacity for grotesqueness and its expressions among the Murik, Lipset's projective descriptions strike me as contrived and sanitised. And this has to do primarily with his infatuation with Bakhtin and the mana that his work is accorded in academic circles rather than with Lipset's inability to get a better understanding of the Murik. In this sense Lipset's monograph is a sorry testimony to the disintegration of critical anthropological thought. Coming as a latest piece in the long succession of Sepik ethoographies "Mangrove Man", despite the self-gratifying aspirations of the 'dialogics of culture', evinces Lipset's limitations as an mdividuated critical thinker. In this regard it is good to point Out that Father Schmidt, the first ethnographer of the Murik, described some of their ritual sexual practices in Latin. But exactiy in that rendition the Murik are no less sanitised and distorted than in the rhetorics of 'dialogism' which as such primarily espouses the wishful optimism of the ethoographer engulfed by academic ideological self-representations. This problem has intensified in recent decades as gender relations in the West became radically restructured, especially in the field of professional middle classes to which academic anthropologists belong. Accordingly, the sphere of theorising and empirical research is primarily the ideological extension of activities in the global arena of social-political-and-economic relations, and specifically in the sector of institutional academic production of knowledge. Now more so than ever before a critical anthropologist has to scrutinis e ethnographic texts since their production is maximally determined by ideological motivations of professional false consciousness which purports to be the quest for critical knowledge. At the same time, it should be clear that the dynamics of this process are generated by primordial dependencies, conflicts and oppressions between the sexes. In that sense, the bias among the sexed authors, especially those who self-avowedly purport to get the issues of gender right, cannot be underestimated. Lipset (and Barlow) are a case in point. Whether Lipset had pondered himself within this range of psychoanalytic and ethnographic problems is an open question. He does refer to Devereux's classic work on psychoanalysis and fieldwork but it does not seem to me that he had applied its insights to himself. For as I see it the determining dimension of Lipset's text is the ethnographer's own self with his idealised maternal-feminine object and her displacements in relationship to which he is exercising his dialogical sensibili ties that mediate the Murik "dialogics" and their "maternal schema". However, it may well be that Lipset's future publications will dwell on the dynamics of the Murik un/conscious actualities with a more acute sense of his counter-transference, a dimension that, if it were uncompromisingly attended to and worked through, might have turned his present construction of their dialogics into a more authentic ethnographic and personal self-synthesis.